shut up there, hear how he enjoys turning the key on them!

"What ensues?
The deed predominant, the deed of deeds!
Which makes a hell of hell, a _heaven of heaven_!
The goddess, with determin'd aspect turns
Her adamantine key's enormous size
Through Destiny's inextricable wards,
_Deep driving every bolt_ on both their fates.
Then, from the crystal battlements of heaven,
Down, down she hurls it through the dark profound,
Ten thousand, thousand fathom; there to rust
And ne'er unlock her resolution more.
The deep resounds; and Hell, through all her glooms,
Returns, in groans, the melancholy roar."

This is one of the blessings for which Dr. Young thanks God "most:"

"For all I bless thee, most, for the severe;
Her death--my own at hand--_the fiery gulf_,
_That flaming bound of wrath omnipotent_!
_It thunders_;--_but it thunders to preserve_;
. . . its wholesome dread
Averts the dreaded pain; _its hideous groans_
_Join Heaven's sweet Hallelujahs in Thy praise_,
Great Source of good alone! How kind in all!
In vengeance kind! Pain, Death, Gehenna, _save_" . . .

_i.e._, save _me_, Dr. Young, who, in return for that favor, promise to
give my divine patron the monopoly of that exuberance in laudatory
epithet, of which specimens may be seen at any moment in a large number
of dedications and odes to kings, queens, prime ministers, and other
persons of distinction. _That_, in Young's conception, is what God
delights in. His crowning aim in the "drama" of the ages, is to
vindicate his own renown. The God of the "Night Thoughts" is simply
Young himself "writ large"--a didactic poet, who "lectures" mankind in
the antithetic hyperbole of mortal and immortal joys, earth and the
stars, hell and heaven; and expects the tribute of inexhaustible
"applause." Young has no conception of religion as anything else than
egoism turned heavenward; and he does not merely imply this, he insists
on it. Religion, he tells us, in argumentative passages too long to
quote, is "ambition, pleasure, and the love of gain," directed toward the
joys of the future life instead of the present. And his ethics
correspond to his religion. He vacillates, indeed, in his ethical
theory, and shifts his position in order to suit his immediate purpose in
argument; but he never changes his level so as to see beyond the horizon
of mere selfishness. Someti