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,
Rolling 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"
