e 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."

And this wail of the lost souls is fine:

"And this for sin?
Could I offend if I had never been?
But still increas'd the senseless, happy mass,
Flow'd in the stream, _or shiver'd in the grass_?
Father of mercies! Why from silent earth
Didst thou awake and curse me into birth?
Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night,
And make a thankless present of thy light?
Push into being a reverse of Thee,
And _animate a clod with misery_?"

But it is seldom in Young's rhymed poems that the effect of a felicitous
thought or image is not cou