of subject." Its tone is rather uniform, but its subjects
are as varied as they are important. They are--Man--the World--Ambition--
Pleasure--Infidelity--Immortality--Death--Judgment--Heaven--Hell--the
Stars--Eternity. Mr Mitford compares Young to Seneca; as if a cold
collector of stiff maxims, and a poet whose wisdom was set in enthusiasm
as in a ring of fire, were proper subjects of comparison. And it is
strange how he should introduce the name of Cicero, as if he were not
that very master of amplification, and of over-copiousness of expression,
which Mitford _imagines_ Young to be! "No selection--no discreet and
graceful reservation--no experienced taste!"--in other words, he was not
Pope or Campbell, but Edward Young--not a middle-sized, neat, and
well-dressed citizen, but a hirsute giant--not an elegant _parterre_, but
an American forest, bowing only to the old Tempests, and offering up a
holocaust of native wealth and glory, not to Man, but to God.

His versification is a more vulnerable point. We grant at once that it
is, as a whole, rugged and imperfect, and that, while his single lines
are often exceedingly melodious, he rarely reaches, any more than Pope or
Johnson, those long and linked swells of sound--

"Floating, mingling, interweaving,
Rising, sinking, and receiving
Each from each, while each is giving
On to each, and each relieving
Each, the pails of gold, the living
Current through the air is heaving"--

which Goethe has so beautifully, although unintentionally, described in
these words, applied by him to the elements of Nature; and which he and
Milton, and Spenser, and Coleridge, and Shelley, have so admirably
exemplified in their verse. Young's style is too broken and sententious
to permit the miracles of melody which are found in some of our poets.
Yet he has a few passages which approach even to this high standard. Take
the following:--

"Look nature through, 'tis revolution all;
All change, no death. Day follows night, and night
The dying day; stars rise and set and rise;
Earth takes th' example. See the summer gay,
With her green chaplet, and ambrosial flowers,
Droops into pallid autumn; winter gray,
Horrid with frost, and turbulent with storm,
Blows autumn, and his golden fruits away;
Then melts into the spring. Soft spring, with breath
Favonian, from warm chambers of the south,
Recalls the first."

Or take the well-known burst which closes the First Ni