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 bid from the terrors of the sky."
And again, speaking of great armies:
"Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn
Rous' d the broad front, and call'd the battle on."
And this wail of the lost souls is fine:
"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 else-
