ght:--

"The sprightly lark's shrill matin wakes the morn;
Grief's sharpest thorn hard pressing on my breast,
I strive, with wakeful melody, to cheer
The sullen gloom, sweet Philomel! like thee,
And call the stars to listen: every star
Is deaf to mine, enamour'd of thy lay.
Yet be not vain; there are, who thine excel,
And charm through distant ages: wrapt in shade,
Prisoner of darkness! to the silent hours
How often I repeat their rage divine,
To lull my griefs, and steal my heart from woe!
I roll their raptures, but not catch their fire,
Dark, though not blind, like thee, Maeonides!
Or his, who made Maeonides our own.
Man, too, he sung; immortal man I sing;
Oft bursts my song beyond the bounds of life;
What, now, but immortality, can please?
O had he press'd his theme, pursued the track
Which opens out of darkness into day!
O had he, mounted on his wing of fire,
Soar'd where I sink, and sung immortal man!
How had it bless'd mankind, and rescued me!"

The reader will notice how, in this noble passage, the individual
sentences and points are all subordinated to the main purpose of the
poet, and being subjected to the general stress of the strain, do not
detract from, but add to, its musical unity.

The comparative place of the poem, and the genius of the writer, are two
subjects which are closely connected, and indeed slide into each other.
The "Night Thoughts" must not be named, in interest, finish, sustained
sublimity, and artistic completeness, with the "Iliad," the "Divina
Commedia," or the "Paradise Lost." It ranks, however, at the top of such
a high class of poems as Cowper's Poems, Thomson's "Seasons," Byron's
Poems, Blair's "Grave," Pollock's "Course of Time," and a few others not
very often criticised now-a-days. Young, however, seems to us to have
been capable of even higher things than he has effected in his works. He
was one of those prolific, fiery, inexhaustible souls, who never seem
nearing a limit, or dreaming of a shallow in their genius; who, often
stumbling over precipices or precipitated into pools, rise stronger, and
rush on faster, from their misadventures; who, sometimes stopping too
long to moralise on fungi and ant-hillocks, are all the better breathed
to career through endless forests, and to take Alps and Andes at a flying
leap; and who are

"Ne'er so sure our pleasure to create,
As when they tread the brink of all we hate."

His tast