It would be extremely ill-bred in us to suppose that our readers are not acquainted with the facts of Young’s life; they are among the things that “every one knows;” but we have observed that, with regard to these universally known matters, the majority of readers like to be treated after the plan suggested by Monsieur Jourdain. When that distinguished48 bourgeois49 was asked if he knew Latin, he implied, “Oui, mais fa?tes comme si je ne le savais pas.” Assuming, then, as a polite writer should, that our readers know everything about Young, it will be a direct sequitur from that assumption that we should proceed as if they knew nothing, and recall the incidents of his biography with as much particularity as we may without trenching on the space we shall need for our main purpose—the reconsideration of his character as a moral and religious poet.
Judging from Young’s works, one might imagine that the preacher had been organized in him by hereditary50 transmission through a long line of clerical forefathers—that the diamonds of the “Night Thoughts” had been slowly condensed from the charcoal51 of ancestral sermons. Yet it was not so. His grandfather, apparently52, wrote himself gentleman, not clerk; and there is no evidence that preaching had run in the family blood before it took that turn in the person of the poet’s father, who was quadruply clerical, being at once rector, prebendary, court chaplain, and dean. Young was born at his father’s rectory of Upham in 1681. We may confidently assume that even the author of the “Night Thoughts” came into the world without a wig53; but, apart from Dr. Doran’s authority, we should not have ventured to state that the excellent rector “kissed, with dignified54 emotion, his only son and intended namesake.” Dr. Doran doubtless knows this, from his intimate acquaintance with clerical physiology55 and psychology56. He has ascertained57 that the paternal58 emotions of prebendaries have a sacerdotal p. 208quality, and that the very chyme and chyle of a rector are conscious of the gown and band.
In due time the boy went to Winchester College, and subsequently, though not till he was twenty-two, to Oxford59, where, for his father’s sake, he was befriended by the wardens60 of two colleges, and in 1708, three years after his father’s death, nominated by Archbishop Tenison to a law fellowship at All Souls. Of Young’s life at Oxford in these years, hardly anything is known. His biographer, Croft, has nothing to tell us but the vague report that, when “Young found himself independent and his own master at All Souls, he was not the ornament to religion and morality that he afterward62 became,” and the perhaps apocryphal63 anecdote64, that Tindal, the atheist65, confessed himself embarrassed by the originality66 of Young’s arguments. Both the report and the anecdote, however, are borne out by indirect evidence. As to the latter, Young has left us sufficient proof that he was fond of arguing on the theological side, and that he had his own way of treating old subjects. As to the former, we learn that Pope, after saying other things which we know to be true of Young, added, that he passed “a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets;” and, from all the indications we possess of his career till he was nearly fifty, we are inclined to think that Pope’s statement only errs67 by defect, and that he should rather have said, “a foolish youth and middle age.” It is not likely that Young was a very hard student, for he impressed Johnson, who saw him in his old age, as “not a great scholar,” and as surprisingly ignorant of what Johnson thought “quite common maxims” in literature; and there is no evidence that he filled either his leisure or his purse by taking pupils. His career as an author did not commence till he was nearly thirty, even dating from the publication of a portion of the “Last Day,” in the Tatler; so that he could hardly have been absorbed in composition. But where the fully69 developed insect is parasitic70, we believe the larva is usually parasitic also, and we shall probably not be far wrong in supposing that Young at Oxford, p. 209as elsewhere, spent a good deal of his time in hanging about possible and actual patrons, and accommodating himself to the habits with considerable flexibility71 of conscience and of tongue; being none the less ready, upon occasion, to present himself as the champion of theology and to rhapsodize at convenient moments in the company of the skies or of skulls. That brilliant profligate, the Duke of Wharton, to whom Young afterward clung as his chief patron, was at this time a mere72 boy; and, though it is probable that their intimacy73 had commenced, since the Duke’s father and mother were friends of the old dean, that intimacy ought not to aggravate74 any unfavorable inference as to Young’s Oxford life. It is less likely that he fell into any exceptional vice75 than that he differed from the men around him chiefly in his episodes of theological advocacy and rhapsodic solemnity. He probably sowed his wild oats after the coarse fashion of his times, for he has left us sufficient evidence that his moral sense was not delicate; but his companions, who were occupied in sowing their own oats, perhaps took it as a matter of course that he should be a rake, and were only struck with the exceptional circumstance that he was a pious76 and moralizing rake.
There is some irony77 in the fact that the two first poetical78 productions of Young, published in the same year, were his “Epistles to Lord Lansdowne,” celebrating the recent creation of peers—Lord Lansdowne’s creation in particular; and the “Last Day.” Other poets besides Young found the device for obtaining a Tory majority by turning twelve insignificant80 commoners into insignificant lords, an irresistible82 stimulus83 to verse; but no other poet showed so versatile84 an enthusiasm—so nearly equal an ardor85 for the honor of the new baron86 and the honor of the Deity87. But the twofold nature of the sycophant and the psalmist is not more strikingly shown in the contrasted themes of the two poems than in the transitions from bombast88 about monarchs89 to bombast about the resurrection, in the “Last Day” itself. The dedication10 of the poem to Queen Anne, Young afterward suppressed, for he was always p. 210ashamed of having flattered a dead patron. In this dedication, Croft tells us, “he gives her Majesty91 praise indeed for her victories, but says that the author is more pleased to see her rise from this lower world, soaring above the clouds, passing the first and second heavens, and leaving the fixed92 stars behind her; nor will he lose her there, he says, but keep her still in view through the boundless93 spaces on the other side of creation, in her journey toward eternal bliss94, till he behold95 the heaven of heavens open, and angels receiving and conveying her still onward96 from the stretch of his imagination, which tires in her pursuit, and falls back again to earth.”
The self-criticism which prompted the suppression of the dedication did not, however, lead him to improve either the rhyme or the reason of the unfortunate couplet—
And, if men’s sins forbid not, other Annes.”
In the “Epistle to Lord Lansdowne” Young indicates his taste for the drama; and there is evidence that his tragedy of “Busiris” was “in the theatre” as early as this very year, 1713, though it was not brought on the stage till nearly six years later; so that Young was now very decidedly bent99 on authorship, for which his degree of B.C.L., taken in this year, was doubtless a magical equipment. Another poem, “The Force of Religion; or, Vanquished100 Love,” founded on the execution of Lady Jane Grey and her husband, quickly followed, showing fertility in feeble and tasteless verse; and on the Queen’s death, in 1714, Young lost no time in making a poetical lament101 for a departed patron a vehicle for extravagant102 laudation of the new monarch90. No further literary production of his appeared until 1716, when a Latin oration103, which he delivered on the foundation of the Codrington Library at All Souls, gave him a new opportunity for displaying his alacrity104 in inflated105 panegyric106.
In 1717 it is probable that Young accompanied the Duke of Wharton to Ireland, though so slender are the materials for his p. 211biography that the chief basis for this supposition is a passage in his “Conjectures on Original Composition,” written when he was nearly eighty, in which he intimates that he had once been in that country. But there are many facts surviving to indicate that for the next eight or nine years Young was a sort of attaché of Wharton’s. In 1719, according to legal records, the Duke granted him an annuity108, in consideration of his having relinquished109 the office of tutor to Lord Burleigh, with a life annuity of ￡100 a year, on his Grace’s assurances that he would provide for him in a much more ample manner. And again, from the same evidence, it appears that in 1721 Young received from Wharton a bond for ￡600, in compensation of expenses incurred110 in standing111 for Parliament at the Duke’s desire, and as an earnest of greater services which his Grace had promised him on his refraining from the spiritual and temporal advantages of taking orders, with a certainty of two livings in the gift of his college. It is clear, therefore, that lay advancement113, as long as there was any chance of it, had more attractions for Young than clerical preferment; and that at this time he accepted the Duke of Wharton as the pilot of his career.
A more creditable relation of Young’s was his friendship with Tickell, with whom he was in the habit of interchanging criticisms, and to whom in 1719—the same year, let us note, in which he took his doctor’s degree—he addressed his “Lines on the Death of Addison.” Close upon these followed his “Paraphrase of part of the Book of Job,” with a dedication to Parker, recently made Lord Chancellor114, showing that the possession of Wharton’s patronage115 did not prevent Young from fishing in other waters. He knew nothing of Parker, but that did not prevent him from magnifying the new Chancellor’s merits; on the other hand, he did know Wharton, but this again did not prevent him from prefixing to his tragedy, “The Revenge,” which appeared in 1721, a dedication attributing to the Duke all virtues117, as well as all accomplishments118. In the concluding sentence of this dedication, Young p. 212na?vely indicates that a considerable ingredient in his gratitude119 was a lively sense of anticipated favors. “My present fortune is his bounty120, and my future his care; which I will venture to say will always be remembered to his honor; since he, I know, intended his generosity121 as an encouragement to merit, through his very pardonable partiality to one who bears him so sincere a duty and respect, I happen to receive the benefit of it.” Young was economical with his ideas and images; he was rarely satisfied with using a clever thing once, and this bit of ingenious humility122 was afterward made to do duty in the “Instalment,” a poem addressed to Walpole:
’Twas meant for merit, though it fell on me.”
