The _Night Thoughts_ is remarkable in its finest passages for a strong, but sombre imagination, and for a command of his instrument that puts Young at times nearly on a level with the greatest masters of blank verse. On this height, however, he does not stay long. He is rich in great thoughts, but they do not fall unconsciously, as it were, while the poet pursues his argument. They are aphorisms uttered generally in single lines which are apt to break the continuity of the poem and to injure the harmony of its versification. The theme of Life, Death, and Immortality is not a narrow one, and affords ample space for imaginative treatment. Young's treatment of it is too often declamatory; he drops the poet in the rhetorician and the wit. There is much of the false sublime in the poem, and much that reveals the hollow character of the writer. The first book is the finest, sparkling with felicitous expressions and rising frequently to true poetry. The poetical quality of that book, however, is lessened by the author's passion for antithesis. The merit of the following passage, for example, is not due to poetical inspiration: 'How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful is man! How passing wonder He, who made him such! Who centered in our make such strange extremes From different natures, marvellously mixed, Connexion exquisite of distant worlds! Distinguished link in being's endless chain! Midway from nothing to the Deity; A beam etherial, sullied, and absorbt! Though sullied and dishonoured still divine! Dim miniature of greatness absolute! An heir of glory! a frail child of dust! Helpless immortal! insect infinite! A worm! a god!--I tremble at myself, And in myself am lost. At home a stranger, Thought wanders up and down, surprised, aghast, And wondering at her own: How reason reels! O what a miracle to man is man! Triumphantly distressed! what joy! what dread! Alternately transported and alarmed! What can preserve my life? or what destroy? An angel's arm can't snatch me from the grave: Legions of angels can't confine me there.' The opening of the ninth and last book will give a more favourable illustration of Young's style: