vague, but beautiful, and its music has murmured in
our minds for many years:

"The cuckoo seasons sing
The same dull note to such as nothing prize
But what those seasons from the teeming earth
To doting sense indulge. But nobler minds,
Which relish fruit unripened by the sun,
Make their days various; various as the dyes
On the dove's neck, which wanton in his rays.
On minds of dove-like innocence possess'd,
On lighten'd minds that bask in Virtue's beams,
Nothing hangs tedious, nothing old revolves
In that for which they long, for which they live.
Their glorious efforts, winged with heavenly hopes,
Each rising morning sees still higher rise;
Each bounteous dawn its novelty presents
To worth maturing, new strength, lustre, fame;
While Nature's circle, like a chariot wheel,
Boiling beneath their elevated aims,
Makes their fair prospect fairer every hour;
Advancing virtue in a line to bliss."

Even here, where he is in his most amiable mood, you see at what a
telescopic distance he stands from mother Earth and simple human
joys--"Nature's circle rolls beneath." Indeed, we remember no mind in
poetic literature that seems to have absorbed less of the beauty and the
healthy breath of the common landscape than Young's. His images, often
grand and finely presented--witness that sublimely sudden leap of
thought,

"Embryos we must be till we burst the shell,
_Yon ambient azure shell_, and spring to life"--

lie almost entirely within that circle of observation which would be
familiar to a man who lived in town, hung about the theatres, read the
newspaper, and went home often by moon and starlight.

There is no natural object nearer than the moon that seems to have any
strong attraction for him, and even to the moon he chiefly appeals for
patronage, and "pays his court" to her. It is reckoned among the many
deficiencies of "Lorenzo" that he "never asked the moon one question"--an
omission which Young thinks eminently unbecoming a rational being. He
describes nothing so well as a comet, and is tempted to linger with fond
detail over nothing more familiar than the day of judgment and an
imaginary journey among the stars. Once on Saturn's ring he feels at
home, and his language becomes quite easy:

"What behold I now?
A wilderness of wonders burning round,
Where larger suns inhabit higher spheres;