higher human sympathies were inactive. This judgment is
entirely opposed to our youthful predilections and enthusiasm. The sweet
garden-breath of early enjoyment lingers about many a page of the "Night
Thoughts," and even of the "Last Day," giving an extrinsic charm to
passages of stilted rhetoric and false sentiment; but the sober and
repeated reading of maturer years has convinced us that it would hardly
be possible to find a more typical instance than Young's poetry, of the
mistake which substitutes interested obedience for sympathetic emotion,
and baptizes egoism as religion.

* * * * *

Pope said of Young, that he had "much of a sublime genius without
common-sense." The deficiency Pope meant to indicate was, we imagine,
moral rather than intellectual: it was the want of that fine sense of
what is fitting in speech and action, which is often eminently possessed
by men and women whose intellect is of a very common order, but who have
the sincerity and dignity which can never coexist with the selfish
preoccupations of vanity or interest. This was the "common-sense" in
which Young was conspicuously deficient; and it was partly owing to this
deficiency that his genius, waiting to be determined by the highest
prize, fluttered uncertainly from effort to effort, until, when he was
more than sixty, it suddenly spread its broad wing, and soared so as to
arrest the gaze of other generations besides his own. For he had no
versatility of faculty to mislead him. The "Night Thoughts" only differ
from his previous works in the degree and not in the kind of power they
manifest. Whether he writes prose or poetry, rhyme or blank verse,
dramas, satires, odes, or meditations, we see everywhere the same
Young--the same narrow circle of thoughts, the same love of abstractions,
the same telescopic view of human things, the same appetency toward
antithetic apothegm and rhapsodic climax. The passages that arrest us in
his tragedies are those in which he anticipates some fine passage in the
"Night Thoughts," and where his characters are only transparent shadows
through which we see the bewigged _embonpoint_ of the didactic poet,
excogitating epigrams or ecstatic soliloquies by the light of a candle
fixed in a skull. Thus, in "The Revenge," "Alonzo," in the conflict of
jealousy and love that at once urges and forbids him to murder his wife,
says:

"This vast and solid earth, that blazing sun,