It was probably “The Revenge” that Young was writing when, as we learn from Spence’s anecdotes124, the Duke of Wharton gave him a skull40 with a candle fixed in it, as the most appropriate lamp by which to write tragedy. According to Young’s dedication, the Duke was “accessory” to the scenes of this tragedy in a more important way, “not only by suggesting the most beautiful incident in them, but by making all possible provision for the success of the whole.” A statement which is credible125, not indeed on the ground of Young’s dedicatory assertion, but from the known ability of the Duke, who, as Pope tells us, possessed126
“each gift of Nature and of Art,
And wanted nothing but an honest heart.”
The year 1722 seems to have been the period of a visit to Mr. Dodington, of Eastbury, in Dorsetshire—the “pure Dorsetian downs” celebrated127 by Thomson—in which Young made the acquaintance of Voltaire; for in the subsequent dedication of his “Sea Piece” to “Mr. Voltaire,” he recalls their meeting on “Dorset Downs;” and it was in this year that Christopher Pitt, a gentleman-poet of those days, addressed an p. 213“Epistle to Dr. Edward Young, at Eastbury, in Dorsetshire,” which has at least the merit of this biographical couplet:
Charm’d with his flowing Burgundy and wit.”
Dodington, apparently, was charmed in his turn, for he told Dr. Wharton that Young was “far superior to the French poet in the variety and novelty of his bon-mots and repartees.” Unfortunately, the only specimen of Young’s wit on this occasion that has been preserved to us is the epigram represented as an extempore retort (spoken aside, surely) to Voltaire’s criticism of Milton’s episode of sin and death:
At once, we think thee Milton, Death, and Sin;”—
an epigram which, in the absence of “flowing Burgundy,” does not strike us as remarkably131 brilliant. Let us give Young the benefit of the doubt thrown on the genuineness of this epigram by his own poetical dedication, in which he represents himself as having “soothed” Voltaire’s “rage” against Milton “with gentle rhymes;” though in other respects that dedication is anything but favorable to a high estimate of Young’s wit. Other evidence apart, we should not be eager for the after-dinner conversation of the man who wrote:
But where’s his dolphin? Know’st thou where?
May that be found in thee, Voltaire!”
The “Satires136” appeared in 1725 and 1726, each, of course, with its laudatory137 dedication and its compliments insinuated138 among the rhymes. The seventh and last is dedicated139 to Sir Robert Walpole, is very short, and contains nothing in particular except lunatic flattery of George the First and his prime p. 214minister, attributing that royal hog’s late escape from a storm at sea to the miraculous140 influence of his grand and virtuous141 soul—for George, he says, rivals the angels:
Nor human rage alone his pow’r perceives,
But the mad winds and the tumultuous waves,
Ev’n storms (Death’s fiercest ministers!) forbear,
And in their own wild empire learn to spare.
Thus, Nature’s self, supporting Man’s decree,
Styles Britain’s sovereign, sovereign of the sea.”
As for Walpole, what he felt at this tremendous crisis
“No powers of language, but his own, can tell,
His own, which Nature and the Graces form,
It is a coincidence worth noticing, that this seventh Satire was published in 1726, and that the warrant of George the First, granting Young a pension of ￡200 a year from Lady-day, 1725, is dated May 3d, 1726. The gratitude exhibited in this Satire may have been chiefly prospective145, but the “Instalment,” a poem inspired by the thrilling event of Walpole’s installation as Knight146 of the Garter, was clearly written with the double ardor of a man who has got a pension and hopes for something more. His emotion about Walpole is precisely147 at the same pitch as his subsequent emotion about the Second Advent148. In the “Instalment” he says:
“I find my inspiration is my theme;
p. 215Nothing can be feebler than this “Instalment,” except in the strength of impudence153 with which the writer professes154 to scorn the prostitution of fair fame, the “profanation of celestial155 fire.”
Herbert Croft tells us that Young made more than three thousand pounds by his “Satires”—a surprising statement, taken in connection with the reasonable doubt he throws on the story related in Spence’s “Anecdotes,” that the Duke of Wharton gave Young ￡2000 for this work. Young, however, seems to have been tolerably fortunate in the pecuniary156 results of his publications; and, with his literary profits, his annuity from Wharton, his fellowship, and his pension, not to mention other bounties157 which may be inferred from the high merits he discovers in many men of wealth and position, we may fairly suppose that he now laid the foundation of the considerable fortune he left at his death.
It is probable that the Duke of Wharton’s final departure for the Continent and disgrace at Court in 1726, and the consequent cessation of Young’s reliance on his patronage, tended not only to heighten the temperature of his poetical enthusiasm for Sir Robert Walpole, but also to turn his thoughts toward the Church again, as the second-best means of rising in the world. On the accession of George the Second, Young found the same transcendent merits in him as in his predecessor158, and celebrated them in a style of poetry previously159 unattempted by him—the Pindaric ode, a poetic79 form which helped him to surpass himself in furious bombast. “Ocean, an Ode: concluding with a Wish,” was the title of this piece. He afterward pruned162 it, and cut off, among other things, the concluding Wish, expressing the yearning163 for humble37 retirement164, which, of course, had prompted him to the effusion; but we may judge of the rejected stanzas165 by the quality of those he has allowed to remain. For example, calling on Britain’s dead mariners166 to rise and meet their “country’s full-blown glory” in the person of the new King, he says:
p. 216“What powerful charm
By Jove, by Fame,
By George’s name,
Awake! awake! awake! awake!”
Soon after this notable production, which was written with the ripe folly169 of forty-seven, Young took orders, and was presently appointed chaplain to the King. “The Brothers,” his third and last tragedy, which was already in rehearsal170, he now withdrew from the stage, and sought reputation in a way more accordant with the decorum of his new profession, by turning prose writer. But after publishing “A True Estimate of Human Life,” with a dedication to the Queen, as one of the “most shining representatives” of God on earth, and a sermon, entitled “An Apology for Princes; or, the Reverence171 due to Government,” preached before the House of Commons, his Pindaric ambition again seized him, and he matched his former ode by another, called “Imperium Pelagi, a Naval172 Lyric173; written in imitation of Pindar’s spirit, occasioned by his Majesty’s return from Hanover, 1729, and the succeeding Peace.” Since he afterward suppressed this second ode, we must suppose that it was rather worse than the first. Next came his two “Epistles to Pope, concerning the Authors of the Age,” remarkable for nothing but the audacity174 of affectation with which the most servile of poets professes to despise servility.
In 1730 Young was presented by his college with the rectory of Welwyn, in Hertfordshire, and, in the following year, when he was just fifty, he married Lady Elizabeth Lee, a widow with two children, who seems to have been in favor with Queen Caroline, and who probably had an income—two attractions which doubtless enhanced the power of her other charms. Pastoral duties and domesticity probably cured Young of some bad habits; but, unhappily, they did not cure him either of flattery or of fustian. Three more odes followed, p. 217quite as bad as those of his bachelorhood, except that in the third he announced the wise resolution of never writing another. It must have been about this time, since Young was now “turned of fifty,” that he wrote the letter to Mrs. Howard (afterward Lady Suffolk), George the Second’s mistress, which proves that he used other engines, besides Pindaric ones, in “besieging Court favor.” The letter is too characteristic to be omitted:
“Monday Morning.
“Madam: I know his Majesty’s goodness to his servants, and his love of justice in general, so well, that I am confident, if his Majesty knew my case, I should not have any cause to despair of his gracious favor to me.
“Abilities.
Want.
Good Manners.
Sufferings
}
Service.
and
} for his Majesty.
Age.
}
These, madam, are the proper points of consideration in the person that humbly176 hopes his Majesty’s favor.
“As to Abilities, all I can presume to say is, I have done the best I could to improve them.
“As to Good manners, I desire no favor, if any just objection lies against them.
“As for Service, I have been near seven years in his Majesty’s and never omitted any duty in it, which few can say.
“As for Age, I am turned of fifty.
“As for Want, I have no manner of preferment.
“As for Sufferings, I have lost ￡300 per ann. by being in his Majesty’s service; as I have shown in a Representation which his Majesty has been so good as to read and consider.
“As for Zeal, I have written nothing without showing my duty to their Majesties177, and some pieces are dedicated to them.
“This, madam, is the short and true state of my case. They that make their court to the ministers, and not their Majesties, succeed better. If my case deserves some consideration, and you can serve me in it, I humbly hope and believe you will: I shall, therefore, trouble you no farther; but beg leave to subscribe178 myself, with truest respect and gratitude,
“Yours, etc.,
Edward Young.
p. 218“P.S. I have some hope that my Lord Townshend is my friend; if therefore soon, and before he leaves the court, you had an opportunity of mentioning me, with that favor you have been so good to show, I think it would not fail of success; and, if not, I shall owe you more than any.”—“Suffolk Letters,” vol. i. p. 285.
Young’s wife died in 1741, leaving him one son, born in 1733. That he had attached himself strongly to her two daughters by her former marriage, there is better evidence in the report, mentioned by Mrs. Montagu, of his practical kindness and liberality to the younger, than in his lamentations over the elder as the “Narcissa” of the “Night Thoughts.” “Narcissa” had died in 1735, shortly after marriage to Mr. Temple, the son of Lord Palmerston; and Mr. Temple himself, after a second marriage, died in 1740, a year before Lady Elizabeth Young. These, then, are the three deaths supposed to have inspired “The Complaint,” which forms the three first books of the “Night Thoughts:”
And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had fill’d her horn.”
