“This is the desert, this the solitude;
How populous, how vital is the grave!”
Joy died with the loved one:
“The disenchanted earth
Lost all her lustre. Where her glitt’ring towers?
Her golden mountains, where? All darkened down
To naked waste; a dreary vale of tears:
The great magician’s dead!”
Under the pang of parting, it seems to the bereaved man as if love were only a nerve to suffer with, and he sickens at the thought of every joy of which he must one day say – “it was.” In its unreasoning anguish, the soul rushes to the idea of perpetuity as the one element of bliss:
“O ye blest scenes of permanent delight! —
Could ye, so rich in rapture, fear an end, —
That ghastly thought would drink up all your joy,
And quite unparadise the realms of light.”
In a man under the immediate pressure of a great sorrow, we tolerate morbid exaggerations; we are prepared to see him turn away a weary eye from sunlight and flowers and sweet human faces, as if this rich and glorious life had no significance but as a preliminary of death; we do not criticise his views, we compassionate his feelings. And so it is with Young in these earlier Nights. There is already some artificiality even in his grief, and feeling often slides into rhetoric, but through it all we are thrilled with the unmistakable cry of pain, which makes us tolerant of egoism and hyperbole:
“In every varied posture, place, and hour,
How widow’d every thought of every joy!
Thought, busy thought! too busy for my peace!
Through the dark postern of time long elapsed
Led softly, by the stillness of the night, —
Led like a murderer (and such it proves!)
Strays (wretched rover!) o’er the pleasing past, —
In quest of wretchedness, perversely strays;
And finds all desert now; and meets the ghosts
Of my departed joys.”
But when he becomes didactic, rather than complaining – when he ceases to sing his sorrows, and begins to insist on his opinions – when that distaste for life which we pity as a transient feeling is thrust upon us as a theory, we become perfectly cool and critical, and are not in the least inclined to be indulgent to false views and selfish sentiments.
Seeing that we are about to be severe on Young’s failings and failures, we ought, if a reviewer’s space were elastic, to dwell also on his merits – on the startling vigor of his imagery – on the occasional grandeur of his thought – on the piquant force of that grave satire into which his meditations continually run. But, since our “limits” are rigorous, we must content ourselves with the less agreeable half of the critic’s duty; and we may the rather do so, because it would be difficult to say anything new of Young, in the way of admiration, while we think there are many salutary lessons remaining to be drawn from his faults.
One of the most striking characteristics of Young is his radical insincerity as a poetic artist. This, added to the thin and artificial texture of his wit, is the true explanation of the paradox – that a poet who is often inopportunely witty has the opposite vice of bombastic absurdity. The source of all grandiloquence is the want of taking for a criterion the true qualities of the object described or the emotion expressed. The grandiloquent man is never bent on saying what he feels or what he sees, but on producing a certain effect on his audience; hence he may float away into utter inanity without meeting any criterion to arrest him. Here lies the distinction between grandiloquence and genuine fancy or bold imaginativeness. The fantastic or the boldly imaginative poet may be as sincere as the most realistic: he is true to his own sensibilities or inward vision, and in his wildest flights he never breaks loose from his criterion – the truth of his own mental state. Now, this disruption of language from genuine thought and feeling is what we are constantly detecting in Young; and his insincerity is the more likely to betray him into absurdity, because he habitually treats of abstractions, and not of concrete objects or specific emotions. He descants perpetually on virtue, religion, “the good man,” life, death, immortality, eternity – subjects which are apt to give a factitious grandeur to empty wordiness. When a poet floats in the empyrean, and only takes a bird’s-eye view of the earth, some people accept the mere fact of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth for proximity to heaven. Thus:
“His hand the good man fixes on the skies,
And bids earth roll, nor feels her idle whirl,”
may, perhaps, pass for sublime with some readers. But pause a moment to realize the image, and the monstrous absurdity of a man’s grasping the skies, and hanging habitually suspended there, while he contemptuously bids the earth roll, warns you that no genuine feeling could have suggested so unnatural a conception. Again,
“See the man immortal: him, I mean,
Who lives as such; whose heart, full bent on Heaven,
Leans all that way, his bias to the stars.”
