'As when a traveller, a long day past In painful search of what he cannot find, At night's approach, content with the next cot, There ruminates awhile, his labour lost; Then cheers his heart with what his fate affords, And chants his sonnet to deceive the time, Till the due season calls him to repose; Thus I, long-travelled in the ways of men, And dancing with the rest the giddy maze Where Disappointment smiles at Hope's career; Warned by the languor of life's evening ray, At length have housed me in an humble shed, Where, future wandering banished from my thought, And waiting, patient, the sweet hour of rest, I chase the moments with a serious song. Song soothes our pains, and age has pains to soothe.' While moralizing on man's mortality Young is seldom a cheerful monitor, he dwells with too great persistence on the incidents of death and of bodily corruption, too little on life with which we have more to do than with death. Thus with a strange perversion he exclaims: 'This is the desart, this the solitude, How populous, how vital, is the grave! This is creation's melancholy vault, The vale funereal, the sad cypress gloom, The land of apparitions, empty shades! All, all on earth is shadow, all beyond Is substance; the reverse is folly's creed.' and harping on the same theme in the ninth book, says: 'What is the world itself? Thy world--a grave. Where is the dust that has not been alive? The spade, the plough, disturb our ancestors; From human mould we reap our daily bread; The globe around earth's hollow surface shakes, And is the ceiling of her sleeping sons. O'er devastation we blind revels keep; Whole buried towns support the dancer's heel.' [Sidenote: Robert Blair (1699-1746).] On laying down the _Night Thoughts_ the student may be advised to read Blair's _Grave_, a poem in less than 800 lines of blank verse, composed in a fresher and more rigorous style than the far larger work of Young, and rather moulded, as Mr. Saintsbury has observed, 'upon dramatic than upon purely poetical models.' _The Grave_, which was written before the publication of the _Night Thoughts_,[29] abounds with poetical felicities, and is pregnant with suggestions that seize the imagination, and appeal alike to the intellect and the heart. The brevity of the piece is in its favour; there is not a line that flags.