“Rude drunkard, rising rosy from the main;”
or when he speaks of God as the “Great Philanthropist;” or calls the moon “the Portland of the skies;” but you always feel yourself in contact with a new, native, overflowing mind—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 of subject.” Its tone is rather uniform, but its subjects are as varied as they are important. They are—Man—the World—Ambition—Pleasure—Infidelity—Immortality—Death—Judgment—Heaven—Hell—the Stars—Eternity. Mr Mitford compares Young to Seneca; as if a cold collector of stiff maxims, and a poet whose wisdom was set in enthusiasm as in a ring of fire, were proper subjects of comparison. And it is strange how he should introduce the name of Cicero, as if he were not that very master of amplification, and of over-copiousness of expression, which Mitford imagines Young to be! “No selection—no discreet and graceful reservation—no experienced taste!”—in other words, he was not Pope or Campbell, but Edward Young—not a middle-sized, neat, and well-dressed citizen, but a hirsute giant—not an elegant parterre, but an American forest, bowing only to the old Tempests, and offering up a holocaust of native wealth and glory, not to Man, but to God.
His versification is a more vulnerable point. We grant at once that it is, as a whole, rugged and imperfect, and that, while his single lines are often exceedingly melodious, he rarely reaches, any more than Pope or Johnson, those long and linked swells of sound—
“Floating, mingling, interweaving,
Rising, sinking, and receiving
Each from each, while each is giving
On to each, and each relieving
Each, the pails of gold, the living
Current through the air is heaving”—