like others. He seems never to have studied prosody, nor to have direction but from his own ear: but with all his defects, he was a man of genius and a poet.

had any

THE NIGHT THOUGHTS.

About the year 1741, it pleased Divine Providence to deprive Dr. Young, within a short period, of his wife, and of the son and daughter whom she had by her first husband. For these Dr. Young manifests as tender a regard as if they had been his own offspring. Meeting with these great domestic losses in such rapid succession, at a tolerably advanced period of life (being nearly sixty years old), disgusted with the world, and deprived so suddenly of all his tenderest social attractions, it was then, as a French writer remarks, that he may in a sense be said to have descended alive into the tomb of his friends, and to have buried himself with them; and, drawing the curtain between the world and himself he no more sought consolation except in the future world, and his genius, far from being idle or mute under his affliction, seemed to wait for these three strokes of lightning to dart itself forward into the sombre empire of death and to penetrate even to the happy regions of which it is the passage.

For the "Night Thoughts,"-a species of composition which he may be said to have created; a mass of the grandest and richest poetry which human genius has ever produced, he has received unbcunded applause. It is to this work, begun when

"He long had buried what gives life to live,

Firmness of nerve, and energy of thought,"

that he deserves, and will continue to deserve his reputation. He appears to have been sensible of its peculiar merit, since he denominated his writings when collected, "The Works of the Author of the Night Thoughts." It may not improperly be considered as a good poetical contrast to Thomson's "Seasons;" the one delighting as much to exhibit the gloomy, as the other the cheerful face of things. In the article of sublimity, it may vie with "Paradise Lost" itself; though in every other literary respect almost, it would be absurd to

attempt a comparison between them. The beauties of the "Night Thoughts" are numerous, and its blemishes are not few.

Among its distinguishing excellencies, are the spirit of sublime piety and strict morality which animates the whole; dignity of thought and language, bold and lively descriptions, proper and well-supported similes, and striking repetitions, or breaks in the expression.

Among its principal faults, are, the unnecessary repetition of the same ideas and images, redundancy of metaphor, extravagant ideas and expressions, crowded and ill-chosen epithets, allusions drawn out beyond their proper bounds, a puerile play on words, the use of inelegant images or terms, and negligence of the harmony of versification. Yet with all its faults, it irresistibly seizes the mind of the reader, arrests his attention, and powerfully interests him in the midnight sorrows of the plaintive bard. It has a merit which no production, except one of real genius, ever possesses: with scarce any facts or incidents to awaken curiosity, it speaks to the heart through the medium of the imagination.

No ordinary genius was required to communicate any poetical interest to a poem on such a plan, and of such a class of subjects. Yet this is one of the few poems on which the broad stamp of popularity has been prominently impressed. Editions have been multiplied from every press in the country. It is to be seen on the shelf of the cottager, with the Family Bible and the Pilgrim's Progress; and it ranks among the first and favourite materials of the poetical library. What is more remarkable, is, that the French are fond of Young, though they cannot understand either Milton or Shakspeare. It is said that Napoleon was particularly gratified with the "Night Thoughts" and Ossian.

Young is, in fact, more of the orator than of the poet; but his oratory is still of a character distinct from the eloquence of prose. The "Night Thoughts" please us much in the same manner as we are captivated by the wonders of fiction, only, in this poem, the vastness, the grandeur, the novelty consist, not in strange or romantic incidents, but in the unexpected turns and adventurous sallies, the dazzling pomp of metaphor, the infinite succession of combinations and intersections of thought, the stratagems of expression, which occur throughout this long poetical homily; so that, forbid.

ding as the subject is from its severity, he has continued to enliven it with all the graces of wit, chastened by the majesty of truth. Add to this, there is a charm in that stern and pensive melancholy which is the character of the "Night Thoughts;" a sentimental charm which hangs about moonlight graves, and whispering night winds, and funereal cypress, in which those persons especially love to indulge, who have known no deeper wounds of sensibility than those of fictitious griefs or philosophical pensiveness.

In this poem there is a luxuriance of faults as well as of beauties. Johnson terms it "a wilderness of thought." The perpetual enigma of the style at length wearies; the antitheses pall upon us; we even grow fatigued with admiration. The faults of Young are, however, the faults of genius, and they are amply redeemed by the splendor that is thrown around them. It is not, perhaps, peculiar to Young's poetry that very young and very old persons are the most partial to the "Night Thoughts:" the reason of this may be found in the progress of taste. It pleases the more before the taste has attained the period of refined cultivation, because we are then less sensible of the defects of his style, and are most susceptible of that indistinct feeling of awe which the Gothic gloom of his poetry is adapted to excite. It pleases us as age advances on account of the sympathetic views of life which make the poetry of Young seem to an old man doubly natural. The author had passed his sixtieth year when he published the First Night; and there is, it must be owned, something of the querulousness, as well as the sageness of age, in the general strain of his sentiments. But his long complaint terminates, as it should do, in consolation; and the Ninth Night is the one, which, next to the first three, is the most generally read and the most frequently adverted to.

