"The world's infectious; few bring back at eve, Immaculate, the manners of the morn."

"How wretched is the man who never mourned."

"Truth shows the real estimate of things, Which no man, unafflicted, ever saw."

"But some reject this sustenance divine;

To beggarly vile appetites descend;

Ask alms of earth for guests that come from heaven."

"Irrationals all sorrow are beneath,

That noble gift! that privilege to man."

Early, bright, transient, chaste, as morning dew,

She sparkled, was exhaled, and went to heaven."

"Like damaged clocks, whose hand and bell dissent, Folly rings six while nature points at twelve."

"Like our shadows,

Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines."

"Age should...........

Walk thoughtful on the silent, solemn shore
Of that vast ocean it must sail so soon."

"Our needful knowledge, like our needful food,
Unhedged lies open in life's common field;
And bids all welcome to the vital feast."

"Like other tyrants, Death delights to smite,
What, smitten, most proclaims the pride of power,
And arbitrary nod. His joy supreme

To bid the wretch survive the fortunate;

The feeble wrap the athletic in his shroud;

And weeping fathers build their children's tomb.
Me thine, Narcissa."

"Our morning's envy, and our evening's sigh."

"Man's lawful pride includes humility;
Stoops to the lowest; is too great to find
Inferiors; all immortal, brothers all !
Proprietors eternal of thy love."

"Who lives to Nature never can be poor;
Who lives to fancy never can be rich."

Resolve me why the Cottager and King,
He who sea-served realms obey, and he
Who steals his whole dominion from the waste,
Repelling winter blasts with mud and straw,
Disquieted alike, draw sigh for sigh,

In fate so instant, in complaint so near?"

"His grief is but his grandeur in disguise; And discontent is immortality."

Man's misery declares him born for bliss.” "If man can't mount, He will descend-he starves on the possest."

"Shall we, this moment, gaze on God in man? The next, lose man for ever in the dust ?"

"Heaven starts at an annihilating God."

"And without breathing, man as well might hope
For life, as without piety, for peace."

"The house of laughter makes a house of wo."
"Is it greater pain

Our soul should murmur, or our dust repine ?"

"Could human courts take vengeance on the mind,
Axes might rust, and racks and gibbets fall.
Guard, then, thy mind, and leave the rest to fate."
"Though tempest frowns,
Though nature shakes, how soft to lean on Heaven!
To lean on Him on whom Archangels lean!
With inward eyes, and silent as the grave,
They stand reflecting every beam of thought,
Till their hearts kindle with divine delight;
For all their thoughts, like angels, seen of old
In Israel's dream, come from and go to Heaven."
"Patience and resignation are the pillars

Of human peace on earth."

"Some joys the future overcast, and some

Throw all their beams that way, and gild the tomb."

Ah! dear Thomas Campbell! Thou

"I will thank you in the grave."

hast dealt our scant and scrimp praise But Silence and Darkness are but the to the Bard of Night-but it was of such lines as these that thou said'st

angels of God. And the Poet, inwith thy native felicity, "he has inspired by them, ventures another in

dividual passages which Philosophy might make her texts, and experience select for her mottos."

Gloomy indeed! Is not the Poem called "The Complaint?" If "Night Thoughts" are not gloomy-then nothing is gloomy on this side of the grave. There is a Poem, you know, called "The Grave," and a noble one" Gloomy it stood as Night." Who? Death.

We have been familiar with Young's Night Thoughts from boyhood-and half a century ago the volume was to be seen lying-with a few others of kindred spirit-beside the Holiest-in many a cottage in the loneliest places in Scotland. The dwellers there were grave-not gloomy-but they loved to look into deep waters, which, though clear, are black because of their depth and their overshadowings-yet show the stars.

"Silence and Darkness! solemn sisters! twins

From ancient Night, who nurse the ten-
der thought,

To reason, and on reason build resolve,
That column of true majesty in man,
Assist me!"

To sing a cheerful song-a merry
roundelay? No such a song as may
help to save his soul alive-the souls
of some-many-of his brethren-and
if the Powers he invokes do hear-

vocation

Young, they say, was a disappointed man, and was world-sick because of unsuccessful ambition. Well he might be-for his talents, learning, eloquence, genius, and virtue, ought to have elevated him to a conspicuous station in the Church. But has he pictured the world worse than it is? Nor is it of the world-in the vulgar sense-that he sings-though with a bitter scorn he sometimes exposes its follies and its mockeries. His poem is "Of man, of nature, and of human life".as they are by the necessity of their being-and who can blacken beyond the truth the character of sin and guilt "that makes the nature's groan?" We are not among the number of those, who from "golden urns draw light," and then make a display of their borrowed lustre-an audacious trick of many a mean-spirited thief, imagining that the world will admire his head as if it shone like that of Christopher among the Mountains, while children, at first scared by the glimmer in the hedge, soon scorn the illuminated turnip. We steal from no

bert Croft, the frog, that, with that bull in his eye, putted himself up till he realized the fable. Thomas Campbell somehow or other missed it-the only miss he ever made-and when one poet goes wrong about another, he is neither to "haud nor to bin"," and flings the stones and gravel from his heels in a style that shows it would be the height of imprudence to attempt to follow. Bulwer alone has written worthily about "one among the highest, but not the most popular of his Country's Poets." And with a crowquill delicately nibbed by Mrs. Gentle, two years ago, we copied in our Oberonic calligraphy, on the fly-leaf of this our Diamond Edition, this fine and philosophic criticism from "The

Student."