This is worse than the previous example: for you can at least form some imperfect conception of a man hanging from the skies, though the position strikes you as uncomfortable and of no particular use; but you are utterly unable to imagine how his heart can lean toward the stars. Examples of such vicious imagery, resulting from insincerity, may be found, perhaps, in almost every page of the “Night Thoughts.” But simple assertions or aspirations, undisguised by imagery, are often equally false. No writer whose rhetoric was checked by the slightest truthful intentions could have said —
“An eye of awe and wonder let me roll,
And roll forever.”
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 torn, 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.”
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.
* * * * *
“In the same brook none ever bathed him twice:
To the same life none ever twice awoke.
We call the brook the same – the same we think
Our life, though still more rapid in its flow;
Nor mark the much irrevocably lapsed
And mingled with the sea.”
* * * * *
“The crown of manhood is a winter joy;
An evergreen that stands the northern blast,
And blossoms in the rigor of our fate.”
The adherence to abstractions, or to the personification of abstractions, is closely allied in Young to the want of genuine emotion. He sees virtue sitting on a mount serene, far above the mists and storms of earth; he sees Religion coming down from the skies, with this world in her left hand and the other world in her right; but we never find him dwelling on virtue or religion as it really exists – in the emotions of a man dressed in an ordinary coat, and seated by his fireside of an evening, with his hand resting on the head of his little daughter, in courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the internal triumph of justice and pity over personal resentment, in all the sublime self-renunciation and sweet charities which are found in the details of ordinary life. Now, emotion links itself with particulars, and only in a faint and secondary manner with abstractions. An orator may discourse very eloquently on injustice in general, and leave his audience cold; but let him state a special case of oppression, and every heart will throb. The most untheoretic persons are aware of this relation between true emotion and particular facts, as opposed to general terms, and implicitly recognize it in the repulsion they feel toward any one who professes strong feeling about abstractions – in the interjectional “Humbug!” which immediately rises to their lips. Wherever abstractions appear to excite strong emotion, this occurs in men of active intellect and imagination, in whom the abstract term rapidly and vividly calls up the particulars it represents, these particulars being the true source of the emotion; and such men, if they wished to express their feeling, would be infallibly prompted to the presentation of details. Strong emotion can no more be directed to generalities apart from particulars, than skill in figures can be directed to arithmetic apart from numbers. Generalities are the refuge at once of deficient intellectual activity and deficient feeling.
If we except the passages in “Philander,” “Narcissa,” and “Lucia,” there is hardly a trace of human sympathy, of self-forgetfulness in the joy or sorrow of a fellow-being, throughout this long poem, which professes to treat the various phases of man’s destiny. And even in the “Narcissa” Night, Young repels us by the low moral tone of his exaggerated lament. This married step-daughter died at Lyons, and, being a Protestant, was denied burial, so that her friends had to bury her in secret – one of the many miserable results of superstition, but not a fact to throw an educated, still less a Christian man, into a fury of hatred and vengeance, in contemplating it after the lapse of five years. Young, however, takes great pains to simulate a bad feeling:
“Of grief
And indignation rival bursts I pour’d,
Half execration mingled with my pray’r;
Kindled at man, while I his God adored;
Sore grudg’d the savage land her sacred dust;
Stamp’d the cursed soil; and with humanity
(Denied Narcissa) wish’d them all a grave.”
The odiously bad taste of this last clause makes us hope that it is simply a platitude, and not intended as witticism, until he removes the possibility of this favorable doubt by immediately asking, “Flows my resentment into guilt?”
When, by an afterthought, he attempts something like sympathy, he only betrays more clearly his want of it. Thus, in the first Night, when he turns from his private griefs to depict earth as a hideous abode of misery for all mankind, and asks,
“What then am I, who sorrow for myself?”
he falls at once into calculating the benefit of sorrowing for others:
“More generous sorrow, while it sinks, exalts;
And conscious virtue mitigates the pang.
Nor virtue, more than prudence, bids me give
Swollen thought a second channel.”
This remarkable negation of sympathy is in perfect consistency with Young’s theory of ethics:
“Virtue is a crime,
A crime of reason, if it costs us pain
Unpaid.”
If there is no immortality for man —
“Sense! take the rein; blind Passion, drive us on;
And Ignorance! befriend us on our way..
