The sublime element was an element of imagery. The woman and man's attention was caught by each other's appearance that it took them a while to get back to what they were doing. Edmund Burke characterized the sublime as causing astonishment. I feel that this element of sublime is one of astonishment. The fact was so amazing that Boris was so close to his aunt that he could follow what she was thinking without any sight of her around.
Sublime literature has many elements that are hard to grasp on to fully.
Sublime can be something that will happen so fast when someone tries to remember what occurred, they cannot. In The Fantastic Sublime, Weiskel describes the structure of the sublime as divided into three stages. The first phase is that the mind is determinate, habitual relationship with the contemplated object. The second phase is experienced by the tearing of a veil between this world and another field of experience altogether, one both more immediate and more intense. Sublime to me is wandering into a land of something else.