"Standing upon the grave—the creations of two worlds are round him, and the grey hairs of the mourn er become touched with the halo of the prophet. It is the time and spot he has chosen wherein to teach us, that dignify and consecrate the lesson: it is not the mere human and earthly moral that gathers on his tongue. The conception hallows the work, and sustains its own majesty in every change and wandering of the verse. And there is this greatness in his theme-dark, terrible, severeHope never deserts it! It is a deep and gloomy wave, but the stars are glassed upon its bosom. The more sternly he questions the World, the more solemnly he refers its answer to Heaven. Our bane and antidote are both before him; and he only arraigns the things of Time before the It is this, which, tribunal of Eternity. to men whom grief or approaching death can divest of the love and han

kerings of the world, leaves the great monitor his majesty, but deprives him of his gloom. Convinced with him of the vanities of life, it is not an ungracious or unsoothing melancholy "But like Prometheus draw the fire which confirms us in our conviction,

man

from Heaven."

But at times we delight to borrow from the rich-that, by scattering the treasure abroad, we may exalt the fame of its creator and owner, and thereby enlarge the sphere of his empire, and increase the number of his subjects. Who has written on the genius of Young? Johnson-poorly -very very poorly indeed; and Her

and points with a steady hand to the divine SOMETHING that awaits us beyond;

The darkness aiding intellectual light, And sacred silence whispering truths di vine,

And truths divine converting pain to peace.'

"I know not whether I should say too much of this great poem if I should

6

call it a fit Appendix to the Paradise Lost.' It is the Consolation to that Complaint. Imagine the ages to have rolled by since our first parents gave earth to their offspring, who sealed the gift with blood, and bequeathed it to us with toil:-imagine, after all that experience can teach-after the hoarded wisdom and the increasing pomp of countless generations-an old man, one of that exiled and fallen race, standing among the tombs of his ancestors, telling us their whole history, in his appeals to the living heart, and holding out to us, with trembling hands, the only comfort which earth has yet discovered for its cares and sores the anticipation of Heaven! To me, that picture completes all that Milton began. It sums up the human history, whose first chapter he had chronicled ; it preacheth the great issues of the Fall; it shows that the burning light then breathed into the soul, lives there still; it consummates the mysterious record of our mortal sadness and our everlasting hope. But if the conception of the Night Thoughts' be great, it is also uniform and sustained. The vast wings of the

inspiration never slacken or grow fatigued. Even the humours and conceits are of a piece with the solemnity of the poem-like the grotesque masks carved on the walls of a cathedral, which defy the strict laws of taste, and almost inexplicably harmonise with the whole. The sorrow, too, of the poet is not egotistical, or weak in its repining. It is the great one sorrow common to all human nature-the deep and wise regret that springs from an intimate knowledge of our being, and the scene in which it has been cast. That same knowledge, operating on various minds, produces various results. In Voltaire it sparkled into wit; in Goethe, it deepened into a humour that belongs to the sublime; in Young it generated the same high and profound melancholy as that which excited the inspirations of the Son of Sirach, and the soundest portion of the philosophy of Plato."

Here is a passage that itself justifies even such an eulogy-for where is its superior-we had almost said its equal either in poetry or philosophythroughout the whole range of the creation of English genius?

"How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful is man!
How passing wonder HE who made him such!
Who centred in our make such strange extremes!
From different natures marvellously mix'd,
Connection exquisite of distant worlds!
Distinguish'd link in being's endless chain!
Midway from nothing to the Deity!
A beam etherial, sullied and absorb'd!
Though sullied and dishonour'd, still divine!
Dim miniature of greatness absolute!
An heir of glory! a frail child of dust!
Helpless immortal! insect infinite!
A worm! a god! I tremble at myself,
And in myself am lost! At home a stranger,
Thought wanders up and down, surprised, aghast,
And wondering at her own: how reason reels!
Oh, what a miracle to man is man,

Triumphantly distress'd! what joy, what dread!
Alternately transported, and alarm'd!
What can preserve my life? or what destroy?
An angel's arm can't snatch me from the grave;
Legions of angels can't confine me there.

"Tis past conjecture; all things rise in proof,
While o'er my limbs sleep's soft dominion spreads.
What though my soul fantastic measures trod
O'er fairy fields; or mourn'd along the gloom
Of pathless woods; or down the craggy steep
Hurl'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool;
Or scaled the cliff, or danced on hollow winds,
With antic shapes, wild natives of the brain?
Her ceaseless flight, though devious, speaks her nature

Of subtler essence than the trodden clod;
Active, aerial, towering, unconfined,
Unfetter'd with her gross companion's fall.
Even silent night proclaims my soul immortal:
Even silent night proclaims eternal day.

For human weal, Heaven husbands all events:
Dull sleep instructs, nor sport vain dreams in vain."