Yes; give the pulse full empire; live the Brute,
Since as the brute we die. The sum of man,
Of godlike man, to revel and to rot.”
* * * * *
“If this life’s gain invites him to the deed,
Why not his country sold, his father slain?”
* * * * *
“Ambition, avarice, by the wise disdain’d,
Is perfect wisdom, while mankind are fools,
And think a turf or tombstone covers all.”
* * * * *
“Die for thy country, thou romantic fool!
Seize, seize the plank thyself, and let her sink.”
* * * * *
“As in the dying parent dies the child,
Virtue with Immortality expires.
Who tells me he denies his soul immortal,
Whate’er his boost, has told me he’s a knave.
His duty ’tis to love himself alone.
Nor care though mankind perish if he smiles.”
We can imagine the man who “denies his soul immortal,” replying, “It is quite possible that you would be a knave, and love yourself alone, if it were not for your belief in immortality; but you are not to force upon me what would result from your own utter want of moral emotion. I am just and honest, not because I expect to live in another world, but because, having felt the pain of injustice and dishonesty toward myself, I have a fellow-feeling with other men, who would suffer the same pain if I were unjust or dishonest toward them. Why should I give my neighbor short weight in this world, because there is not another world in which I should have nothing to weigh out to him? I am honest, because I don’t like to inflict evil on others in this life, not because I’m afraid of evil to myself in another. The fact is, I do not love myself alone, whatever logical necessity there may be for that in your mind. I have a tender love for my wife, and children, and friends, and through that love I sympathize with like affections in other men. It is a pang to me to witness the sufferings of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffering the more acutely because he is mortal– because his life is so short, and I would have it, if possible, filled with happiness and not misery. Through my union and fellowship with the men and women I have seen, I feel a like, though a fainter, sympathy with those I have not seen; and I am able so to live in imagination with the generations to come, that their good is not alien to me, and is a stimulus to me to labor for ends which may not benefit myself, but will benefit them. It is possible that you may prefer to ‘live the brute,’ to sell your country, or to slay your father, if you were not afraid of some disagreeable consequences from the criminal laws of another world; but even if I could conceive no motive but my own worldly interest or the gratification of my animal desire, I have not observed that beastliness, treachery, and parricide are the direct way to happiness and comfort on earth. And I should say, that if you feel no motive to common morality but your fear of a criminal bar in heaven, you are decidedly a man for the police on earth to keep their eye upon, since it is matter of world-old experience that fear of distant consequences is a very insufficient barrier against the rush of immediate desire. Fear of consequences is only one form of egoism, which will hardly stand against half a dozen other forms of egoism bearing down upon it. And in opposition to your theory that a belief in immortality is the only source of virtue, I maintain that, so far as moral action is dependent on that belief, so far the emotion which prompts it is not truly moral – is still in the stage of egoism, and has not yet attained the higher development of sympathy. In proportion as a man would care less for the rights and welfare of his fellow, if he did not believe in a future life, in that proportion is he wanting in the genuine feelings of justice and benevolence; as the musician who would care less to play a sonata of Beethoven’s finely in solitude than in public, where he was to be paid for it, is wanting in genuine enthusiasm for music.”
Thus far might answer the man who “denies himself immortal;” and, allowing for that deficient recognition of the finer and more indirect influences exercised by the idea of immortality which might be expected from one who took up a dogmatic position on such a subject, we think he would have given a sufficient reply to Young and other theological advocates who, like him, pique themselves on the loftiness of their doctrine when they maintain that “virtue with immortality expires.” We may admit, indeed, that if the better part of virtue consists, as Young appears to think, in contempt for mortal joys, in “meditation of our own decease,” and in “applause” of God in the style of a congratulatory address to Her Majesty – all which has small relation to the well-being of mankind on this earth – the motive to it must be gathered from something that lies quite outside the sphere of human sympathy. But, for certain other elements of virtue, which are of more obvious importance to untheological minds – a delicate sense of our neighbor’s rights, an active participation in the joys and sorrows of our fellow-men, a magnanimous acceptance of privation or suffering for ourselves when it is the condition of good to others, in a word, the extension and intensification of our sympathetic nature – we think it of some importance to contend that they have no more direct relation to the belief in a future state than the interchange of gases in the lungs has to the plurality of worlds. Nay, to us it is conceivable that in some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human mortality – that we are here for a little while and then vanish away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones and to our many suffering fellow-men – lies nearer the fountains of moral emotion than the conception of extended existence. And surely it ought to be a welcome fact, if the thought of mortality, as well as of immortality, be favorable to virtue. Do writers of sermons and religious novels prefer that men should be vicious in order that there may be a more evident political and social necessity for printed sermons and clerical fictions? Because learned gentlemen are theological, are we to have no more simple honesty and good-will? We can imagine that the proprietors of a patent water-supply have a dread of common springs; but, for our own part, we think there cannot be too great a security against a lack of fresh water or of pure morality. To us it is a matter of unmixed rejoicing that this latter necessary of healthful life is independent of theological ink, and that its evolution is insured in the interaction of human souls as certainly as the evolution of science or of art, with which, indeed, it is but a twin ray, melting into them with undefinable limits.
