"This is the dumb and dreary hour,

When injured ghosts complain;
When yawning graves give up their dead,
To haunt the faithless swain.

"Bethink thee, William, of thy fault,
Thy pledge and broken oath!
And give me back my maiden-vow,
And give me back my troth.

"Why did you promise love to me,

And not that promise keep?

Why did you swear my eyes were bright,
Yet leave those eyes to weep?

"How could you say my face was fair,
And yet that face forsake?
How could you win my virgin-heart,
Yet leave that heart to break?

"Why did you say my lip was sweet,
And made the scarlet pale?

And why did I, young witless maid !
Believe the flattering tale?

"That face, alas! no more is fair,
Those lips no longer red:

Dark are my eyes, now closed in death, And every charm is fled.

"The hungry worm my sister is;

This winding-sheet I wear :
And cold and weary lasts our night,

Till that last morn appear.

"But, hark! the cock has warn'd me hence; A long and late adieu!

Come, see, false man, how low she lies,

Who died for love of you."

The lark sung loud; the morning smiled,
With beams of rosy red:

Pale William quaked in every limb,
And raving left his bed.

He hied him to the fatal place
Where Margaret's body lay;

And stretch'd him on the green-grass turf,
That wrapp'd her breathless clay.
And thrice he call'd on Margaret's name,
And thrice he wept full sore;

Then laid his cheek to her cold grave,
And word spake never more!

SONG.

THE smiling morn, the breathing spring,
Invite the tuneful birds to sing,
And while they warble from each spray,
Love melts the universal lay.

Let us, Amanda, timely wise,
Like them improve the hour that flies,
And in soft raptures waste the day
Among the shades of Endermay.

For soon the winter of the year,
And age, life's winter, will appear ;
At this, thy living bloom will fade,
As that will strip the vernal shade.
Our taste of pleasure then is o'er,
The feather'd songsters love no more;
And when they droop, and we decay,
Adieu the shades of Endermay.

YOUNG'S satires have at least the merit of containing a number of epigrams, and as they appeared rather earlier than those of Pope, they may boast of having afforded that writer some degree of example. Swift's opinion of them, however, seems not to have been unjust, that they should have either been more merry or more angry. One of his tragedies is still popular on the stage; and his Night Thoughts have many admirers both at home and abroad.

[ The Universal Passion is indeed a very great performance. It is said to be a series of epigrams.

Young's species of satire is between those of Horace and Juvenal; and he has the gaiety of Horace without his laxity of numbers, and the morality of Juvenal with greater variation of images. He plays indeed only on the surface of life; he never penetrates the recesses of the mind, and therefore the whole power of his poetry is exhausted by a single perusal; his conceits please only when they surprise.-JOHNSON.]

Of his lyrical poetry he had himself the good sense to think but indifferently. In none of his works is he more spirited and amusing than in his Essay on Original Composition, written at the age of eighty.

The Night Thoughts have been translated into more than one foreign language; and it is usual for foreigners to regard them as eminently characteristic of the peculiar temperament of English genius. Madame de Stael has indeed gravely deduced the genealogy of our national melancholy from Ossian and the Northern Scalds, down to Dr. Young. Few Englishmen, however, will probably be disposed to recognise the author of the Night Thoughts as their national poet by way of eminence. His devotional gloom is more in the spirit of St. Francis of Asisium than of an English divine: and his austerity is blended with

