three first Nights, the majority of readers rarely
getting beyond these, unless, as Wilson says, they "have but few books,
are poor, and live in the country." And in these earlier Nights there is
enough genuine sublimity and genuine sadness to bribe us into too
favorable a judgment of them as a whole. Young had only a very few
things to say or sing--such as that life is vain, that death is imminent,
that man is immortal, that virtue is wisdom, that friendship is sweet,
and that the source of virtue is the contemplation of death and
immortality--and even in his two first Nights he had said almost all he
had to say in his finest manner. Through these first outpourings of
"complaint" we feel that the poet is really sad, that the bird is singing
over a rifled nest; and we bear with his morbid picture of the world and
of life, as the Job-like lament of a man whom "the hand of God hath
touched." Death has carried away his best-beloved, and that "silent
land" whither they are gone has more reality for the desolate one than
this world which is empty of their love:

"This is the desert, this the solitude;
How populous, how vital is the grave!"

Joy died with the loved one:

"The disenchanted earth
Lost all her lustre. Where her glitt'ring towers?
Her golden mountains, where? All darkened down
To naked waste; a dreary vale of tears:
_The great magician's dead_!"

Under the pang of parting, it seems to the bereaved man as if love were
only a nerve to suffer with, and he sickens at the thought of every joy
of which he must one day say--"_it __was_." In its unreasoning anguish,
the soul rushes to the idea of perpetuity as the one element of bliss:

"O ye blest scenes of permanent delight!--
Could ye, so rich in rapture, fear an end,--
That ghastly thought would drink up all your joy,
And quite unparadise the realms of light."

In a man under the immediate pressure of a great sorrow, we tolerate
morbid exaggerations; we are prepared to see him turn away a weary eye
from sunlight and flowers and sweet human faces, as if this rich and
glorious life had no significance but as a preliminary of death; we do
not criticise his views, we compassionate his feelings. And so it is
with Young in these earlier Nights. There is already some artificiality
even in his grief, and feeling often slides into rhetoric, but through it
all we are thrilled with the unmistakable cry of pai