ver, is lessened by the author's passion for
antithesis. The merit of the following passage, for example, is not due
to poetical inspiration:

'How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful is man!
How passing wonder He, who made him such!
Who centered in our make such strange extremes
From different natures, marvellously mixed,
Connexion exquisite of distant worlds!
Distinguished link in being's endless chain!
Midway from nothing to the Deity;
A beam etherial, sullied, and absorbt!
Though sullied and dishonoured still divine!
Dim miniature of greatness absolute!
An heir of glory! a frail child of dust!
Helpless immortal! insect infinite!
A worm! a god!--I tremble at myself,
And in myself am lost. At home a stranger,
Thought wanders up and down, surprised, aghast,
And wondering at her own: How reason reels!
O what a miracle to man is man!
Triumphantly distressed! what joy! what dread!
Alternately transported and alarmed!
What can preserve my life? or what destroy?
An angel's arm can't snatch me from the grave:
Legions of angels can't confine me there.'

The opening of the ninth and last book will give a more favourable
illustration of Young's style:

'As when a traveller, a long day past
In painful search of what he cannot find,
At night's approach, content with the next cot,
There ruminates awhile, his labour lost;
Then cheers his heart with what his fate affords,
And chants his sonnet to deceive the time,
Till the due season calls him to repose;
Thus I, long-travelled in the ways of men,
And dancing with the rest the giddy maze
Where Disappointment smiles at Hope's career;
Warned by the languor of life's evening ray,
At length have housed me in an humble shed,
Where, future wandering banished from my thought,
And waiting, patient, the sweet hour of rest,
I chase the moments with a serious song.
Song soothes our pains, and age has pains to soothe.'

While moralizing on man's mortality Young is seldom a cheerful monitor,
he dwells with too great persistence on the incidents of death and of
bodily corruption, too little on life with which we have more to do than
with death. Thus with a strange perversion he exclaims:

'This is the desart, this the solitude,
How populous, how vital, is the grave!
This is creatio