O had he press’d his theme, pursued the track
Which opens out of darkness into day!
O had he, mounted on his wing of fire,
Soar’d where I sink, and sung immortal man!
How had it bless’d mankind, and rescued me!”
The reader will notice how, in this noble passage, the individual sentences and points are all subordinated to the main purpose of the poet, and being subjected to the general stress of the strain, do not detract from, but add to, its musical unity.
The comparative place of the poem, and the genius of the writer, are two subjects which are closely connected, and indeed slide into each other. The “Night Thoughts” must not be named, in interest, finish, sustained sublimity, and artistic completeness, with the “Iliad,” the “Divina Commedia,” or the “Paradise Lost.” It ranks, however, at the top of such a high class of poems as Cowper’s Poems, Thomson’s “Seasons,” Byron’s Poems, Blair’s “Grave,” Pollock’s “Course of Time,” and a few others not very often criticised now-a-days. Young, however, seems to us to have been capable of even higher things than he has effected in his works. He was one of those prolific, fiery, inexhaustible souls, who never seem nearing a limit, or dreaming of a shallow in their genius; who, often stumbling over precipices or precipitated into pools, rise stronger, and rush on faster, from their misadventures; who, sometimes stopping too long to moralise on fungi and ant-hillocks, are all the better breathed to career through endless forests, and to take Alps and Andes at a flying leap; and who are
“Ne’er so sure our pleasure to create,
As when they tread the brink of all we hate.”
His taste was not equal certainly to his other faculties, and he was guilty of occasional extravagances, and stumbled not unfrequently over the brink of the bathos; but his genius possessed the following qualities:—It was original. He had read much, but he copies little, and never slavishly. His mind looks at everything—at skulls and stars—through a medium of its own. It was subtle as well as native and strong, and in its movements it is broadly based on a vigorous intellect. It was progressive and prophetic in its spirit, and many of our recent speculations or semi-speculations on the relations of man and nature, are to be found in Young—ay, in the mere spray his mind threw off on its way to an ulterior result. Think of this, for instance, and then remember a similar expression in Carlyle:—