HH

a vein of whimsical conceit that is still more unlike the plainness of English character. The Night Thoughts certainly contain many splendid and happy conceptions, but their beauty is thickly marred by false wit and overlaboured antithesis: indeed his whole ideas seem to have been in a state of antithesis while he composed the poem. One portion of his fancy appears devoted to aggravate the picture of his desolate feelings, and the other half to contradict that picture by eccentric images and epigrammatic ingenuities. As a poet he was fond of exaggeration, but it was that of the fancy more than of the heart. This appears no less in the noisy hyperboles of his tragedies, than in the studied melancholy of the Night Thoughts, in which he pronounces the simple act of laughter to be half immoral. That he was a pious man, and had felt something from the afflictions described in the Complaint, need not be called in question*, but he seems covenanting with himself to be as desolate as possible, as if he had continued the custom ascribed to him at college, of studying with a candle stuck in a human skull; while, at the same time, the feelings and habits of a man of the world, which still adhere to him, throw a singular contrast over his renunciations of human vanity. He abjures the world in witty metaphors, commences his poem with a sarcasm on sleep, deplores his being neglected at court, compliments a lady of quality by asking the moon if she would choose to be called the "fair Portland of the skies"-and dedicates to the patrons of "a much indebted muse," one of whom (Lord Wilmington†) on some occasion he puts in the balance of antithesis as a counterpart to heaven. He was, in truth, not so sick of life as of missing its preferments, and was still ambitious not only of converting Lorenzo, but of shining before this utterly worthless and wretched world as a sparkling, sublime, and witty poet. Hence his poetry has not the majestic simplicity of a heart abstracted from human vanities, and while the groundwork of his sentiments is more darkly shaded than is absolutely necessary either for poetry or religion, the surface of his expression glitters with irony and satire, and with thoughts sometimes absolutely | approaching to pleasantry. His ingenuity in the false sublime is very peculiar. In Night IX. he concludes his description of the day of judgment by showing the just and the unjust consigned respectively to their "sulphureous or ambrosial seats," while

"Hell through all her glooms Returns in groans a melancholy roar; this is aptly put under the book of Consolation.

* It appears, however, from Sir Herbert Croft's account of his life, [in Johnson's Poets,] that he had not lost the objects of his affection in such rapid succession as he feigns, when he addresses the "Insatiate archer (Death) whose shaft flew thrice, ere thrice yon moon had filled

her horn."

[ The Lord Wilmington of Thomson's "" Winter."]

But instead of winding up his labours, he proceeds through a multitude of reflections, and amidst many comparisons assimilates the constellations of heaven to gems of immense weight and value on a ring for the finger of their Creator. Conceit could hardly go farther than to ascribe finery to Omnipotence. The taste of the French artist was not quite so bold, when in the picture of Belshazzar's feast, he put a ring and ruffle on the hand that was writing on the wall.

Here, however, he was in earnest comparatively with some other passages, such as that in which he likens Death to Nero driving a phaeton in a female guise, or where he describes the same personage, Death, borrowing the “cockaded brow of a spendthrift," in order to gain admittance to

a gay circle." Men, with the same familiarity, are compared to monkeys before a lookingglass; and, at the end of the eighth book, Satan is roundly denominated a "duncet:" the first time, perhaps, that his abilities were ever seriously called in questions.

Shall we agree with Dr. Johnson when he affirms of the Night Thoughts that particular lines are not to be regarded, that the power is in the whole, and that in the whole there is a magnificence like that which is ascribed to a Chinese plantation, the magnificence of vast extent and endless diversity? Of a Chinese plantation few men have probably a very distinct conception; but unless that species of landscape be an utterly capricious show of objects, in which case even extent and variety will hardly constitute magnificence, it must possess amusement and vicissitude, arising from the relation of parts to each other. But there is nothing of entertaining succession of parts in the Night Thoughts. The poem excites no anticipation as it proceeds. One book bespeaks no impatience for another, nor is found to have laid the smallest foundation for new pleasure when the succeeding night sets in. The poet's fancy discharges itself on the mind in short ictuses of surprise, which rather lose than increase their force by reiteration; but he is remarkably defective in progressive interest and collective effect. The power of the poem, instead of“ being in the whole," lies in short, vivid, and broken gleams of genius; so that if we disregard particular lines, we shall but too often miss the only gems of ransom which the poet can bring as the price of his relief from surrounding tædium. Of any long work, where the power really lies in the whole, we feel reluctant to hazard the character by a few short quotations, because a few fragments can convey no adequate idea of the

architecture; but the directly reverse of this is the case with the Night Thoughts, for by selecting particular beauties of the poem we should delight and electrify a sensitive reader, but might put him to sleep by a perusal of the whole. This character of detached felicities, unconnected with interesting progress or reciprocal animation of parts, may be likened to a wilderness, without path or perspective, or to a Chinese plantation (if the illustration be more agreeable); but it does not correspond with our idea of the magnificence of a great poem, of which it can be said that the power is in the whole. After all, the variety and extent of reflection in the Night Thoughts is to a certain degree more imposing than real. They have more metaphorical than substantial variety of thought. Questions which we had thought exhausted and laid at rest in one book, are called up again in the next in a Proteus metamorphosis of shape, and a chameleon diversity of colour. Happily the awful truths which they illustrate are few and simple. Around those truths the poet directs his course with innumerable sinuosities of fancy, like a man appearing to make a long voyage while he is in reality only crossing and recrossing the same expanse of

water.

