rapidly and vividly calls up the particulars it
represents, these particulars being the true source of the emotion; and
such men, if they wished to express their feeling, would be infallibly
prompted to the presentation of details. Strong emotion can no more be
directed to generalities apart from particulars, than skill in figures
can be directed to arithmetic apart from numbers. Generalities are the
refuge at once of deficient intellectual activity and deficient feeling.

If we except the passages in "Philander," "Narcissa," and "Lucia," there
is hardly a trace of human sympathy, of self-forgetfulness in the joy or
sorrow of a fellow-being, throughout this long poem, which professes to
treat the various phases of man's destiny. And even in the "Narcissa"
Night, Young repels us by the low moral tone of his exaggerated lament.
This married step-daughter died at Lyons, and, being a Protestant, was
denied burial, so that her friends had to bury her in secret--one of the
many miserable results of superstition, but not a fact to throw an
educated, still less a Christian man, into a fury of hatred and
vengeance, in contemplating it after the lapse of five years. Young,
however, takes great pains to simulate a bad feeling:

"Of grief
And indignation rival bursts I pour'd,
Half execration mingled with my pray'r;
Kindled at man, while I his God adored;
Sore grudg'd the savage land her sacred dust;
Stamp'd the cursed soil; _and with humanity_
(_Denied Narcissa_) _wish'd them all a grave_."

The odiously bad taste of this last clause makes us hope that it is
simply a platitude, and not intended as witticism, until he removes the
possibility of this favorable doubt by immediately asking, "Flows my
resentment into guilt?"

When, by an afterthought, he attempts something like sympathy, he only
betrays more clearly his want of it. Thus, in the first Night, when he
turns from his private griefs to depict earth as a hideous abode of
misery for all mankind, and asks,

"What then am I, who sorrow for myself?"

he falls at once into calculating the benefit of sorrowing for others:

"More generous sorrow, while it sinks, exalts;
_And conscious virtue mitigates the pang_.
Nor virtue, more than prudence, bids me give
Swollen thought a second channel."

This remarkable negation of sympathy is in perfect consistency with
Young's theory of ethics:

"Virtue is