The name and look of life, and dwells among us.
And then the poet describes Death as being present always and everywhere, and especially
Gaily carousing, to his gay compeers
Inly he laughs to see them laugh at him
As absent far.
But Young has not, like Milton, been able to conjure up a definite and convincing vision, and thus he never achieves anything approaching the overwhelming effect produced by the phantom of Death in “Paradise Lost,” called before us in a single verse:
So spake the grisly Terror.
(P.L., II. 704)
For the rest, Young’s personifications, considering the nature of his subject, are fewer than might be expected. Where they occur they often seem to owe their presence to a desire to vary the monotony of his moral reflections; as a result we get a number of abstractions, which may be called personifications only because they are sometimes accompanied by human attributes.
Young has also certain other evocations which can scarcely be called abstractions, but which are really indistinct, shadowy beings, like the figures of a dream, as when he describes the phantom of the past: