to shine on for ever." We thought of the words of Peter, "All these things shall be dissolved." And then we fancied an invisible animalcule inhabiting one of the mountain peaks of a furnace, looking abroad from one of its surging spires, and saying, "This wondrous blaze is to burn for ever," and yet, ere a few hours have passed, the flame is sunk in ashes, and the animalcule is gone. So the Heavens shall pass away with a great noise. They shall perish, but Thou God remainest; nay, thou Man, too, art destined to survive this splendid nursery, and to enter on new Heavens and a new Earth! The argument of the "Night Thoughts" may be stated in general to be as follows:--It is to shew the vanity of man as mortal; to inculcate the lowness, misery, and madness of the sensual life; to prove the superiority of the Christian to the man of the world, both in life and in death, and the worthlessness of merely human friendship; to argue, from nature and reason, the truth of man's immortality; to shew the reasonableness of religion, and to inculcate the necessity of a divine revelation, and of a propitiatory sacrifice. That this argument is always steadily pursued, or logically pled, we do not pretend. It has its flaws;--we particularly demur to many of its proofs of the immortality of the soul, which seem to us very feeble and unsatisfactory; but, taking it as a whole, it is unanswerable and overwhelming. Its links are of red-hot iron; its appeals to the conscience are irresistible; and he who can read it with indifference, or rise from it unimpressed and unawed, must be either something worse or something less than man. It needs not to be surrounded by panegyrics. Convinced, purified, elevated, saved Souls, are the gems in its crown. We are inclined to believe that, in this aspect, the "Night Thoughts" has effected more practical good than the "Paradise Lost." The latter is a splendid picture; the former a searching, powerful sermon. Now, although pictures with a strong moral contained in them have often done much good, they want the point, emphasis, and effect of great sermons. You may gaze long enough at Milton with no feeling besides admiration of his genius; but in every page Young is grappling with your conscience, and saying, "Don't look at me, but look to yourself." Foster, one of the greatest of our practical reasoners on religion, has been much indebted to Young, whom he resembled also in the sombre grandeur of his genius. Young's imagery is distinguished by its richness, originality, and exceeding boldness. It was verily a new thing in that timid and conventional age. Like the imagery of all highest poets, it is selected alike from low and from lofty objects, from the gay and the gloomy, from stars and dunghills. His mind moves along through the poem like a great wheel, now descending and now ascending, easy to criticise, but impossible to resist. You may question the taste of many of his figures, such as that of the Sun--