The other passage is vague, but beautiful, and its music has murmured in our minds for many years: “The cuckoo seasons sing The same dull note to such as nothing prize But what those seasons from the teeming earth To doting sense indulge. But nobler minds, Which relish fruit unripened by the sun, Make their days various; various as the dyes On the dove’s neck, which wanton in his rays. On minds of dove-like innocence possess’d, On lighten’d minds that bask in Virtue’s beams, Nothing hangs tedious, nothing old revolves In that for which they long, for which they live. Their glorious efforts, winged with heavenly hopes, Each rising morning sees still higher rise; Each bounteous dawn its novelty presents To worth maturing, new strength, lustre, fame; While Nature’s circle, like a chariot wheel, Boiling beneath their elevated aims, Makes their fair prospect fairer every hour; Advancing virtue in a line to bliss.” Even here, where he is in his most amiable mood, you see at what a telescopic distance he stands from mother Earth and simple human joys—“Nature’s circle rolls beneath.” Indeed, we remember no mind in poetic literature that seems to have absorbed less of the beauty and the healthy breath of the common landscape than Young’s. His images, often grand and finely presented—witness that sublimely sudden leap of thought, “Embryos we must be till we burst the shell, _Yon ambient azure shell_, and spring to life”— lie almost entirely within that circle of observation which would be familiar to a man who lived in town, hung about the theatres, read the newspaper, and went home often by moon and starlight. There is no natural object nearer than the moon that seems to have any strong attraction for him, and even to the moon he chiefly appeals for patronage, and “pays his court” to her. It is reckoned among the many deficiencies of “Lorenzo” that he “never asked the moon one question”—an omission which Young thinks eminently unbecoming a rational being. He describes nothing so well as a comet, and is tempted to linger with fond detail over nothing more familiar than the day of judgment and an imaginary journey among the stars. Once on Saturn’s ring he feels at home, and his language becomes quite easy: “What behold I now? A wilderness of wonders burning round, Where larger suns inhabit higher spheres; Perhaps _the villas of descending gods_!” It is like a sudden relief from a strained posture when, in the “Night Thoughts,” we come on any allusion that carries us to the lanes, woods, or fields. Such allusions are amazingly rare, and we could almost count them on a single hand. That we may do him no injustice, we will quote the three best: “Like _blossom’d trees o’erturned by vernal storm_, Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay. * * * * *