My song the midnight raven has outwinged,
and the midnight owl was outshrieked.
From short (as usual) and disturbed repose
I wake, how happy they who wake no more!
Yet that were vain, if dreams infest the grave.
We remember
In that sleep of death what dreams may come!
A few lines are in the common stock of quotations such as,
An undevout astronomer is mad.
There are good passages, here and there, but long sermons in a kind of blank verse which "does not overstimulate" are not immortal. "Young has the trick of joining the turgid with the familiar... but with all his faults he was a man of genius and a poet." He was not, as people, misled by the existence of one William Young, foolishly supposed, the original of Fielding's Parson Adams in "Joseph Andrews", But Young may be the original of Robert Montgomery, who added to the piety of Young the ebullitions of an unprecedented genius for nonsense.
James Thomson.
Romance secured a firm footing in English literature, after the artificialities of the eighteenth century had sunk into dotage, through the genius of a Borderer, Sir Walter Scott. But another Borderer, long before, had seen glimmerings and had heard strains of the fairy world and the fairy songs. This was James Thomson, son of the parish minister of Ednam in Roxburghshire. The father was presently translated to Southdean, in the Cheviots, and on the old line of Scottish marches: by that way they rode, as Froissart shows, to Otterbourne fight. Thomson's father died while trying to lay a ghost in a house near Southdean, when the son was at the University of Edinburgh. The haunted house was demolished. Thomson studied divinity, but abandoned the prospective pulpit for poetry, and went to London to seek his fortune in 1725. He lost his letters of introduction, and he needed a pair of shoes; his only resource was the manuscript of his "Winter," in "The Seasons". A dedication brought to Thomson twenty guineas: the piece was praised by Aaron Hill and Malloch (or Mallet, Malloch is a Macgregor name); the poem was liked; "Spring" and "Summer" followed, and Thomson dallied over "Autumn" till 1730.