of the Christian to the man of the world, both in life and in death, and the worthlessness of merely human friendship; to argue, from nature and reason, the truth of man’s immortality; to shew the reasonableness of religion, and to inculcate the necessity of a divine revelation, and of a propitiatory sacrifice. That this argument is always steadily pursued, or logically pled, we do not pretend. It has its flaws;—we particularly demur to many of its proofs of the immortality of the soul, which seem to us very feeble and unsatisfactory; but, taking it as a whole, it is unanswerable and overwhelming. Its links are of red-hot iron; its appeals to the conscience are irresistible; and he who can read it with indifference, or rise from it unimpressed and unawed, must be either something worse or something less than man. It needs not to be surrounded by panegyrics. Convinced, purified, elevated, saved Souls, are the gems in its crown. We are inclined to believe that, in this aspect, the “Night Thoughts” has effected more practical good than the “Paradise Lost.” The latter is a splendid picture; the former a searching, powerful sermon. Now, although pictures with a strong moral contained in them have often done much good, they want the point, emphasis, and effect of great sermons. You may gaze long enough at Milton with no feeling besides admiration of his genius; but in every page Young is grappling with your conscience, and saying, “Don’t look at me, but look to yourself.” Foster, one of the greatest of our practical reasoners on religion, has been much indebted to Young, whom he resembled also in the sombre grandeur of his genius.

Young’s imagery is distinguished by its richness, originality, and exceeding boldness. It was verily a new thing in that timid and conventional age. Like the imagery of all highest poets, it is selected alike from low and from lofty objects, from the gay and the gloomy, from stars and dunghills. His mind moves along through the poem like a great wheel, now descending and now ascending, easy to criticise, but impossible to resist. You may question the taste of many of his figures, such as that of the Sun—

or when he speaks of God as the “Great Philanthropist;” or calls the moon “the Portland of the skies;” but you always feel yourself in contact with a new, native, overflowing mind—with a mind which has read nature through man, and man through nature. There is to Young’s genius nothing common or unclean in the material universe. All points up to God, and looks round significantly to man. His imagination has no limits, and, when he is thoroughly roused, like the war-horse of Job, the “glory of his nostrils is terrible;” it is the fury of power, the revel of conscious wealth, the “prancing of a mighty one;” not the dance of mere fancy, but the earnestness and energy of one treading a winepress alone. In proof of this, we appeal to his splendid passages on the miserable state of Man, on Dreams, on Procrastination, to one half of his defence of Immortality, and to the whole of his descant on the Stars. This every one feels is power—barbarous power, if you will—savage, mismanaged power, if you please to call it so; but power that moves, agitates, overwhelms, hurries you away like an infant on the stream of a cataract.

His diction is, on the whole, a worthy medium to his thought. It has been somewhat spoiled by intimacy with Pope’s writings, and is often vitiated with antithesis, an excess in which was the mode of the day. Now and then, too, he is coarse and violent, to vulgarity, in his expressions. But whenever he forgets Pope, and remembers Milton—or, still more, when he becomes swallowed up in the magnitude of his theme—his language is easy, powerful, and magnificent. It never, as Mitford asserts, is unsupported by a “corresponding grandeur of thought.” There is more thought in Young’s poem—more sharp, clear, original reflection—more of that matter which leaves stings behind it—more moral sublimity—than in any poem which has appeared since in Britain. Mitford says, that “every image is amplified to the utmost.” Some images unquestionably are; but amplification is not a prevailing vice of Young’s style—it is, indeed, inconsistent with that pointed intensity which is his general manner; and how comes it, if he be a diffuse and wordy writer, that his pages literally sparkle with maxims, and that, next perhaps to Shakspeare, no poet has been so often quoted? What the same writer means by Young “fatiguing the reader’s mind,” we can understand; since it is fatiguing to look long at the sun, or to follow the grand parabola of the eagle’s flight; but how he should “dissatisfy” the mind of any intelligent and candid reader, is to us extraordinary. It is not true that the work has “a uniformity of subject.” Its tone is rather uniform, but its subjects are as varied as they are important. They are—Man—the World—Ambition—Pleasure—Infidelity—Immortality—Death—Judgment—Heaven—Hell—the Stars—Eternity. Mr Mitford compares Young to Seneca; as if a cold collector of stiff maxims, and a poet whose wisdom was set in enthusiasm as in a ring of fire, were proper subjects of comparison. And it is strange how he should introduce the name of Cicero, as if he were not that very master of amplification, and of over-copiousness of expression, which Mitford imagines Young to be! “No selection—no discreet and graceful reservation—no experienced taste!”—in other words, he was not Pope or Campbell, but Edward Young—not a middle-sized, neat, and well-dressed citizen, but a hirsute giant—not an elegant parterre, but an American forest, bowing only to the old Tempests, and offering up a holocaust of native wealth and glory, not to Man, but to God.

His versification is a more vulnerable point. We grant at once that it is, as a whole, rugged and imperfect, and that, while his single lines are often exceedingly melodious, he rarely reaches, any more than Pope or Johnson, those long and linked swells of sound—

which Goëthe has so beautifully, although unintentionally, described in these words, applied by him to the elements of Nature; and which he and Milton, and Spenser, and Coleridge, and Shelley, have so admirably exemplified in their verse. Young’s style is too broken and sententious to permit the miracles of melody which are found in some of our poets. Yet he has a few passages which approach even to this high standard. Take the following:—

Or take the well-known burst which closes the First Night:—