He has been well described in a late poem, as one in whom

"Still gleams and still expires the cloudy day

Of genuine poetry."

The above remarks have been made with no desire to depreciate what is genuine in his beauties. The reader most sensitive to his faults must have felt, that there is in him a spark of originality which is never long extinguished, however far it may be from vivifying the entire mass of his poetry. Many and exquisite are his touches of sublime expression, of profound reflection, and of striking imagery. It is recalling but a few of these to allude to his description, in the eighth book, of the man whose thoughts are not of this world, to his simile of the traveller at the opening of the ninth book, to his spectre of the antediluvian world, and to some parts of his very unequal description of the conflagration; above all, to that noble and familiar image, "When final Ruin fiercely drives

Her ploughshare o'er creation *."

It is true that he seldom, if ever, maintains a flight of poetry long free from oblique associations; but he has individual passages which Philosophy might make her texts, and Experience select for her mottoes.

Introduction to the Night Thoughts-Uncertainty of human happiness-Universality of human misery. TIRED nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep! He, like the world, his ready visit pays Where fortune smiles; the wretched he forsakes; Swift on his downy pinion flies from woe, And lights on lids unsullied with a tear.

From short (as usual) and disturb'd repose, I wake: How happy they, who wake no more! Yet that were vain, if dreams infest the grave. I wake, emerging from a sea of dreams Tumultuous; where my wreck'd desponding thought From wave to wave of fancied misery, At random drove, her helm of reason lost. Though now restored, 'tis only change of pain, (A bitter change!) severer for severe, The day too short for my distress; and night, Even in the zenith of her dark domain, Is sunshine to the colour of my fate.

Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne, In rayless majesty, now stretches forth Her leaden sceptre o'er a slumbering world. Silence, how dead! and darkness how profound! Nor eye, nor listening ear, an object finds; Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the general pulse Of life stood still, and nature made a pause; An awful pause! prophetic of her end. And let her prophecy be soon fulfill'd; Fate! drop the curtain; I can lose no more.

Silence and darkness! solemn sisters! twins From ancient night, who nurse the tender thought!

O thou, whose word from solid darkness struck That spark, the sun, strike wisdom from my soul;

My soul, which flies to thee, her trust, her treasure, As misers to their gold, while others rest.

Through this opaque of nature and of soul,
This double night, transmit one pitying ray,
To lighten and to cheer. O lead my mind
(A mind that fain would wander from its woe),
Lead it through various scenes of life and death;
And from each scene the noblest truths inspire.
Nor less inspire my conduct than my song;
Teach my best reason, reason; my best will
Teach rectitude; and fix my firm resolve
Wisdom to wed, and pay her long arrear:
[* A passage imitated by Burns in his Poem "To the
Daisy":

Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives elate
Full on thy bloom,

Till crush'd beneath the furrow's weight,
Shall be thy doom.

Burns was a great reader of Young, as the Scotch indeed universally are.]

Nor let the vial of thy vengeance, pour'd
On this devoted head, be pour'd in vain.
The bell strikes one. We take no note of time
But from its loss. To give it then a tongue
Is wise in man. As if an angel spoke,

I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright,
It is the knell of my departed hours:

Where are they? With the years beyond the flood.
It is the signal that demands despatch:
How much is to be done? My hopes and fears
Start up alarm'd, and o'er life's narrow verge
Look down-On what? a fathomiess abyss;
A dread eternity! how surely mine!
And can eternity belong to me,
Poor pensioner on the bounties of an hour?

