--the truth of his own mental state. Now,
this disruption of language from genuine thought and feeling is what we
are constantly detecting in Young; and his insincerity is the more likely
to betray him into absurdity, because he habitually treats of
abstractions, and not of concrete objects or specific emotions. He
descants perpetually on virtue, religion, "the good man," life, death,
immortality, eternity--subjects which are apt to give a factitious
grandeur to empty wordiness. When a poet floats in the empyrean, and
only takes a bird's-eye view of the earth, some people accept the mere
fact of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth
for proximity to heaven. Thus:

"His hand the good man fixes on the skies,
And bids earth roll, nor feels her idle whirl,"

may, perhaps, pass for sublime with some readers. But pause a moment to
realize the image, and the monstrous absurdity of a man's grasping the
skies, and hanging habitually suspended there, while he contemptuously
bids the earth roll, warns you that no genuine feeling could have
suggested so unnatural a conception. Again,

"See the man immortal: him, I mean,
Who lives as such; whose heart, full bent on Heaven,
Leans all that way, his bias to the stars."

This is worse than the previous example: for you can at least form some
imperfect conception of a man hanging from the skies, though the position
strikes you as uncomfortable and of no particular use; but you are
utterly unable to imagine how his heart can lean toward the stars.
Examples of such vicious imagery, resulting from insincerity, may be
found, perhaps, in almost every page of the "Night Thoughts." But simple
assertions or aspirations, undisguised by imagery, are often equally
false. No writer whose rhetoric was checked by the slightest truthful
intentions could have said--

"An eye of awe and wonder let me roll,
And roll forever."

Abstracting the more poetical associations with the eye, this is hardly
less absurd than if he had wished to stand forever with his mouth open.

Again:

"Far beneath
A soul immortal is a mortal joy."

Happily for human nature, we are sure no man really believes that. Which
of us has the impiety not to feel that our souls are only too narrow for
the joy of looking into the trusting eyes of our children, of reposing on
the love of a husband or a wife--nay, of listening to the divine voice of
mu