Young's Night Thoughts.
But of a surety it has not the same hold upon people in this century that it had in the last. There are eloquent passages in it—passages almost rising to sublimity. His love of superlatives and of wordy exaggerations served him in good stead when he came to talk of the shortness of time, and the length of eternity, and the depth of the grave, and the shadows of death. Amidst these topics he moved on the great sable pinions of his muse with a sweep of wing, and a steadiness of poise, that drew a great many sorrowing and pious souls after him.
This is his Apostrophe to Night:
"O majestic Night!
Nature's great ancestor! Day's elder born!
And fated to survive the transient sun!
By mortals and immortals seen with awe!
A starry crown thy raven brow adorns,
An azure zone thy waist; clouds in Heaven's loom
Wrought through varieties of drapery divine
Thy flowing mantle form, and heaven throughout
Voluminously pour thy pompous train."
There is no well-considered scheme or method in his poems; but his august sorrowing and devout meditations, clothed in a great pomp of language, chase each other over his mind, as vagrant high-sweeping clouds chase over the sky. You may watch and follow them in dreamy hours, with a languid pleasure; but a real sorrow, or a real task do not, I think, find much help in them.
Dr. Young believed, in the moodiness of his grief, that he was going to bid adieu to the world; but he did not; we find him back at court long after the funeral bells had sounded in his verse:—back there too, in search of offices of some sort; bowing obsequiously to those who had gifts in their hands.
Good Mrs. Hannah More tells us that being on one occasion at a Parliamentary party, where some volumes of original letters were shown, she was specially anxious to see one of her dear Dr. Young, for whose Night Thoughts she expressed enthusiastic admiration. Her anxiety was gratified, and she adds that she had
"the mortification to read the most fawning, servile, mendicant letter that was perhaps ever penned by a clergyman, imploring the mistress of George II. to exert her interest for his preferment."
I do not like to tell such things to those who admire the poet; but we are after the truth—first of all. A curious mixture he was, of frugality and piety—of love for reputation and emotional religion. He essayed the writing of some of his tragic episodes in a dark room, "with a candle stuck in a skull;" and such love of claptrap abode with him and qualified most of his work.
Night Thoughts has some unforgetable things in it: there is a lurid splendor in many of the lines, and great imaginative range. But his was an imagination not chastened by a severe taste or held in check by the discretions of an elevated and cultured judgment. Upon the whole, I have more respect for the memory of Dr. Watts, than for the memory of Dr. Young.