Edmund Burke (1729–1797). On the Sublime and Beautiful. The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.
Why Things not Dangerous Produce a Passion Like Terror
A MODE1 of terror or pain is always the cause of the sublime. For terror, or associated danger, the foregoing explication is, I believe, sufficient. It will require something more trouble to show, that such examples as I have given of the sublime in the second part are capable of producing a mode of pain, and of being thus allied to terror, and to be accounted for on the same principles. And first of such objects as are great in their dimensions. I speak of visual objects.