Since we find Young departing from the truth of dates, in order to heighten the effect of his calamity182, or at least of his climax183, we need not be surprised that he allowed his imagination great freedom in other matters besides chronology, and that the character of “Philander” can, by no process, be made to fit Mr. Temple. The supposition that the much-lectured “Lorenzo” of the “Night Thoughts” was Young’s own son is hardly rendered more absurd by the fact that the poem was written when that son was a boy, than by the obvious artificiality of the characters Young introduces as targets for his arguments and rebukes. Among all the trivial efforts of conjectured184 criticism, there can hardly be one more futile185 than the attempts to discover the original of those pitiable lay-figures, the “Lorenzos” and “Altamonts” of Young’s didactic prose and poetry. His muse never stood face to face with a genuine p. 219living human being; she would have been as much startled by such an encounter as a necromancer186 whose incantations and blue fire had actually conjured187 up a demon188.
The “Night Thoughts” appeared between 1741 and 1745. Although he declares in them that he has chosen God for his “patron” henceforth, this is not at all to the prejudice of some half dozen lords, duchesses, and right honorables who have the privilege of sharing finely-turned compliments with their co-patron. The line which closed the Second Night in the earlier editions—
“Wits spare not Heaven, O Wilmington!—nor thee”—
is an intense specimen of that perilous190 juxtaposition191 of ideas by which Young, in his incessant192 search after point and novelty, unconsciously converts his compliments into sarcasms193; and his apostrophe to the moon as more likely to be favorable to his song if he calls her “fair Portland of the skies,” is worthy194 even of his Pindaric ravings. His ostentatious renunciation of worldly schemes, and especially of his twenty-years’ siege of Court favor, are in the tone of one who retains some hope in the midst of his querulousness.
He descended195 from the astronomical45 rhapsodies of his “Ninth Night,” published in 1745, to more terrestrial strains in his “Reflections on the Public Situation of the Kingdom,” dedicated to the Duke of Newcastle; but in this critical year we get a glimpse of him through a more prosaic197 and less refracting medium. He spent a part of the year at Tunbridge Wells; and Mrs. Montagu, who was there too, gives a very lively picture of the “divine Doctor” in her letters to the Duchess of Portland, on whom Young had bestowed198 the superlative bombast to which we have recently alluded199. We shall borrow the quotations200 from Dr. Doran, in spite of their length, because, to our mind, they present the most agreeable portrait we possess of Young:
“I have great joy in Dr. Young, whom I disturbed in a reverie. At first he started, then bowed, then fell back into a surprise; then p. 220began a speech, relapsed into his astonishment203 two or three times, forgot what he had been saying; began a new subject, and so went on. I told him your grace desired he would write longer letters; to which he cried ‘Ha!’ most emphatically, and I leave you to interpret what it meant. He has made a friendship with one person here, whom I believe you would not imagine to have been made for his bosom205 friend. You would, perhaps, suppose it was a bishop61 or dean, a prebend, a pious preacher, a clergyman of exemplary life, or, if a layman207, of most virtuous conversation, one that had paraphrased208 St. Matthew, or wrote comments on St. Paul. . . . You would not guess that this associate of the doctor’s was—old Cibber! Certainly, in their religious, moral, and civil character, there is no relation; but in their dramatic capacity there is some.—Mrs. Montagu was not aware that Cibber, whom Young had named not disparagingly209 in his Satires, was the brother of his old school-fellow; but to return to our hero. ‘The waters,’ says Mrs. Montagu, ‘have raised his spirits to a fine pitch, as your grace will imagine, when I tell you how sublime210 an answer he made to a very vulgar question. I asked him how long he stayed at the Wells; he said, ‘As long as my rival stayed;—as long as the sun did.’ Among the visitors at the Wells were Lady Sunderland (wife of Sir Robert Sutton), and her sister, Mrs. Tichborne. ‘He did an admirable thing to Lady Sunderland: on her mentioning Sir Robert Sutton, he asked her where Sir Robert’s lady was; on which we all laughed very heartily211, and I brought him off, half ashamed, to my lodgings212, where, during breakfast, he assured me he had asked after Lady Sunderland, because he had a great honor for her; and that, having a respect for her sister, he designed to have inquired after her, if we had not put it out of his head by laughing at him. You must know, Mrs. Tichborne sat next to Lady Sunderland. It would have been admirable to have had him finish his compliment in that manner.’ . . . ‘His expressions all bear the stamp of novelty, and his thoughts of sterling213 sense. He practises a kind of philosophical214 abstinence. . . . He carried Mrs. Rolt and myself to Tunbridge, five miles from hence, where we were to see some fine old ruins. First rode the doctor on a tall steed, decently caparisoned in dark gray; next, ambled215 Mrs. Rolt on a hackney horse; . . . then followed your humble servant on a milk-white palfrey. I rode on in safety, and at leisure to observe the company, especially the two figures that brought up the rear. The first was my servant, valiantly216 armed with two uncharged pistols; the last was the doctor’s man, whose uncombed hair so resembled the mane of the horse he rode, p. 221one could not help imagining they were of kin6, and wishing, for the honor of the family, that they had had one comb betwixt them. On his head was a velvet217 cap, much resembling a black saucepan, and on his side hung a little basket. At last we arrived at the King’s Head, where the loyalty219 of the doctor induced him to alight; and then, knight-errant-like, he took his damsels from off their palfreys, and courteously220 handed us into the inn.’ . . . The party returned to the Wells; and ‘the silver Cynthia held up her lamp in the heavens’ the while. ‘The night silenced all but our divine doctor, who sometimes uttered things fit to be spoken in a season when all nature seems to be hushed and hearkening. I followed, gathering221 wisdom as I went, till I found, by my horse’s stumbling, that I was in a bad road, and that the blind was leading the blind. So I placed my servant between the doctor and myself; which he not perceiving, went on in a most philosophical strain, to the great admiration222 of my poor clown of a servant, who, not being wrought223 up to any pitch of enthusiasm, nor making any answer to all the fine things he heard, the doctor, wondering I was dumb, and grieving I was so stupid, looked round and declared his surprise.’”
Young’s oddity and absence of mind are gathered from other sources besides these stories of Mrs. Montagu’s, and gave rise to the report that he was the original of Fielding’s “Parson Adams;” but this Croft denies, and mentions another Young, who really sat for the portrait, and who, we imagine, had both more Greek and more genuine simplicity224 than the poet. His love of chatting with Colley Cibber was an indication that the old predilection226 for the stage survived, in spite of his emphatic204 contempt for “all joys but joys that never can expire;” and the production of “The Brothers,” at Drury Lane in 1753, after a suppression of fifteen years, was perhaps not entirely227 due to the expressed desire to give the proceeds to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The author’s profits were not more than ￡400—in those days a disappointing sum; and Young, as we learn from his friend Richardson, did not make this the limit of his donation, but gave a thousand guineas to the Society. “I had some talk with him,” says Richardson, in one of his letters, “about this great action. ‘I always,’ said he, ‘intended to do something handsome for p. 222the Society. Had I deferred228 it to my demise229, I should have given away my son’s money. All the world are inclined to pleasure; could I have given myself a greater by disposing of the sum to a different use, I should have done it.’” Surely he took his old friend Richardson for “Lorenzo!”
His next work was “The Centaur230 not Fabulous231; in Six Letters to a Friend, on the Life in Vogue,” which reads very much like the most objurgatory parts of the “Night Thoughts” reduced to prose. It is preceded by a preface which, though addressed to a lady, is in its denunciations of vice as grossly indecent and almost as flippant as the epilogues written by “friends,” which he allowed to be reprinted after his tragedies in the latest edition of his works. We like much better than “The Centaur,” “Conjectures on Original Composition,” written in 1759, for the sake, he says, of communicating to the world the well-known anecdote about Addison’s deathbed, and with the exception of his poem on Resignation, the last thing he ever published.
The estrangement232 from his son, which must have embittered233 the later years of his life, appears to have begun not many years after the mother’s death. On the marriage of her second daughter, who had previously presided over Young’s household, a Mrs. Hallows, understood to be a woman of discreet234 age, and the daughter (a widow) of a clergyman who was an old friend of Young’s, became housekeeper235 at Welwyn. Opinions about ladies are apt to differ. “Mrs. Hallows was a woman of piety237, improved by reading,” says one witness. “She was a very coarse woman,” says Dr. Johnson; and we shall presently find some indirect evidence that her temper was perhaps not quite so much improved as her piety. Servants, it seems, were not fond of remaining long in the house with her; a satirical curate, named Kidgell, hints at “drops of juniper” taken as a cordial (but perhaps he was spiteful, and a teetotaller); and Young’s son is said to have told his father that “an old man should not resign himself to the management of anybody.” The result was, that the son was banished239 from home for the p. 223rest of his father’s life-time, though Young seems never to have thought of disinheriting him.
