“A requesting Omnipotence? What can stun and confound thy reason more? What more can ravish and exalt thy heart? It cannot but ravish and exalt; it cannot but gloriously disturb and perplex thee, to take in all that suggests. Thou child of the dust! Thou speck of misery and sin! How abject thy weakness! how great is thy power! Thou crawler on earth, and possible (I was about to say) controller of the skies! Weigh, and weigh well, the wondrous truths I have in view: which cannot be weighed too much; which the more they are weighed, amaze the more; which to have supposed, before they were revealed, would have been as great madness, and to have presumed on as great sin, as it is now madness and sin not to believe.”
Even in his Pindaric odes, in which he made the most violent efforts against nature, he is still neither more nor less than the Young of the “Last Day,” emptied and swept of his genius, and possessed by seven demons of fustian and bad rhyme. Even here his “Ercles’ Vein” alternates with his moral platitudes, and we have the perpetual text of the “Night Thoughts:”
“Gold pleasure buys;
But pleasure dies,
For soon the gross fruition cloys;
Though raptures court,
The sense is short;
But virtue kindles living joys;—“Joys felt alone!
Joys asked of none!
Which Time’s and fortune’s arrows miss:
Joys that subsist,
Though fates resist,
An unprecarious, endless bliss!“Unhappy they!
And falsely gay!
Who bask forever in success;
A constant feast
Quite palls the taste,
And long enjoyment is distress.”
In the “Last Day,” again, which is the earliest thing he wrote, we have an anticipation of all his greatest faults and merits. Conspicuous among the faults is that attempt to exalt our conceptions of Deity by vulgar images and comparisons, which is so offensive in the later “Night Thoughts.” In a burst of prayer and homage to God, called forth by the contemplation of Christ coming to judgment, he asks, Who brings the change of the seasons? and answers:
“Not the great Ottoman, or Greater Czar;
Not Europe’s arbitress of peace and war!”
Conceive the soul in its most solemn moments, assuring God that it doesn’t place his power below that of Louis Napoleon or Queen Victoria!
But in the midst of uneasy rhymes, inappropriate imagery, vaulting sublimity that o’erleaps itself, and vulgar emotions, we have in this poem an occasional flash of genius, a touch of simple grandeur, which promises as much as Young ever achieved. Describing the on-coming of the dissolution of all things, he says:
“No sun in radiant glory shines on high;
No light but from the terrors of the sky.”
And again, speaking of great armies:
“Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn
Rous’d the broad front, and call’d the battle on.”