It may be profitable as well as interesting here to introduce part of a sketch from the Edinburgh Review, of that school of English poetry to which Dr. Young belonged, and which differed so essentially from that of the preceding century. The Restoration (of Charles II.), says the author of this sketch, Lord Jeffrey, brought in a French taste upon us, and what was called a classical and a polite taste; and the wings of our English muses were clipped and trimmed, and their flights regulated at the expense of all that was pecu

liar, and much of what was brightest in their beauty. The king and his courtiers during their long exile, had of course imbibed the taste of their protectors; and, coming from the gay court of France, with something of that additional profligacy that belonged to their outcast and adventurer character, were likely enough to be revolted by the very excellencies of our native literature. The grand and sublime tone of our greater poets appeared to them dull, morose, and gloomy; and the fine play of their rich and unrestrained fancy, mere childishness and folly: while their frequent lapses and perpetual irregularity were set down as clear indications of barbarity and ignorance. At this particular moment too in England, the best of its recent models labored under the reproach of republicanism; and the courtiers were not only disposed to see all its peculiarities with an eye of scorn and aversion, but had even a good deal to say in favor of that very opposite style to which they had been habituated. It was a witty, and a grand, and a splendid style. It showed more scholarship and art, than the luxuriant negligence of the old English school; and was not only free from many of its hazards, and some of its faults, but possessed merits of its own, of a character more likely to please those who had then the power of conferring celebrity, or condemning to derision. Then it was a style which it was peculiarly easy to justify by argument; and in support of which great authorities, as well as imposing names, were always ready to be produced. It came upon us with the air and the pretension of being the style of cultivated Europe, and a true copy of the style of polished antiquity.

Compared with the former style of English poets, this new continental one was more worldly and more townish; holding more of reason, and ridicule and authority; more elaborate and more assuming; addressed more to the judgment than to the feelings; and somewhat ostentatiously accommodated to the habits, or supposed habits, of persons in fashionable life. Instead of tenderness and fancy, we had satire and sophistry; artificial declamation, in place of the spontaneous animations of genius; and, for the universal language of Shakespeare, the personalities, the party politics, and the brutal obscenities of Dryden. Of this continental style, Addison was the consummation; and if it had not been redeemed about the same

time by the fine talents of Pope, would probably have so far discredited it, as to have brought us back to our original faith half a century before. Pope has incomparably more spirit, and taste, and animation; but Pope is a satirist, and a moralist, and a wit, and a critic, and a fine writer, much more than he is a poet. He has all the delicacies and proprieties and felicities of diction; but he has not a great deal of fancy, and scarcely ever touches any of the greater passions. He is much the best, we think, of the classical continental school; but he is not to be compared with the masters, nor with the pupils, of that Old English one from which there had been so lamentable an apostacy. There are no pictures of nature or of simple emotion in all his writings. He is the poet of town life, and of high life, and of literary life; and seems so much afraid of incurring ridicule by the display of natural feeling or unregulated fancy, that it is difficult not to imagine that he thought such ridicule could have been very well directed.

With the wits of Queen Anne this foreign school attained the summit of its reputation; and has ever since, we think, been declining, though by slow and imperceptible gradations. Thomson was the first writer of any eminence who receded from it, and made some steps back to the force and animation of our original poetry. Young exhibits, in our judgment, a curious combination, or contrast rather, of the two steps of which we have been speaking. Though incapable either of tenderness or of passion, he had a richness and activity of fancy that belonged rather to the days of James and Elizabeth, than to those of George and Anne: but then, instead of indulging it, as the older writers would have done, in easy and playful inventions, in splendid descriptions, or glowing illustrations, he is led by the restraints and established taste of his age to work it up into strained and fantastical epigrams, or into cold and revolting hyperboles. Instead of letting it flow gracefully on, in an easy and sparkling current, he perpetually forces it out in jets, or makes it stagnate in formal canals; and thinking it necessary to write like Pope, when the bent of his genius led him rather to copy what was best in Cowley and most fantastic in Shakespeare, he has produced something which has produced wonder instead of admiration, and is felt by every one to be at once ingenious, incongruous, and unnatural.