Our latest glimpses of the aged98 poet are derived240 from certain letters of Mr. Jones, his curate—letters preserved in the British Museum, and happily made accessible to common mortals in Nichols’s “Anecdotes.” Mr. Jones was a man of some literary activity and ambition—a collector of interesting documents, and one of those concerned in the “Free and Candid241 Disquisitions,” the design of which was “to point out such things in our ecclesiastical establishment as want to be reviewed and amended242.” On these and kindred subjects he corresponded with Dr. Birch, occasionally troubling him with queries243 and manuscripts. We have a respect for Mr. Jones. Unlike any person who ever troubled us with queries or manuscripts, he mitigates244 the infliction245 by such gifts as “a fat pullet,” wishing he “had anything better to send; but this depauperizing vicarage (of Alconbury) too often checks the freedom and forwardness of my mind.” Another day comes a “pound canister of tea,” another, a “young fatted goose.” Clearly, Mr. Jones was entirely unlike your literary correspondents of the present day; he forwarded manuscripts, but he had “bowels,” and forwarded poultry247 too. His first letter from Welwyn is dated June, 1759, not quite six years before Young’s death. In June, 1762, he expresses a wish to go to London “this summer. But,” he continues:
“My time and pains are almost continually taken up here, and . . . I have been (I now find) a considerable loser, upon the whole, by continuing here so long. The consideration of this, and the inconveniences I sustained, and do still experience, from my late illness, obliged me at last to acquaint the Doctor (Young) with my case, and to assure him that I plainly perceived the duty and confinement248 here to be too much for me; for which reason I must (I said) beg to be at liberty to resign my charge at Michaelmas. I began to give him these notices in February, when I was very ill; and now I perceive, by what he told me the other day, that he is in some difficulty: for which reason he is at last (he says) resolved to advertise, and even (which is much wondered at) to raise the salary considerably249 p. 224higher. (What he allowed my predecessors250 was 20l. per annum; and now he proposes 50l., as he tells me.) I never asked him to raise it for me, though I well knew it was not equal to the duty; nor did I say a word about myself when he lately suggested to me his intentions upon this subject.”
In a postscript251 to this letter he says:
“I may mention to you farther, as a friend that may be trusted, that in all likelihood the poor old gentleman will not find it a very easy matter, unless by dint253 of money, and force upon himself, to procure254 a man that he can like for his next curate, nor one that will stay with him so long as I have done. Then, his great age will recur255 to people’s thoughts; and if he has any foibles, either in temper or conduct, they will be sure not to be forgotten on this occasion by those who know him; and those who do not will probably be on their guard. On these and the like considerations, it is by no means an eligible256 office to be seeking out for a curate for him, as he has several times wished me to do; and would, if he knew that I am now writing to you, wish your assistance also. But my best friends here, who well foresee the probable consequences, and wish me well, earnestly dissuade257 me from complying: and I will decline the office with as much decency258 as I can: but high salary will, I suppose, fetch in somebody or other, soon.”
In the following July he writes:
“The old gentleman here (I may venture to tell you freely) seems to me to be in a pretty odd way of late—moping, dejected, self-willed, and as if surrounded with some perplexing circumstances. Though I visit him pretty frequently for short intervals260, I say very little to his affairs, not choosing to be a party concerned, especially in cases of so critical and tender a nature. There is much mystery in almost all his temporal affairs, as well as in many of his speculative261 theories. Whoever lives in this neighborhood to see his exit will probably see and hear some very strange things. Time will show;—I am afraid, not greatly to his credit. There is thought to be an irremovable obstruction262 to his happiness within his walls, as well as another without them; but the former is the more powerful, and like to continue so. He has this day been trying anew to engage me to stay with him. No lucrative263 views can tempt160 me to sacrifice my liberty or my health, to such measures as are proposed here. Nor do I like to p. 225have to do with persons whose word and honor cannot be depended on. So much for this very odd and unhappy topic.”
In August Mr. Jones’s tone is slightly modified. Earnest entreaties264, not lucrative considerations, have induced him to cheer the Doctor’s dejected heart by remaining at Welwyn some time longer. The Doctor is, “in various respects, a very unhappy man,” and few know so much of these respects as Mr. Jones. In September he recurs265 to the subject:
“My ancient gentleman here is still full of trouble, which moves my concern, though it moves only the secret laughter of many, and some untoward266 surmises267 in disfavor of him and his household. The loss of a very large sum of money (about 200l.) is talked of; whereof this vill and neighborhood is full. Some disbelieve; others says, ‘It is no wonder, where about eighteen or more servants are sometimes taken and dismissed in the course of a year.’ The gentleman himself is allowed by all to be far more harmless and easy in his family than some one else who hath too much the lead in it. This, among others, was one reason for my late motion to quit.”
No other mention of Young’s affairs occurs until April 2d, 1765, when he says that Dr. Young is very ill, attended by two physicians.
“Having mentioned this young gentleman (Dr. Young’s son), I would acquaint you next, that he came hither this morning, having been sent for, as I am told, by the direction of Mrs. Hallows. Indeed, she intimated to me as much herself. And if this be so, I must say, that it is one of the most prudent268 Acts she ever did, or could have done in such a case as this; as it may prove a means of preventing much confusion after the death of the Doctor. I have had some little discourse269 with the son: he seems much affected270, and I believe really is so. He earnestly wishes his father might be pleased to ask after him; for you must know he has not yet done this, nor is, in my opinion, like to do it. And it has been said farther, that upon a late application made to him on the behalf of his son, he desired that no more might be said to him about it. How true this may be I cannot as yet be certain; all I shall say is, it seems not improbable . . . I heartily wish the ancient man’s heart may prove tender toward his son; though, knowing him so well, I can scarce hope to hear such desirable news.”
p. 226Eleven days later he writes:
“I have now the pleasure to acquaint you, that the late Dr. Young, though he had for many years kept his son at a distance from him, yet has now at last left him all his possessions, after the payment of certain legacies271; so that the young gentleman (who bears a fair character, and behaves well, as far as I can hear or see) will, I hope, soon enjoy and make a prudent use of a handsome fortune. The father, on his deathbed, and since my return from London, was applied272 to in the tenderest manner, by one of his physicians, and by another person, to admit the son into his presence, to make submission273, intreat forgiveness, and obtain his blessing274. As to an interview with his son, he intimated that he chose to decline it, as his spirits were then low and his nerves weak. With regard to the next particular, he said, ‘I heartily forgive him;’ and upon ‘mention of this last, he gently lifted up his hand, and letting it gently fall, pronounced these words, ‘God bless him!’ . . . I know it will give you pleasure to be farther informed that he was pleased to make respectful mention of me in his will; expressing his satisfaction in my care of his parish, bequeathing to me a handsome legacy275, and appointing me to be one of his executors.”
So far Mr. Jones, in his confidential276 correspondence with a “friend, who may be trusted.” In a letter communicated apparently by him to the Gentleman’s Magazine, seven years later, namely, in 1782, on the appearance of Croft’s biography of Young, we find him speaking of “the ancient gentleman” in a tone of reverential eulogy277, quite at variance278 with the free comments we have just quoted. But the Rev116. John Jones was probably of opinion, with Mrs. Montagu, whose contemporary and retrospective letters are also set in a different key, that “the interests of religion were connected with the character of a man so distinguished for piety as Dr. Young.” At all events, a subsequent quasi-official statement weighs nothing as evidence against contemporary, spontaneous, and confidential hints.
To Mrs. Hallows, Young left a legacy of ￡1000, with the request that she would destroy all his manuscripts. This final request, from some unknown cause, was not complied with, and among the papers he left behind him was the following p. 227letter from Archbishop Secker, which probably marks the date of his latest effort after preferment:
“Deanery of St. Paul’s, July 8, 1758.
“Good Dr. Young: I have long wondered that more suitable notice of your great merit hath not been taken by persons in power. But how to remedy the omission279 I see not. No encouragement hath ever been given me to mention things of this nature to his Majesty. And therefore, in all likelihood, the only consequence of doing it would be weakening the little influence which else I may possibly have on some other occasions. Your fortune and your reputation set you above the need of advancement; and your sentiments above that concern for it, on your own account, which, on that of the public, is sincerely felt by
“Your loving Brother,
The loving brother’s irony is severe!
Perhaps the least questionable280 testimony281 to the better side of Young’s character is that of Bishop Hildesley, who, as the vicar of a parish near Welwyn, had been Young’s neighbor for upward of twenty years. The affection of the clergy206 for each other, we have observed, is, like that of the fair sex, not at all of a blind and infatuated kind; and we may therefore the rather believe them when they give each other any extra-official praise. Bishop Hildesley, then writing of Young to Richardson, says:
“The impertinence of my frequent visits to him was amply rewarded; forasmuch as, I can truly say, he never received me but with agreeable open complacency; and I never left him but with profitable pleasure and improvement. He was one or other, the most modest, the most patient of contradiction, and the most informing and entertaining I ever conversed282 with—at least, of any man who had so just pretensions283 to pertinacity284 and reserve.”
Mr. Langton, however, who was also a frequent visitor of Young’s, informed Boswell—
“That there was an air of benevolence285 in his manner; but that he could obtain from him less information than he had hoped to receive from one who had lived so much in intercourse286 with the brightest p. 228men of what had been called the Augustan age of England; and that he showed a degree of eager curiosity concerning the common occurrences that were then passing, which appeared somewhat remarkable in a man of such intellectual stores, of such an advanced age, and who had retired from life with declared disappointment in his expectations.”
The same substance, we know, will exhibit different qualities under different tests; and, after all, imperfect reports of individual impressions, whether immediate287 or traditional, are a very frail288 basis on which to build our opinion of a man. One’s character may be very indifferently mirrored in the mind of the most intimate neighbor; it all depends on the quality of that gentleman’s reflecting surface.