How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful is man!
How passing wonder he who made him such!
Who center'd in our make such strange extremes!
From different natures marvellously mix'd,
Connexion exquisite of distant worlds!
Distinguish'd link in being's endless chain !
Midway from nothing to the Deity!
A beam ethereal, sullied, and absorp'd!
Though sullied and dishonour'd, still divine!
Dim miniature of greatness absolute !
An heir of glory! a frail child of dust!
Helpless immortal! insect infinite!
A worm a god !-I tremble at myself,
And in myself am lost! at home a stranger,
Thought wanders up and down, surprised, aghast,
And wondering at her own: How reason reels!
O what a miracle to man is man,
Triumphantly distress'd! what joy, what dread!
Alternately transported and alarm'd!
What can preserve my life, or what destroy?
An angel's arm can't snatch me from the grave;
Legions of angels can't confine me there.

'Tis past conjecture; all things rise in proof: While o'er my limbs sleep's soft dominion spread, What though my soul fantastic measures trod O'er fairy fields; or mourn'd along the gloom Of pathless woods; or down the craggy steep Hurl'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool; Or scaled the cliff; or danced on hollow winds, With antic shapes, wild natives of the brain? Her ceaseless flight, though devious, speaks her Of subtler essence than the trodden clod; [nature Active, aërial, towering, unconfined, Unfetter'd with her gross companion's fall. Ev'n silent night proclaims my soul immortal; Ev'n silent night proclaims eternal day. For human weal Heaven husbands all events; Dull sleep instructs, nor sport vain dreams in vain. Why then their loss deplore that are not lost? Why wanders wretched thought their tombs around In infidel distress? Are angels there? Slumbers, raked up in dust, ethereal fire? They live! they greatly live a life on earth Unkindled, unconceived; and from an eye Of tenderness let heavenly pity fall On me, more justly number'd with the dead.

This is the desert, this the solitude:
How populous, how vital, is the grave !
This is creation's melancholy vault,
The vale funereal, the sad cypress gloom;
The land of apparitions, empty shades!
All, all on earth, is shadow, all beyond
Is substance; the reverse is folly's creed:
How solid all, where change shall be no more!

This is the bud of being, the dim dawn,
The twilight of our day, the vestibule ;
Life's theatre as yet is shut, and death,
Strong death, alone can heave the massy bar,
This gross impediment of clay remove,
And make us embryos of existence free
From real life; but little more remote
Is he, not yet a candidate for light,
The future embryo, slumbering in his sire.
Embryos we must be till we burst the shell,
Yon ambient azure shell, and spring to life,
The life of gods, O transport! and of man.

Yet man, fool man! here buries all his thoughts;
Inters celestial hopes without one sigh.
Prisoner of earth, and pent beneath the moon,
Here pinions all his wishes; wing'd by heaven
To fly at infinite; and reach it there
Where seraphs gather immortality,
On life's fair tree, fast by the throne of God.
What golden joys ambrosial clustering glow
In his full beam, and ripen for the just,
Where momentary ages are no more!
Where time, and pain, and chance, and death expire!
And is it in the flight of threescore years
To push eternity from human thought,
And smother souls immortal in the dust?
A soul immortal, spending all her fires,
Wasting her strength in strenuous idleness,
Thrown into tumult, raptured or alarm'd,
At aught this scene can threaten or indulge,
Resembles ocean into tempest wrought,
To waft a feather, or to drown a fly.

Where falls this censure? It o'erwhelms myself: How was my heart incrusted by the world! O how self-fetter'd was my grovelling soul, How, like a worm, was I wrapt round and round In silken thought, which reptile fancy spun, Till darken'd reason lay quite clouded o'er With soft conceit of endless comfort here, Nor yet put forth her wings to reach the skies!

Night-visions may befriend: (as sung above) Our waking dreams are fatal. How I dream'd Of things impossible! (Could sleep do more ?) Of joys perpetual in perpetual change! Of stable pleasures on the tossing wave! Eternal sunshine in the storms of life! How richly were my noon-tide trances hung With gorgeous tapestries of pictured joys! Joy behind joy, in endless perspective! Till at death's toll, whose restless iron tongue Calls daily for his millions at a meal, Starting I woke, and found myself undone. Where now my frenzy's pompous furniture? The cobweb'd cottage, with its ragged wall

Of mouldering mud, is royalty to me!
The spider's most attenuated thread
Is cord, is cable, to man's tender tie
On earthly bliss; it breaks at every breeze.

