, perhaps more
eagerly and more frequently than the rest. When he got as far as the
fourth or fifth, his original motive for taking up the pen was answered;
his grief was naturally either diminished or exhausted. We still find
the same pious poet; but we hear less of Philander and Narcissa, and
less of the mourner whom he loved to pity.

Mrs. Temple died of a consumption at Lyons, in her way to Nice, the year
after her marriage; that is, when poetry relates the fact, "in her
bridal hour." It is more than poetically true, that Young accompanied
her to the Continent:

I flew, I snatch'd her from the rigid north, And bore her nearer to the
sun.

But in vain. Her funeral was attended with the difficulties painted in
such animated colours in Night the Third. After her death, the remainder
of the party passed the ensuing winter at Nice.

The poet seems, perhaps, in these compositions, to dwell with more
melancholy on the death of Philander and Narcissa, than of his wife. But
it is only for this reason. He who runs and reads may remember, that in
the Night Thoughts Philander and Narcissa are often mentioned and often
lamented. To recollect lamentations over the author's wife, the memory
must have been charged with distinct passages. This lady brought him one
child, Frederick, now living, to whom the prince of Wales was
godfather.

That domestick grief is, in the first instance, to be thanked for these
ornaments to our language, it is impossible to deny. Nor would it be
common hardiness to contend, that worldly discontent had no hand in
these joint productions of poetry and piety. Yet am I by no means sure
that, at any rate, we should not have had something of the same colour
from Young's pencil, notwithstanding the liveliness of his satires. In
so long a life, causes for discontent and occasions for grief must have
occurred. It is not clear to me that his muse was not sitting upon the
watch for the first which happened. Night thoughts were not uncommon to
her, even when first she visited the poet, and at a time when he himself
was remarkable neither for gravity nor gloominess. In his Last Day,
almost his earliest poem, he calls her the Melancholy Maid,

Whom dismal scenes delight,
Frequent at tombs and in the realms of night.

In the prayer which concludes the second book of the same poem, he
says--

Oh! permit the gloom of solemn night
To sacred thought may forcibly invite.
Oh! how divine to