ignificant fact in relation to our
position, that the predominant didactic tendency proceeds rather from the
poet's perception that it is good for other men to be moral, than from
any overflow of moral feeling in himself. A man who is perpetually
thinking in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of admonition, can
have little energy left for simple emotion. And this is the case with
Young. In his highest flights of contemplation and his most wailing
soliloquies he interrupts himself to fling an admonitory parenthesis at
"Lorenzo," or to hint that "folly's creed" is the reverse of his own.
Before his thoughts can flow, he must fix his eye on an imaginary
miscreant, who gives unlimited scope for lecturing, and recriminates just
enough to keep the spring of admonition and argument going to the extent
of nine books. It is curious to see how this pedagogic habit of mind
runs through Young's contemplation of Nature. As the tendency to see our
own sadness reflected in the external world has been called by Mr. Ruskin
the "pathetic fallacy," so we may call Young's disposition to see a
rebuke or a warning in every natural object, the "pedagogic fallacy." To
his mind, the heavens are "forever _scolding_ as they shine;" and the
great function of the stars is to be a "lecture to mankind." The
conception of the Deity as a didactic author is not merely an implicit
point of view with him; he works it out in elaborate imagery, and at
length makes it the occasion of his most extraordinary achievement in the
"art of sinking," by exclaiming, _a propos_, we need hardly say, of the
nocturnal heavens,

"Divine Instructor! Thy first volume this
For man's perusal! all in CAPITALS!"

It is this pedagogic tendency, this sermonizing attitude of Young's mind,
which produces the wearisome monotony of his pauses. After the first two
or three nights he is rarely singing, rarely pouring forth any continuous
melody inspired by the spontaneous flow of thought or feeling. He is
rather occupied with argumentative insistence, with hammering in the
proofs of his propositions by disconnected verses, which he puts down at
intervals. The perpetual recurrence of the pause at the end of the line
throughout long passages makes them as fatiguing to the ear as a
monotonous chant, which consists of the endless repetition of one short
musical phrase. For example:

"Past hours,
If not by guilt, yet wound us by their flight