But, discarding any inferences from such uncertain evidence, the outline of Young’s character is too distinctly traceable in the well-attested facts of his life, and yet more in the self-betrayal that runs through all his works, for us to fear that our general estimate of him may be false. For, while no poet seems less easy and spontaneous than Young, no poet discloses himself more completely. Men’s minds have no hiding-place out of themselves—their affectations do but betray another phase of their nature. And if, in the present view of Young, we seem to be more intent on laying bare unfavorable facts than on shrouding289 them in “charitable speeches,” it is not because we have any irreverential pleasure in turning men’s characters “the seamy side without,” but because we see no great advantage in considering a man as he was not. Young’s biographers and critics have usually set out from the position that he was a great religious teacher, and that his poetry is morally sublime; and they have toned down his failings into harmony with their conception of the divine and the poet. For our own part, we set out from precisely the opposite conviction—namely, that the religious and moral spirit of Young’s poetry is low and false, and we think it of some importance to show that the “Night Thoughts” are the reflex of the mind in which the higher human sympathies were inactive. This p. 229judgment is entirely opposed to our youthful predilections290 and enthusiasm. The sweet garden-breath of early enjoyment291 lingers about many a page of the “Night Thoughts,” and even of the “Last Day,” giving an extrinsic292 charm to passages of stilted293 rhetoric44 and false sentiment; but the sober and repeated reading of maturer years has convinced us that it would hardly be possible to find a more typical instance than Young’s poetry, of the mistake which substitutes interested obedience294 for sympathetic emotion, and baptizes egoism as religion.
Pope said of Young, that he had “much of a sublime genius without common-sense.” The deficiency Pope meant to indicate was, we imagine, moral rather than intellectual: it was the want of that fine sense of what is fitting in speech and action, which is often eminently296 possessed by men and women whose intellect is of a very common order, but who have the sincerity297 and dignity which can never coexist with the selfish preoccupations of vanity or interest. This was the “common-sense” in which Young was conspicuously298 deficient299; and it was partly owing to this deficiency that his genius, waiting to be determined by the highest prize, fluttered uncertainly from effort to effort, until, when he was more than sixty, it suddenly spread its broad wing, and soared so as to arrest the gaze of other generations besides his own. For he had no versatility300 of faculty301 to mislead him. The “Night Thoughts” only differ from his previous works in the degree and not in the kind of power they manifest. Whether he writes prose or poetry, rhyme or blank verse, dramas, satires, odes, or meditations302, we see everywhere the same Young—the same narrow circle of thoughts, the same love of abstractions, the same telescopic view of human things, the same appetency toward antithetic apothegm and rhapsodic climax. The passages that arrest us in his tragedies are those in which he anticipates some fine passage in the “Night Thoughts,” and where his characters are only transparent303 shadows through which we see the bewigged embonpoint of the didactic poet, excogitating epigrams or ecstatic p. 230soliloquies by the light of a candle fixed in a skull. Thus, in “The Revenge,” “Alonzo,” in the conflict of jealousy304 and love that at once urges and forbids him to murder his wife, says:
“This vast and solid earth, that blazing sun,
Those skies, through which it rolls, must all have end.
What then is man? The smallest part of nothing.
Day buries day; month, month; and year the year!
Our life is but a chain of many deaths.
Can then Death’s self be feared? Our life much rather:
Death joins us to the great majority;
’Tis to be born to Plato and to C?sar;
’Tis to be great forever;
’Tis pleasure, ’tis ambition, then, to die.”
His prose writings all read like the “Night Thoughts,” either diluted306 into prose or not yet crystallized into poetry. For example, in his “Thoughts for Age,” he says:
“Though we stand on its awful brink307, such our leaden bias308 to the world, we turn our faces the wrong way; we are still looking on our old acquaintance, Time; though now so wasted and reduced, that we can see little more of him than his wings and his scythe309: our age enlarges his wings to our imagination; and our fear of death, his scythe; as Time himself grows less. His consumption is deep; his annihilation is at hand.”
“Time in advance behind him hides his wings,
Behold him when past by! What then is seen
Again:
“A requesting Omnipotence312? What can stun313 and confound thy reason more? What more can ravish and exalt41 thy heart? It cannot but ravish and exalt; it cannot but gloriously disturb and perplex thee, to take in all that suggests. Thou child of the dust! Thou speck314 of misery315 and sin! How abject316 thy weakness! how great is thy power! Thou crawler on earth, and possible (I was about to say) controller of the skies! Weigh, and weigh well, the wondrous317 truths I have in view: which cannot be weighed too much; which p. 231the more they are weighed, amaze the more; which to have supposed, before they were revealed, would have been as great madness, and to have presumed on as great sin, as it is now madness and sin not to believe.”
Even in his Pindaric odes, in which he made the most violent efforts against nature, he is still neither more nor less than the Young of the “Last Day,” emptied and swept of his genius, and possessed by seven demons318 of fustian and bad rhyme. Even here his “Ercles’ Vein” alternates with his moral platitudes319, and we have the perpetual text of the “Night Thoughts:”
“Gold pleasure buys;
But pleasure dies,
The sense is short;
“Joys felt alone!
Joys asked of none!
Which Time’s and fortune’s arrows miss:
Though fates resist,
An unprecarious, endless bliss!
“Unhappy they!
And falsely gay!
A constant feast
In the “Last Day,” again, which is the earliest thing he wrote, we have an anticipation328 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 homage329 to God, called forth189 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!”
p. 232Conceive 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, vaulting330 sublimity331 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.”
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 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,
But it is seldom in Young’s rhymed poems that the effect of a felicitous334 thought or image is not counteracted335 by our sense of the constraint336 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 reclaimed337, 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 witticisms339 are peculiarly susceptible341 to the intrusion of a superfluous342 word, or to an inversion343 which implies constraint. Here, even more than elsewhere, p. 233the art that conceals344 art is an absolute requisite345, and to have a witticism340 presented to us in limping or cumbrous rhythm is as counteractive346 to any electrifying347 effect as to see the tentative grimaces348 by which a comedian349 prepares a grotesque350 countenance351. We discern the process, instead of being startled by the result.
This is one reason why the Satires, read seriatim, have a flatness to us, which, when we afterward read picked passages, we are inclined to disbelieve in, and to attribute to some deficiency in our own mood. But there are deeper reasons for that dissatisfaction. Young is not a satirist352 of a high order. His satire has neither the terrible vigor353, the lacerating energy of genuine indignation, nor the humor which owns loving fellowship with the poor human nature it laughs at; nor yet the personal bitterness which, as in Pope’s characters of Sporus and Atticus, insures those living touches by virtue of which the individual and particular in Art becomes the universal and immortal. Young could never describe a real, complex human being; but what he could do with eminent295 success was to describe, with neat and finished point, obvious types, of manners rather than of character—to write cold and clever epigrams on personified vices112 and absurdities354. There is no more emotion in his satire than if he were turning witty verses on a waxen image of Cupid or a lady’s glove. He has none of these felicitious epithets355, none of those pregnant lines, by which Pope’s Satires have enriched the ordinary speech of educated men. Young’s wit will be found in almost every instance to consist in that antithetic combination of ideas which, of all the forms of wit, is most within reach of a clever effort. In his gravest arguments, as well as in his lightest satire, one might imagine that he had set himself to work out the problem, how much antithesis357 might be got out of a given subject. And there he completely succeeds. His neatest portraits are all wrought on this plan. “Narcissus,” for example, who
“Omits no duty; nor can Envy say
He miss’d, these many years, the Church or Play:
p. 234He makes no noise in Parliament, ’tis true;
But pays his debts, and visit when ’tis due;
His character and gloves are ever clean,
And then he can out-bow the bowing Dean;
A smile eternal on his lip he wears,
Which equally the wise and worthless shares.
Patient of idleness beyond belief,
Most charitably lends the town his face
For ornament in every public place;
As sure as cards he to th’ assembly comes,
And is the furniture of drawing-rooms:
When Ombre calls, his hand and heart are free,
And, joined to two, he fails not—to make three;
Narcissus is the glory of his race;
For who does nothing with a better grace?
To deck my list by nature were designed
Such shining expletives of human kind,
Who want, while through blank life they dream along,
Sense to be right and passion to be wrong.”
It is but seldom that we find a touch of that easy slyness which gives an additional zest359 to surprise; but here is an instance:
“See Tityrus, with merriment possest,
Is burst with laughter ere he hears the jest,
What need he stay, for when the joke is o’er,
His teeth will be no whiter than before.”
Like Pope, whom he imitated, he sets out with a psychological mistake as the basis of his satire, attributing all forms of folly to one passion—the love of fame, or vanity—a much grosser mistake, indeed, than Pope’s, exaggeration of the extent to which the “ruling passion” determines conduct in the individual. Not that Young is consistent in his mistake. He sometimes implies no more than what is the truth—that the love of fame is the cause, not of all follies360, but of many.
Young’s satires on women are superior to Pope’s, which is only saying that they are superior to Pope’s greatest failure. We can more frequently pick out a couplet as successful than an entire sketch361. Of the too emphatic “Syrena” he says:
“Her judgment just, her sentence is too strong;
Because she’s right, she’s ever in the wrong.”
Of the diplomatic “Julia:”
p. 235“For her own breakfast she’ll project a scheme,
Of “Lyce,” the old painted coquette:
“In vain the cock has summoned sprites away;
She walks at noon and blasts the bloom of day.”
Of the nymph, who, “gratis, clears religious mysteries:”
“’Tis hard, too, she who makes no use but chat
Of her religion, should be barr’d in that.”
