The natural world and the sublime ...

I am often reminded here in the Adirondacks that our mountain landscape is not just beautiful but sublime.  A quick bit of history from Wikipedia:

William Wordsworth is the Romantic best known for working with the sublime. Many scholars actually place Wordsworth's idea of the sublime as the standard of the romantic sublime. In his essay on the sublime, Wordsworth says that the "mind {tries} to grasp at something towards which it can make approaches but which it is incapable of attaining".^[6]In trying to "grasp" at this sublime idea, the mind loses consciousness, and the spirit is able to grasp the sublime—but it is only temporary. Wordsworth expresses the emotion that this elicits in his poem "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey":

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burden of the mystery
In which the heavy and weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened (37-41).^[5](p258)

Here Wordsworth expresses that in the mood of the sublime, the burden of the world is lifted. In a lot of these cases, Wordsworth finds the sublime in Nature. He finds the awe in the beautiful forms of nature, but he also finds terror. Wordsworth experiences both aspects of the sublime. However, he does go beyond Burke or Kant's definition of the literary sublime, for his ultimate goal is to find Enlightenment within the sublime.