d--with a mind which has read nature
through man, and man through nature. There is to Young's genius nothing
common or unclean in the material universe. _All_ points up to God, and
looks round significantly to man. His imagination has no limits, and,
when he is thoroughly roused, like the war-horse of Job, the "glory of
his nostrils is terrible;" it is the fury of power, the revel of
conscious wealth, the "prancing of a mighty one;" not the dance of mere
fancy, but the earnestness and energy of one treading a winepress alone.
In proof of this, we appeal to his splendid passages on the miserable
state of Man, on Dreams, on Procrastination, to one half of his defence
of Immortality, and to the whole of his descant on the Stars. This every
one feels is power--barbarous power, if you will--savage, mismanaged
power, if you please to call it so; but power that moves, agitates,
overwhelms, hurries you away like an infant on the stream of a cataract.

His diction is, on the whole, a worthy medium to his thought. It has been
somewhat spoiled by intimacy with Pope's writings, and is often vitiated
with antithesis, an excess in which was the mode of the day. Now and
then, too, he is coarse and violent, to vulgarity, in his expressions.
But whenever he forgets Pope, and remembers Milton--or, still more, when
he becomes swallowed up in the magnitude of his theme--his language is
easy, powerful, and magnificent. It never, as Mitford asserts, is
unsupported by a "corresponding grandeur of thought." There is more
thought in Young's poem--more sharp, clear, original reflection--more of
that matter which leaves stings behind it--more moral sublimity--than in
any poem which has appeared since in Britain. Mitford says, that "every
image is amplified to the utmost." Some images unquestionably are; but
amplification is not a prevailing vice of Young's style--it is, indeed,
inconsistent with that pointed intensity which is his general manner; and
how comes it, if he be a diffuse and wordy writer, that his pages
literally sparkle with maxims, and that, next perhaps to Shakspeare, no
poet has been so often quoted? What the same writer means by Young
"fatiguing the reader's mind," we can understand; since it is fatiguing
to look long at the sun, or to follow the grand parabola of the eagle's
flight; but how he should "dissatisfy" the mind of any intelligent and
candid reader, is to us extraordinary. It is not true that the work has
"a uniformity