The description of the literary belle363, “Daphne,” well prefaces that of “Stella,” admired by Johnson:
“With legs toss’d high, on her sophee she sits,
Vouchsafing364 audience to contending wits:
Of each performance she’s the final test;
One act read o’er, she prophecies the rest;
And then, pronouncing with decisive air,
Fully convinces all the town—she’s fair.
Had lonely Daphne Hecatessa’s face,
Some ladies’ judgment in their features lies,
And all their genius sparkles in their eyes.
Must I want common sense because I’m fair?
O no; see Stella: her eyes shine as bright
As if her tongue was never in the right;
And yet what real learning, judgment, fire!
She seems inspir’d, and can herself inspire.
Could Daphne publish, and could she forbear?”
After all, when we have gone through Young’s seven Satires, we seem to have made but an indifferent meal. They are a sort of fricassee, with some little solid meat in them, and yet the flavor is not always piquant368. It is curious to find him, when he pauses a moment from his satiric238 sketching369, recurring370 to his old platitudes:
“Can gold calm passion, or make reason shine?
Can we dig peace or wisdom from the mine?
Wisdom to gold prefer;”—
platitudes which he seems inevitably371 to fall into, for the same reason that some men are constantly asserting their contempt for criticism—because he felt the opposite so keenly.
p. 236The outburst of genius in the earlier books of the “Night Thoughts” is the more remarkable, that in the interval259 between them and the Satires he had produced nothing but his Pindaric odes, in which he fell far below the level of his previous works. Two sources of this sudden strength were the freedom of blank verse and the presence of a genuine emotion. Most persons, in speaking of the “Night Thoughts,” have in their minds only the two or three first Nights, the majority of readers rarely getting beyond these, unless, as Wilson says, they “have but few books, are poor, and live in the country.” And in these earlier Nights there is enough genuine sublimity and genuine sadness to bribe372 us into too favorable a judgment of them as a whole. Young had only a very few things to say or sing—such as that life is vain, that death is imminent373, that man is immortal, that virtue is wisdom, that friendship is sweet, and that the source of virtue is the contemplation of death and immortality—and even in his two first Nights he had said almost all he had to say in his finest manner. Through these first outpourings of “complaint” we feel that the poet is really sad, that the bird is singing over a rifled nest; and we bear with his morbid374 picture of the world and of life, as the Job-like lament of a man whom “the hand of God hath touched.” Death has carried away his best-beloved, and that “silent land” whither they are gone has more reality for the desolate375 one than this world which is empty of their love:
“This is the desert, this the solitude;
Joy died with the loved one:
“The disenchanted earth
Her golden mountains, where? All darkened down
The great magician’s dead!”
Under the pang379 of parting, it seems to the bereaved380 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 p. 237was.” In its unreasoning anguish18, the soul rushes to the idea of perpetuity as the one element of bliss:
“O ye blest scenes of permanent delight!—
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 criticise381 his views, we compassionate382 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:
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, perversely386 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 perfectly387 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 elastic388, 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 p. 238we 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 drawn390 from his faults.
One of the most striking characteristics of Young is his radical391 insincerity as a poetic artist. This, added to the thin and artificial texture392 of his wit, is the true explanation of the paradox—that a poet who is often inopportunely witty has the opposite vice of bombastic393 absurdity394. The source of all grandiloquence395 is the want of taking for a criterion the true qualities of the object described or the emotion expressed. The grandiloquent396 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 inanity397 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 habitually398 treats of abstractions, and not of concrete objects or specific emotions. He descants399 perpetually on virtue, religion, “the good man,” life, death, immortality, eternity400—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 proximity401 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 monstrous402 absurdity of a man’s grasping the skies, and hanging habitually suspended p. 239there, while he contemptuously bids the earth roll, warns you that no genuine feeling could have suggested so unnatural403 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 utterly404 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 aspirations405, undisguised by imagery, are often equally false. No writer whose rhetoric was checked by the slightest truthful407 intentions could have said—
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 impiety409 not to feel that our souls are only too narrow for the joy of looking into the trusting eyes of our children, of reposing410 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 spoke129 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.” p. 240Of 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 fumes411 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 eloquence412 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 guilt413 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 turn, 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 explicitly414. 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;
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
Make their days various; various as the dyes
On the dove’s neck, which wanton in his rays.
On lighten’d minds that bask in Virtue’s beams,
In that for which they long, for which they live.
Their glorious efforts, winged with heavenly hopes,
Each rising morning sees still higher rise;
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 amiable421 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 sublimely422 sudden leap of thought,
“Embryos we must be till we burst the shell,
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” p. 242that 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 tempted161 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 wilderness425 of wonders burning round,
Where larger suns inhabit higher spheres;
It is like a sudden relief from a strained posture when, in the “Night Thoughts,” we come on any allusion428 that carries us to the lanes, woods, or fields. Such allusions429 are amazingly rare, and we could almost count them on a single hand. That we may do him no injustice430, we will quote the three best:
“Like blossom’d trees o’erturned by vernal storm,
Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay.
* * * * *
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;
* * * * *
“The crown of manhood is a winter joy;
The adherence435 to abstractions, or to the personification of abstractions, is closely allied436 in Young to the want of genuine emotion. He sees virtue sitting on a mount serene437, 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 dwelling438 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 courageous439 effort for unselfish ends, in the p. 243internal triumph of justice and pity over personal resentment440, 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 orator441 may discourse very eloquently442 on injustice in general, and leave his audience cold; but let him state a special case of oppression, and every heart will throb443. The most untheoretic persons are aware of this relation between true emotion and particular facts, as opposed to general terms, and implicitly444 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 vividly445 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 repels446 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 miserable447 results of superstition448, but not a fact to throw an educated, still less a Christian man, into a fury of hatred449 and vengeance450, in contemplating451 it after the lapse202 of five years. Young, however, takes great pains to simulate a bad feeling:
p. 244“Of grief
And indignation rival bursts I pour’d,
Half execration452 mingled with my pray’r;
Stamp’d the cursed soil; and with humanity
(Denied Narcissa) wish’d them all a grave.”
The odiously455 bad taste of this last clause makes us hope that it is simply a platitude320, 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 depict456 earth as a hideous457 abode458 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:
And conscious virtue mitigates the pang.
This remarkable negation462 of sympathy is in perfect consistency463 with Young’s theory of ethics464:
“Virtue is a crime,
A crime of reason, if it costs us pain
If there is no immortality for man—
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,
* * * * *
“If this life’s gain invites him to the deed,
Why not his country sold, his father slain?”
* * * * *
Is perfect wisdom, while mankind are fools,
And think a turf or tombstone covers all.”
* * * * *
p. 245“Die for thy country, thou romantic fool!
* * * * *
“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 inflict246 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 labor469 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 slay470 your father, if you were not afraid of some disagreeable consequences from p. 246the criminal laws of another world; but even if I could conceive no motive28 but my own worldly interest or the gratification of my animal desire, I have not observed that beastliness, treachery, and parricide471 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 insufficient472 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 opposition473 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 attained474 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 sonata475 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, pique476 themselves on the loftiness of their doctrine477 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-being478 of p. 247mankind 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 participation479 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 intensification480 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 pathos481 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 proprietors482 of a patent water-supply have a dread483 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 p. 248he decries484. 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.
* * * *
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 fathomless486!
Then, and then only, Adam’s offspring quits
Asserts his rank, and rises into man.”
So, then, if it were certified490 that, as some benevolent491 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 maim492 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 colossal493 scale, we must turn to those passages where his rhetoric is at its utmost stretch of inflation—where he addresses the Deity, discourses494 of the Divine operations, or describes the last judgment. As a compound of vulgar pomp, crawling adulation, and hard selfishness, presented under the guise406 of piety, there are few things in literature to surpass the Ninth Night, entitled “Consolation495,” especially in the pages where he describes the last judgment—a subject to which, with na?ve self-betrayal, he applies phraseology, favored by the exuberant496 penny-a-liner. Thus, when God descends497, and the groans498 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:
The charmed spectators thunder their applause.”
In the same taste he sings:
“Eternity, the various sentence past,
Exquisite502 delicacy503 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
Deep driving every bolt on both their fates.
Then, from the crystal battlements of heaven,
And ne’er unlock her resolution more.
Returns, in groans, the melancholy507 roar.”
“For all I bless thee, most, for the severe;
It thunders;—but it thunders to preserve;
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 exuberance516 in laudatory epithet356, 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 vindicate517 his own renown. The God of the “Night Thoughts” p. 250is 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 ethical518 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 forsake519 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 perceptive520 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 innate521 power which we call Genius, and not from labored522 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 p. 251imperious, and excludes the reflection why it should act. In the same way, in proportion as morality is emotional, i.e., has affinity523 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 mingles524 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. Watts525, or James Montgomery, or some other singer of spotless life and ardent526 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 overflow527 of moral feeling in himself. A man who is perpetually thinking in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux528 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 wailing529 soliloquies he interrupts himself to fling an admonitory parenthesis530 at “Lorenzo,” or to hint that “folly’s creed531” is the reverse of his own. Before his thoughts can flow, he must fix his eye on an imaginary miscreant532, who gives unlimited533 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,” p. 252so we may call Young’s disposition534 to see a rebuke31 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 implicit225 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,
“Divine Instructor535! Thy first volume this
It is this pedagogic tendency, this sermonizing attitude of Young’s mind, which produces the wearisome monotony of his pauses. After the first two or three nights he is rarely singing, rarely pouring forth any continuous melody inspired by the spontaneous flow of thought or feeling. He is rather occupied with argumentative insistence537, with hammering in the proofs of his propositions by disconnected verses, which he puts down at intervals. The perpetual recurrence538 of the pause at the end of the line throughout long passages makes them as fatiguing539 to the ear as a monotonous540 chant, which consists of the endless repetition of one short musical phrase. For example:
“Past hours,
If not by guilt, yet wound us by their flight,
If folly bound our prospect by the grave,
All feeling of futurity be numb’d,
All godlike passion for eternals quench’d,
All relish of realities expired;
Our freedom chain’d; quite wingless our desire;
In sense dark-prison’d all that ought to soar;
Dismounted every great and glorious aim;
Enthralled543 every faculty divine,
Heart-buried in the rubbish of the world.”
