The Sublime and the Beautiful

It was the philosopher Edmund Burke who first proposed a difference between the sublime and the beautiful (in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, of course; 1757) We all know about beautiful things: a garden of flowers in the spring sunshine is beautiful. But other things are sublime: volcanos and thunderstorms and waves crashing against a cliff. And monsters.

If you want to spot a Romantic (like John Keats) heres a quick rule of thumb: the...