The poem demands a brief critical consideration as to its _season_, its _argument_, its _imagery_, its _style_, its _versification_, its _comparative place_ and _merit_, and, lastly, the _genius_ of its author. First, of its _season_--the Night--and the use to which he turns it. Night had never before found a worthy laureate. Its profound silence, as if it were listening to catch the accents of some supernal voice--the shadowy grandeur and mysterious newness it gives to objects on the earth--the divine hues into which its moon discolours all things--the deep sleep which then falleth upon men, and changes the world into one hushed grave--the supernatural shapes and mystic sounds which have been supposed to walk in its darkness, or to echo through its depths--the voices scarce less solemn, which often break its silence, of howling winds, and wailing rivers, and shrieking tempests, and groaning thunders, and the wild cries of human misery and despair--and last and highest, its withdrawal of the bright mist and mantle of day from the starry universe, and the pomp with which it unrols and exhibits its "great map" of suns and systems--its silvery satellites--its meek planets, each shining in its own degree of reflected splendour--its oceans of original and ever-burning fire called suns--its comets, those serpents of the sky, trailing their vast volumes of deadly glory through the shuddering system--its fantastic and magnificent shapes and collocations of stars, the constellations--its firmaments rising above firmaments, like rounds in a ladder, at the top of which is the throne of God--and those two awful arms into which its Milky Way diverges, and which seem uplifted to heaven in silent prayer, or in some deep and dread protest,--all these elements of interest and grandeur had existed from the beginning of the world in Night, and yet had never, till Young arose, awakened any consecutive and lofty strain of poetic adoration. Many beautiful and many sublime sentiments had been uttered by poets about particular features of Night, but there had been no attempt to represent it as a whole. There were many single thoughts, but no large and sounding Hymn. The views of the Pagan poets about astronomy were, of course, warped by the absurd systems of their day; and this served to damp their fire, and to render their poetic tributes rather fantastic than truly powerful. Even Dante and Milton are somewhat embarrassed by the Ptolemaic system, although it proves the strength of their genius that they have extracted so much poetry from it. But before Young arose, "Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night; God said, Let Newton be, and all was light;" and he has set the Newtonian system to his own martial music.