How different from the easy, graceful544 melody of Cowper’s blank verse! Indeed, it is hardly possible to criticise Young without being reminded at every step of the contrast presented p. 253to him by Cowper. And this contrast urges itself upon us the more from the fact that there is, to a certain extent, a parallelism between the “Night Thoughts” and the “Task.” In both poems the author achieves his greatest in virtue of the new freedom conferred by blank verse; both poems are professionally didactic, and mingle432 much satire with their graver meditations; both poems are the productions of men whose estimate of this life was formed by the light of a belief in immortality, and who were intensely attached to Christianity. On some grounds we might have anticipated a more morbid view of things from Cowper than from Young. Cowper’s religion was dogmatically the more gloomy, for he was a Calvinist; while Young was a “low” Arminian, believing that Christ died for all, and that the only obstacle to any man’s salvation545 lay in his will, which he could change if he chose. There was real and deep sadness involved in Cowper’s personal lot; while Young, apart from his ambitious and greedy discontent, seems to have had no great sorrow.
Yet, see how a lovely, sympathetic nature manifests itself in spite of creed and circumstance! Where is the poem that surpasses the “Task” in the genuine love it breathes, at once toward inanimate and animate existence—in truthfulness546 of perception and sincerity of presentation—in the calm gladness that springs from a delight in objects for their own sake, without self-reference—in divine sympathy with the lowliest pleasures, with the most short-lived capacity for pain? Here is no railing at the earth’s “melancholy map,” but the happiest lingering over her simplest scenes with all the fond minuteness of attention that belongs to love; no pompous547 rhetoric about the inferiority of the “brutes,” but a warm plea on their behalf against man’s inconsiderateness and cruelty, and a sense of enlarged happiness from their companionship in enjoyment; no vague rant68 about human misery and human virtue, but that close and vivid presentation of particular sorrows and privations, of particular deeds and misdeeds, which is the direct road to the emotions. How Cowper’s exquisite mind falls p. 254with the mild warmth of morning sunlight on the commonest objects, at once disclosing every detail, and investing every detail with beauty! No object is too small to prompt his song—not the sooty film on the bars, or the spoutless548 teapot holding a bit of mignonette that serves to cheer the dingy549 town-lodging with a “hint that Nature lives;” and yet his song is never trivial, for he is alive to small objects, not because his mind is narrow, but because his glance is clear and his heart is large. Instead of trying to edify550 us by supercilious551 allusions to the “brutes” and the “stalls,” he interests us in that tragedy of the hen-roost when the thief has wrenched552 the door,
“Where Chanticleer amidst his harem sleeps
In unsuspecting pomp;”
in the patient cattle, that on the winter’s morning
“Mourn in corners where the fence
In unrecumbent sadness;”
in the little squirrel, that, surprised by him in his woodland walk,
“At once, swift as a bird,
With all the prettiness of feign’d alarm
And anger insignificantly557 fierce.”
And then he passes into reflection, not with curt558 apothegm and snappish reproof559, but with that melodious560 flow of utterance561 which belongs to thought when it is carried along in a stream of feeling:
“The heart is hard in nature, and unfit
For human fellowship, as being void
Of sympathy, and therefore dead alike
To love and friendship both, that is not pleased
With sight of animals enjoying life,
His large and tender heart embraces the most every-day forms of human life—the carter driving his team through the wintry storm; the cottager’s wife who, painfully nursing the embers on her hearth563, while her infants “sit cowering564 o’er the sparks,”
“Retires, content to quake, so they be warm’d;”
or the villager, with her little ones, going out to pick
“A cheap but wholesome salad from the brook;”
p. 255and he compels our colder natures to follow his in its manifold sympathies, not by exhortations565, not by telling us to meditate566 at midnight, to “indulge” the thought of death, or to ask ourselves how we shall “weather an eternal night,” but by presenting to us the object of his compassion383 truthfully and lovingly. And when he handles greater themes, when he takes a wider survey, and considers the men or the deeds which have a direct influence on the welfare of communities and nations, there is the same unselfish warmth of feeling, the same scrupulous567 truthfulness. He is never vague in his remonstrance568 or his satire, but puts his finger on some particular vice or folly which excites his indignation or “dissolves his heart in pity,” because of some specific injury it does to his fellow-man or to a sacred cause. And when he is asked why he interests himself about the sorrows and wrongs of others, hear what is the reason he gives. Not, like Young, that the movements of the planets show a mutual569 dependence570, and that
“Thus man his sovereign duty learns in this
Material picture of benevolence,”
or that—
“More generous sorrow, while it sinks, exalts,
And conscious virtue mitigates the pang.”
What is Cowper’s answer, when he imagines some “sage, erudite, profound,” asking him “What’s the world to you?”
“Much. I was born of woman, and drew milk
As sweet as charity from human breasts.
I think, articulate, I laugh and weep,
And exercise all functions of a man.
How then should I and any man that lives
Be strangers to each other?”
Young is astonished that men can make war on each other—that any one can “seize his brother’s throat,” while
“The Planets cry, ‘Forbear.’”
Cowper weeps because
It does not feel for man.”
Young applauds God as a monarch with an empire and a court quite superior to the English, or as an author who produces “volumes for man’s perusal.” Cowper sees his father’s love in all the gentle pleasures of the home fireside, in the charms even of the wintry landscape, and thinks—
p. 256“Happy who walks with him! whom what he finds
Or what he views of beautiful or grand
To the green blade that twinkles in the sun,
Prompts with remembrance of a present God.”
To conclude—for we must arrest ourselves in a contrast that would lead us beyond our bounds. Young flies for his utmost consolation to the day of judgment, when
“Final Ruin fiercely drives
Her ploughshare o’er creation;”
when earth, stars, and sun are swept aside,
Full on the confines of our ether, flames:
While (dreadful contrast!) far (how far!) beneath,
Expanding wide, and roaring for her prey,”
Dr. Young and similar “ornaments of religion and virtue” passing of course with grateful “applause” into the upper region. Cowper finds his highest inspiration in the Millennium—in the restoration of this our beloved home of earth to perfect holiness and bliss, when the Supreme578
Propitious579 in his chariot paved with love;
And what his storms have blasted and defaced
For man’s revolt, shall with a smile repair.”
And into what delicious melody his song flows at the thought of that blessedness to be enjoyed by future generations on earth!
Shout to each other, and the mountains tops
From distant mountains catch the flying joy;
Till, nation after nation taught the strain,
Earth rolls the rapturous Hosanna round!”
The sum of our comparison is this: In Young we have the type of that deficient human sympathy, that impiety toward the present and the visible, which flies for its motives, its sanctities, and its religion, to the remote, the vague, and the unknown: in Cowper we have the type of that genuine love which cherishes things in proportion to their nearness, and feels its reverence grow in proportion to the intimacy of its knowledge.
