In the “Last Day,” again, which is the earliest thing he wrote, we have an anticipation of all his greatest faults and merits. Conspicuous among the faults is that attempt to exalt our conceptions of Deity by vulgar images and comparisons, which is so offensive in the later “Night Thoughts.” In a burst of prayer and homage to God, called forth by the contemplation of Christ coming to judgment, he asks, Who brings the change of the seasons? and answers:
“Not the great Ottoman, or Greater Czar; Not Europe’s arbitress of peace and war!”
Conceive the soul in its most solemn moments, assuring God that it doesn’t place his power below that of Louis Napoleon or Queen Victoria!
But in the midst of uneasy rhymes, inappropriate imagery, vaulting sublimity that o’erleaps itself, and vulgar emotions, we have in this poem an occasional flash of genius, a touch of simple grandeur, which promises as much as Young ever achieved. Describing the on-coming of the dissolution of all things, he says:
“No sun in radiant glory shines on high; _No light but from the terrors of the sky_.”
“Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn Rous’d the broad front, and call’d the battle on.”
“And this for sin? Could I offend if I had never been? But still increas’d the senseless, happy mass, Flow’d in the stream, _or shiver’d in the grass_? Father of mercies! Why from silent earth Didst thou awake and curse me into birth? Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night, And make a thankless present of thy light? Push into being a reverse of Thee, And _animate a clod with misery_?”
But it is seldom in Young’s rhymed poems that the effect of a felicitous thought or image is not counteracted by our sense of the constraint he suffered from the necessities of rhyme—that “Gothic demon,” as he afterward called it, “which, modern poetry tasting, became mortal.” In relation to his own power, no one will question the truth of this dictum, that “blank verse is verse unfallen, uncurst; verse reclaimed, reinthroned in the true language of the gods; who never thundered nor suffered their Homer to thunder in rhyme.” His want of mastery in rhyme is especially a drawback on the effects of his Satires; for epigrams and witticisms are peculiarly susceptible to the intrusion of a superfluous word, or to an inversion which implies constraint. Here, even more than elsewhere, the art that conceals art is an absolute requisite, and to have a witticism presented to us in limping or cumbrous rhythm is as counteractive to any electrifying effect as to see the tentative grimaces by which a comedian prepares a grotesque countenance. We discern the process, instead of being startled by the result.