Abstracting the more poetical associations with the eye, this is hardly less absurd than if he had wished to stand forever with his mouth open. Again: “Far beneath A soul immortal is a mortal joy.” Happily for human nature, we are sure no man really believes that. Which of us has the impiety not to feel that our souls are only too narrow for the joy of looking into the trusting eyes of our children, of reposing on the love of a husband or a wife—nay, of listening to the divine voice of music, or watching the calm brightness of autumnal afternoons? But Young could utter this falsity without detecting it, because, when he spoke of “mortal joys,” he rarely had in his mind any object to which he could attach sacredness. He was thinking of bishoprics, and benefices, of smiling monarchs, patronizing prime ministers, and a “much indebted muse.” Of anything between these and eternal bliss he was but rarely and moderately conscious. Often, indeed, he sinks very much below even the bishopric, and seems to have no notion of earthly pleasure but such as breathes gaslight and the fumes of wine. His picture of life is precisely such as you would expect from a man who has risen from his bed at two o’clock in the afternoon with a headache and a dim remembrance that he has added to his “debts of honor:” “What wretched repetition cloys us here! What periodic potions for the sick, Distemper’d bodies, and distemper’d minds?” And then he flies off to his usual antithesis: “In an eternity what scenes shall strike! Adventures thicken, novelties surprise!” “Earth” means lords and levees, duchesses and Dalilahs, South-Sea dreams, and illegal percentage; and the only things distinctly preferable to these are eternity and the stars. Deprive Young of this antithesis, and more than half his eloquence would be shrivelled up. Place him on a breezy common, where the furze is in its golden bloom, where children are playing, and horses are standing in the sunshine with fondling necks, and he would have nothing to say. Here are neither depths of guilt nor heights of glory; and we doubt whether in such a scene he would be able to pay his usual compliment to the Creator: “Where’er I turn, what claim on all applause!” It is true that he sometimes—not often—speaks of virtue as capable of sweetening life, as well as of taking the sting from death and winning heaven; and, lest we should be guilty of any unfairness to him, we will quote the two passages which convey this sentiment the most explicitly. In the one he gives “Lorenzo” this excellent recipe for obtaining cheerfulness: “Go, fix some weighty truth; Chain down some passion; do some generous good; Teach Ignorance to see, or Grief to smile; Correct thy friend; befriend thy greatest foe; Or, with warm heart, and confidence divine, Spring up, and lay strong hold on Him who made thee.”