Young's Night Thoughts: With Life, Critical Dissertation and Explanatory NotesYoung, Edward
Philosophy
Young's Night Thoughts: With Life, Critical Dissertation and Explanatory Notes
Young, Edward
Didactic poetry, English; English poetry
We are far from contending that Young has exhausted the poetry of the
theme. Since his time the telescopes of Herschell and Lord Rosse have
been turned to the skies, and have greatly extended the size and
splendour of that vast midnight Apparition--the starry scheme. Our recent
poets have availed themselves of these discoveries, as witness the
eloquent rhapsodies about the stars by Bailey, A. Smith, and Bigg. And
there is even yet room for another great poem on the subject, entitled
"Night," were the author come. But Young deserves praise for the
following things:--
_1st_, He has nobly sung the magnitude and unutterable glory of the
starry hosts. His soul kindles, triumphs, exults under the midnight
canopy. As the Tartar horse when led forth from his stable to the free
steppes and free firmament of the desert, bounds, prances, and caracoles
for joy, so does Young, in the last part of his poem. Escaped from dark
and mournful contemplations on Man, Death, Infidelity, and Earth's
"melancholy map," he sees the stars like bright milestones on the way to
heaven, and his spirit is glad within him, and tumultuous is the
grandeur, and fierce and rapid the torrent, of his song.
_2dly_, He has brought out, better than any other poet, the religion of
the stars. "Night," says Isaac Taylor, "has three daughters, Atheism,
Superstition, and Religion." Following out this fine thought, we see
Atheism looking up with impudent eye, brazen brow, and naked figure, to
the midnight sky, as if it were only a huge toy-shop of glittering
gew-gaws; Superstition shrouding herself in a black mantle, and falling
down prostrate and trembling before these innumerable fires, as if they
were the eyes of an infinite enemy; while Religion turns aloft her
humble, yet fearless form, her tear-trembling yet radiant visage, and
murmurs, "My Father made them all." Young, we need scarcely say, finds in
the nocturnal heavens lessons neither of Atheism nor of Superstition, but
of Religion, and reads in the face of Old Night her divine origin, the
witness she bears to the existence of God, her dependence upon her
Author, and her subordination to His purposes. He had magnified, as
Newton himself could not so eloquently have done, the extent of the
universe; and yet his loyalty to Scripture compels him to intimate that
this system, so far from being God, or infinite, or, strictly speaking,
Divine, is to perish and pass away. One look from the angry Judge, one
uplifting of His rod, and its voluminous waves of glory, like another Red
Sea, are to be dried up, that the people of God may pass through and
enter on the land of the real Immortality, the "inheritance
incorruptible, undefiled, and that shall never fade away." We refer our
readers to that most eloquent picture, near the beginning of the Ninth
Night, of the Last Day. We once heard a lecturer on chemistry close a
superb description of the material universe, with the words, "And it is
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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