To return to Young. We can often detect a man’s deficiencies in what he admires more clearly than in what he contemns – in the sentiments he presents as laudable rather than in those he decries. And in Young’s notion of what is lofty he casts a shadow by which we can measure him without further trouble. For example, in arguing for human immortality, he says:
“First, what is true ambition? The pursuit
Of glory nothing less than man can share.
* * * *
The Visible and Present are for brutes,
A slender portion, and a narrow bound!
These Reason, with an energy divine,
O’erleaps, and claims the Future and Unseen;
The vast Unseen, the Future fathomless!
When the great soul buoys up to this high point,
Leaving gross Nature’s sediments below,
Then, and then only, Adam’s offspring quits
The sage and hero of the fields and woods,
Asserts his rank, and rises into man.”
So, then, if it were certified that, as some benevolent minds have tried to infer, our dumb fellow-creatures would share a future existence, in which it is to be hoped we should neither beat, starve, nor maim them, our ambition for a future life would cease to be “lofty!” This is a notion of loftiness which may pair off with Dr. Whewell’s celebrated observation, that Bentham’s moral theory is low because it includes justice and mercy to brutes.
But, for a reflection of Young’s moral personality on a colossal scale, we must turn to those passages where his rhetoric is at its utmost stretch of inflation – where he addresses the Deity, discourses of the Divine operations, or describes the last judgment. As a compound of vulgar pomp, crawling adulation, and hard selfishness, presented under the guise of piety, there are few things in literature to surpass the Ninth Night, entitled “Consolation,” especially in the pages where he describes the last judgment – a subject to which, with naïve self-betrayal, he applies phraseology, favored by the exuberant penny-a-liner. Thus, when God descends, and the groans of hell are opposed by “shouts of joy,” much as cheers and groans contend at a public meeting where the resolutions are not passed unanimously, the poet completes his climax in this way:
“Hence, in one peal of loud, eternal praise,
The charmed spectators thunder their applause.”
In the same taste he sings:
“Eternity, the various sentence past,
Assigns the sever’d throng distinct abodes,
Sulphureous or ambrosial.”
Exquisite delicacy of indication! He is too nice to be specific as to the interior of the “sulphureous” abode; but when once half the human race are shut up there, hear how he enjoys turning the key on them!
“What ensues?
The deed predominant, the deed of deeds!
Which makes a hell of hell, a heaven of heaven!
The goddess, with determin’d aspect turns
Her adamantine key’s enormous size
Through Destiny’s inextricable wards,
Deep driving every bolt on both their fates.
Then, from the crystal battlements of heaven,
Down, down she hurls it through the dark profound,
Ten thousand, thousand fathom; there to rust
And ne’er unlock her resolution more.
The deep resounds; and Hell, through all her glooms,
Returns, in groans, the melancholy roar.”
This is one of the blessings for which Dr. Young thanks God “most:”
“For all I bless thee, most, for the severe;
Her death – my own at hand —the fiery gulf,
That flaming bound of wrath omnipotent!
It thunders; —but it thunders to preserve;
.. its wholesome dread
Averts the dreaded pain; its hideous groans
Join Heaven’s sweet Hallelujahs in Thy praise,
Great Source of good alone! How kind in all!