Yet why complain? or why complain for one?
Hangs out the sun his lustre but for me,
The single man? Are angels all beside ?
I mourn for millions: 'Tis the common lot ;
In this shape, or in that, has fate entail'd
The mother's throes on all of woman born,
Not more the children than sure heirs of pain.
War, famine, pest, volcano, storm, and fire,
Intestine broils, oppression, with her heart
Wrapt up in triple brass, besiege mankind.
God's image disinherited of day,

Here, plunged in mines, forgets a sun was made.
There, beings deathless as their haughty lord,
Are hammer'd to the galling oar for life,
And plough the winter's wave, and reap despair,
Some for hard masters, broken under arms,
In battle lopp'd away, with half their limbs,
Beg bitter bread through realms their valour
saved,

If so the tyrant, or his minion, doom.
Want, and incurable disease, (fell pair!)
On hopeless multitudes remorseless seize
At once, and make a refuge of the grave.
How groaning hospitals eject their dead!
What numbers groan for sad admission there!
What numbers, once in fortune's lap high-fed,
Solicit the cold hand of charity!

To shock us more, solicit it in vain!

Ye silken sons of pleasure; since in pains
You rue more modish visits, visit here,

And breathe from your debauch: give, and reduce

Surfeit's dominion over you: but so great
Your impudence, you blush at what is right.

Happy! did sorrow seize on such alone.
Not prudence can defend, or virtue save;
Disease invades the chastest temperance,
And punishment the guiltless, and alarm,
Through thickest shades, pursues the fond of

peace.

Man's caution often into danger turns ;
And his guard falling crushes him to death.
Not happiness itself makes good her name;
Our very wishes give us not our wish.
How distant oft the thing we doat on most
From that for which we doat, felicity!
The smoothest course of nature has its pains;
And truest friends, through error, wound our rest.
Without misfortune, what calamities;
And what hostilities, without a foe!
Nor are foes wanting to the best on earth.
But endless is the list of human ills,

And sighs might sooner fail, than cause to sigh.

FROM NIGHT II.

Apology for the Seriousness of the subject.

THOU say'st I preach, Lorenzo; 'tis confest.
What if, for once, I preach thee quite awake?
Who wants amusement in the flame of battle?
Is it not treason in the soul immortal,
Her foes in arms, eternity the prize?
Will toys amuse, when medicines cannot cure?
When spirits ebb, when life's enchanting scenes
Their lustre lose, and lessen in our sight,
As lands and cities with their glittering spires,
To the poor shatter'd bark, by sudden storm
Thrown off to sea, and soon to perish there?
Will toys amuse? No: Thrones will then be
toys,

And earth and skies seem dust upon the scale.

FROM THE SAME.

Madness of men in pursuit of amusements.

AH! how unjust to Nature and himself,
Is thoughtless, thankless, inconsistent man!
Like children, babbling nonsense in their sports,
We censure nature for a span too short;
That span too short, we tax as tedious too;
Torture invention, all expedients tire,
To lash the lingering moments into speed,
And whirl us (happy riddance !) from ourselves.
Art, brainless art! our furious charioteer
(For nature's voice unstifled would recal),
Drives headlong towards the precipice of death;
Death, most our dread; death thus more dreadful
made:

O what a riddle of absurdity!

Leisure is pain; takes off our chariot wheels;
How heavily we drag the load of life!
Blest leisure is our curse; like that of Cain,
It makes us wander; wander earth around,
To fly that tyrant, thought. As Atlas groan'd
The world beneath, we groan beneath an hour.
We cry for mercy to the next amusement;
The next amusement mortgages our fields;
Slight inconvenience! prisons hardly frown,
From hateful time if prisons set us free.
Yet when death kindly tenders us relief,
We call him cruel; years to moments shrink,
Ages to years. The telescope is turn'd.
To man's false optics (from his folly false)
Time, in advance, behind him hides his wings,
And seems to creep, decrepit with his age;
Behold him, when pass'd by; what then is seen,
But his broad pinions swifter than the winds?
And all mankind, in contradiction strong,
Rueful, aghast, cry out on his career.