,
If folly bound our prospect by the grave,
All feeling of futurity be numb'd,
All godlike passion for eternals quench'd,
All relish of realities expired;
Renounced all correspondence with the skies;
Our freedom chain'd; quite wingless our desire;
In sense dark-prison'd all that ought to soar;
Prone to the centre; crawling in the dust;
Dismounted every great and glorious aim;
Enthralled every faculty divine,
Heart-buried in the rubbish of the world."

How different from the easy, graceful melody of Cowper's blank verse!
Indeed, it is hardly possible to criticise Young without being reminded
at every step of the contrast presented to him by Cowper. And this
contrast urges itself upon us the more from the fact that there is, to a
certain extent, a parallelism between the "Night Thoughts" and the
"Task." In both poems the author achieves his greatest in virtue of the
new freedom conferred by blank verse; both poems are professionally
didactic, and mingle much satire with their graver meditations; both
poems are the productions of men whose estimate of this life was formed
by the light of a belief in immortality, and who were intensely attached
to Christianity. On some grounds we might have anticipated a more morbid
view of things from Cowper than from Young. Cowper's religion was
dogmatically the more gloomy, for he was a Calvinist; while Young was a
"low" Arminian, believing that Christ died for all, and that the only
obstacle to any man's salvation lay in his will, which he could change if
he chose. There was real and deep sadness involved in Cowper's personal
lot; while Young, apart from his ambitious and greedy discontent, seems
to have had no great sorrow.

Yet, see how a lovely, sympathetic nature manifests itself in spite of
creed and circumstance! Where is the poem that surpasses the "Task" in
the genuine love it breathes, at once toward inanimate and animate
existence--in truthfulness of perception and sincerity of
presentation--in the calm gladness that springs from a delight in objects
for their own sake, without self-reference--in divine sympathy with the
lowliest pleasures, with the most short-lived capacity for pain? Here is
no railing at the earth's "melancholy map," but the happiest lingering
over her simplest scenes with all the fond minuteness of attention that
belongs to love; no pompous rhetoric about the inferiority of the
"brutes," but a warm ple