Now, we have prefixed the hackneyed line of Il Penseroso to our paper,
because it is a definition of the essence of the beautiful. What is most
musical, will always be found most melancholy; and no real beauty can be
obtained without a touch of sadness. Whenever the beautiful loses its
melancholy, it degenerates into prettiness. We appeal to the memories of
all our observing readers, whether they have treasured up any scene,
pretending to be more than pretty, which has not about it either a tinge
of melancholy or a sense of danger; the one constitutes the beautiful,
the other the sublime.

24. This postulate being granted, as we are sure it will by most (and we
beg to assure those who are refractory or argumentative, that, were this
a treatise on the sublime and beautiful, we could convince and quell
their incredulity to their entire satisfaction by innumerable
instances), we proceed to remark here, once for all, that the principal
glory of the Italian landscape is its extreme melancholy. It is fitting
that it should be so: the dead are the nations of Italy; her name and
her strength are dwelling with the pale nations underneath the earth;
the chief and chosen boast of her utmost pride is the _hic jacet_; she
is but one wide sepulcher, and all her present life is like a shadow or
a memory. And therefore, or, rather, by a most beautiful coincidence,
her national tree is the cypress; and whoever has marked the peculiar
character which these noble shadowy spires can give to her landscape,
lifting their majestic troops of waving darkness from beside the fallen
column, or out of the midst of the silence of the shadowed temple and
worshipless shrine, seen far and wide over the blue of the faint plain,
without loving the dark trees for their sympathy with the sadness of
Italy's sweet cemetery shore, is one who profanes her soil with his
footsteps.