In vengeance kind! Pain, Death, Gehenna, save”.
i. e., save me, Dr. Young, who, in return for that favor, promise to give my divine patron the monopoly of that exuberance in laudatory epithet, of which specimens may be seen at any moment in a large number of dedications and odes to kings, queens, prime ministers, and other persons of distinction. That, in Young’s conception, is what God delights in. His crowning aim in the “drama” of the ages, is to vindicate his own renown. The God of the “Night Thoughts” is simply Young himself “writ large” – a didactic poet, who “lectures” mankind in the antithetic hyperbole of mortal and immortal joys, earth and the stars, hell and heaven; and expects the tribute of inexhaustible “applause.” Young has no conception of religion as anything else than egoism turned heavenward; and he does not merely imply this, he insists on it. Religion, he tells us, in argumentative passages too long to quote, is “ambition, pleasure, and the love of gain,” directed toward the joys of the future life instead of the present. And his ethics correspond to his religion. He vacillates, indeed, in his ethical theory, and shifts his position in order to suit his immediate purpose in argument; but he never changes his level so as to see beyond the horizon of mere selfishness. Sometimes he insists, as we have seen, that the belief in a future life is the only basis of morality; but elsewhere he tells us —
“In self-applause is virtue’s golden prize.”
Virtue, with Young, must always squint – must never look straight toward the immediate object of its emotion and effort. Thus, if a man risks perishing in the snow himself rather than forsake a weaker comrade, he must either do this because his hopes and fears are directed to another world, or because he desires to applaud himself afterward! Young, if we may believe him, would despise the action as folly unless it had these motives. Let us hope he was not so bad as he pretended to be! The tides of the divine life in man move under the thickest ice of theory.
Another indication of Young’s deficiency in moral, i. e., in sympathetic emotion, is his unintermitting habit of pedagogic moralizing. On its theoretic and perceptive side, morality touches science; on its emotional side, Art. Now, the products of Art are great in proportion as they result from that immediate prompting of innate power which we call Genius, and not from labored obedience to a theory or rule; and the presence of genius or innate prompting is directly opposed to the perpetual consciousness of a rule. The action of faculty is imperious, and excludes the reflection why it should act. In the same way, in proportion as morality is emotional, i. e., has affinity with Art, it will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic feeling and action, and not as the recognition of a rule. Love does not say, “I ought to love” – it loves. Pity does not say, “It is right to be pitiful” – it pities. Justice does not say, “I am bound to be just” – it feels justly. It is only where moral emotion is comparatively weak that the contemplation of a rule or theory habitually mingles with its action; and in accordance with this, we think experience, both in literature and life, has shown that the minds which are pre-eminently didactic – which insist on a “lesson,” and despise everything that will not convey a moral, are deficient in sympathetic emotion. A certain poet is recorded to have said that he “wished everything of his burned that did not impress some moral; even in love-verses, it might be flung in by the way.” What poet was it who took this medicinal view of poetry? Dr. Watts, or James Montgomery, or some other singer of spotless life and ardent piety? Not at all. It was Waller. A significant fact in relation to our position, that the predominant didactic tendency proceeds rather from the poet’s perception that it is good for other men to be moral, than from any overflow of moral feeling in himself. A man who is perpetually thinking in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of admonition, can have little energy left for simple emotion. And this is the case with Young. In his highest flights of contemplation and his most wailing soliloquies he interrupts himself to fling an admonitory parenthesis at “Lorenzo,” or to hint that “folly’s creed” is the reverse of his own. Before his thoughts can flow, he must fix his eye on an imaginary miscreant, who gives unlimited scope for lecturing, and recriminates just enough to keep the spring of admonition and argument going to the extent of nine books. It is curious to see how this pedagogic habit of mind runs through Young’s contemplation of Nature. As the tendency to see our own sadness reflected in the external world has been called by Mr. Ruskin the “pathetic fallacy,” so we may call Young’s disposition to see a rebuke or a warning in every natural object, the “pedagogic fallacy.” To his mind, the heavens are “forever scolding as they shine;” and the great function of the stars is to be a “lecture to mankind.” The conception of the Deity as a didactic author is not merely an implicit point of view with him; he works it out in elaborate imagery, and at length makes it the occasion of his most extraordinary achievement in the “art of sinking,” by exclaiming, à propos, we need hardly say, of the nocturnal heavens,