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1
specimen
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| n.样本，标本 | |
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specimens
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| n.样品( specimen的名词复数 )；范例；（化验的）抽样；某种类型的人 | |
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3
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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4
verge
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| n.边，边缘；v.接近，濒临 | |
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sycophant
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| n.马屁精 | |
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kin
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| n.家族，亲属，血缘关系；adj.亲属关系的，同类的 | |
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profligate
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| adj.行为不检的；n.放荡的人，浪子，肆意挥霍者 | |
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fulsome
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| adj.可恶的，虚伪的，过分恭维的 | |
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dedications
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| 奉献( dedication的名词复数 )； 献身精神； 教堂的)献堂礼； （书等作品上的）题词 | |
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dedication
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| n.奉献，献身，致力，题献，献辞 | |
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fustian
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| n.浮夸的；厚粗棉布 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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13
mendicancy
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| n.乞丐，托钵，行乞修道士 | |
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prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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advantageous
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| adj.有利的；有帮助的 | |
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momentousness
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| n.重大，重要性 | |
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languishes
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| 长期受苦( languish的第三人称单数 )； 受折磨； 变得（越来越）衰弱； 因渴望而变得憔悴或闷闷不乐 | |
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anguish
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| n.(尤指心灵上的)极度痛苦，烦恼 | |
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19
immortal
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| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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fervid
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| adj.热情的；炽热的 | |
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attachment
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| n.附属物，附件；依恋；依附 | |
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almighty
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| adj.全能的，万能的；很大的，很强的 | |
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meritorious
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| adj.值得赞赏的 | |
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secular
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| n.牧师，凡人；adj.世俗的，现世的，不朽的 | |
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attire
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| v.穿衣，装扮[同]array；n.衣着；盛装 | |
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ornament
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| v.装饰，美化；n.装饰，装饰物 | |
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virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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28
motive
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| n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的 | |
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motives
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| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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30
graveyards
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| 墓地( graveyard的名词复数 )； 垃圾场； 废物堆积处； 收容所 | |
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31
rebuke
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| v.指责，非难，斥责 [反]praise | |
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rebukes
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| 责难或指责( rebuke的第三人称单数 ) | |
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33
immortality
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| n.不死，不朽 | |
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irrational
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| adj.无理性的，失去理性的 | |
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35
knave
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| n.流氓；（纸牌中的）杰克 | |
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brute
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| n.野兽，兽性 | |
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37
humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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38
humbled
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| adj. 卑下的，谦逊的，粗陋的 vt. 使 ... 卑下，贬低 | |
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skulls
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| 颅骨( skull的名词复数 )； 脑袋； 脑子； 脑瓜 | |
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40
skull
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| n.头骨；颅骨 | |
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41
exalt
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| v.赞扬，歌颂，晋升，提升 | |
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42
exalting
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| a.令人激动的，令人喜悦的 | |
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43
Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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44
rhetoric
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| n.修辞学，浮夸之言语 | |
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45
astronomical
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| adj.天文学的，（数字）极大的 | |
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46
lasting
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| adj.永久的，永恒的；vbl.持续，维持 | |
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47
repulsive
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| adj.排斥的，使人反感的 | |
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48
distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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bourgeois
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| adj./n.追求物质享受的(人)；中产阶级分子 | |
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hereditary
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| adj.遗传的，遗传性的，可继承的，世袭的 | |
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51
charcoal
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| n.炭，木炭，生物炭 | |
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52
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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wig
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| n.假发 | |
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dignified
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| a.可敬的，高贵的 | |
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physiology
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| n.生理学，生理机能 | |
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56
psychology
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| n.心理，心理学，心理状态 | |
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57
ascertained
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| v.弄清，确定，查明( ascertain的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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58
paternal
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| adj.父亲的，像父亲的，父系的，父方的 | |
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59
Oxford
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| n.牛津（英国城市） | |
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wardens
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| n.看守人( warden的名词复数 )；管理员；监察员；监察官 | |
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61
bishop
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| n.主教，（国际象棋）象 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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apocryphal
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| adj.假冒的，虚假的 | |
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anecdote
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| n.轶事，趣闻，短故事 | |
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atheist
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| n.无神论者 | |
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originality
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| n.创造力，独创性；新颖 | |
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errs
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| 犯错误，做错事( err的第三人称单数 ) | |
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rant
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| v.咆哮；怒吼；n.大话；粗野的话 | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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parasitic
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| adj.寄生的 | |
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71
flexibility
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| n.柔韧性，弹性，（光的）折射性，灵活性 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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73
intimacy
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| n.熟悉，亲密，密切关系，亲昵的言行 | |
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aggravate
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| vt.加重(剧)，使恶化；激怒，使恼火 | |
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vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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pious
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| adj.虔诚的；道貌岸然的 | |
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77
irony
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| n.反语，冷嘲；具有讽刺意味的事，嘲弄 | |
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poetical
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| adj.似诗人的；诗一般的；韵文的；富有诗意的 | |
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poetic
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| adj.富有诗意的，有诗人气质的，善于抒情的 | |
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insignificant
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| adj.无关紧要的，可忽略的，无意义的 | |
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81
cant
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| n.斜穿，黑话，猛扔 | |
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82
irresistible
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| adj.非常诱人的，无法拒绝的，无法抗拒的 | |
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83
stimulus
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| n.刺激，刺激物，促进因素，引起兴奋的事物 | |
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84
versatile
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| adj.通用的，万用的；多才多艺的，多方面的 | |
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85
ardor
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| n.热情，狂热 | |
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86
baron
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| n.男爵；(商业界等)巨头，大王 | |
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87
deity
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| n.神，神性；被奉若神明的人(或物) | |
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bombast
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| n.高调，夸大之辞 | |
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monarchs
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| 君主，帝王( monarch的名词复数 ) | |
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monarch
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| n.帝王，君主，最高统治者 | |
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majesty
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| n.雄伟，壮丽，庄严，威严；最高权威，王权 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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boundless
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| adj.无限的；无边无际的；巨大的 | |
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bliss
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| n.狂喜，福佑，天赐的福 | |
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behold
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| v.看，注视，看到 | |
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onward
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| adj.向前的，前进的；adv.向前，前进，在先 | |
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reign
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| n.统治时期，统治，支配，盛行；v.占优势 | |
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aged
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| adj.年老的，陈年的 | |
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bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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vanquished
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| v.征服( vanquish的过去式和过去分词 )；战胜；克服；抑制 | |
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101
lament
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| n.悲叹，悔恨，恸哭；v.哀悼，悔恨，悲叹 | |
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extravagant
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| adj.奢侈的；过分的；(言行等)放肆的 | |
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oration
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| n.演说，致辞，叙述法 | |
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104
alacrity
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| n.敏捷，轻快，乐意 | |
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inflated
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| adj.（价格）飞涨的；（通货）膨胀的；言过其实的；充了气的v.使充气（于轮胎、气球等）( inflate的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）膨胀；（使）通货膨胀；物价上涨 | |
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106
panegyric
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| n.颂词，颂扬 | |
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107
sage
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| n.圣人，哲人；adj.贤明的，明智的 | |
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annuity
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| n.年金；养老金 | |
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relinquished
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| 交出，让给( relinquish的过去式和过去分词 )； 放弃 | |
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incurred
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| [医]招致的，遭受的； incur的过去式 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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112
vices
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| 缺陷( vice的名词复数 )； 恶习； 不道德行为； 台钳 | |
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113
advancement
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| n.前进，促进，提升 | |
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114
chancellor
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| n.(英)大臣；法官；(德、奥)总理；大学校长 | |
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115
patronage
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| n.赞助，支援，援助；光顾，捧场 | |
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rev
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| v.发动机旋转，加快速度 | |
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117
virtues
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| 美德( virtue的名词复数 )； 德行； 优点； 长处 | |
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118
accomplishments
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| n.造诣；完成( accomplishment的名词复数 )；技能；成绩；成就 | |
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119
gratitude
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| adj.感激，感谢 | |
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120
bounty
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| n.慷慨的赠予物，奖金；慷慨，大方；施与 | |
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121
generosity
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| n.大度，慷慨，慷慨的行为 | |
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122
humility
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| n.谦逊，谦恭 | |
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123
censure
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| v./n.责备；非难；责难 | |
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124
anecdotes
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| n.掌故，趣闻，轶事( anecdote的名词复数 ) | |
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125
credible
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| adj.可信任的，可靠的 | |
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126
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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127
celebrated
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| adj.有名的，声誉卓著的 | |
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128
retired
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| adj.隐退的，退休的，退役的 | |
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129
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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130
witty
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| adj.机智的，风趣的 | |
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131
remarkably
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| ad.不同寻常地，相当地 | |
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132
renown
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| n.声誉，名望 | |
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133
trump
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| n.王牌，法宝；v.打出王牌，吹喇叭 | |
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134
harp
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| n.竖琴；天琴座 | |
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135
satire
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| n.讽刺，讽刺文学，讽刺作品 | |
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136
satires
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| 讽刺，讥讽( satire的名词复数 )； 讽刺作品 | |
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137
laudatory
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| adj.赞扬的 | |
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138
insinuated
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| v.暗示( insinuate的过去式和过去分词 )；巧妙或迂回地潜入；（使）缓慢进入；慢慢伸入 | |
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139
dedicated
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| adj.一心一意的；献身的；热诚的 | |
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140
miraculous
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| adj.像奇迹一样的，不可思议的 | |
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141
virtuous
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| adj.有品德的，善良的，贞洁的，有效力的 | |
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142
foes
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| 敌人，仇敌( foe的名词复数 ) | |
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143
foe
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| n.敌人，仇敌 | |
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144
hush
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| int.嘘，别出声；n.沉默，静寂；v.使安静 | |
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145
prospective
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| adj.预期的，未来的，前瞻性的 | |
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146
knight
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| n.骑士，武士；爵士 | |
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147
precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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148
advent
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| n.(重要事件等的)到来，来临 | |
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149
inflame
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| v.使燃烧；使极度激动；使发炎 | |
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150
muse
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| n.缪斯（希腊神话中的女神），创作灵感 | |
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151
judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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152
grandeur
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| n.伟大，崇高，宏伟，庄严，豪华 | |
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153
impudence
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| n.厚颜无耻；冒失；无礼 | |
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154
professes
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| 声称( profess的第三人称单数 )； 宣称； 公开表明； 信奉 | |
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155
celestial
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| adj.天体的；天上的 | |
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156
pecuniary
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| adj.金钱的；金钱上的 | |
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157
bounties
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| （由政府提供的）奖金( bounty的名词复数 )； 赏金； 慷慨； 大方 | |
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158
predecessor
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| n.前辈，前任 | |
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159
previously
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| adv.以前，先前（地） | |
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160
tempt
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| vt.引诱，勾引，吸引，引起…的兴趣 | |
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161
tempted
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| v.怂恿（某人）干不正当的事；冒…的险（tempt的过去分词） | |
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162
pruned
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| v.修剪（树木等）( prune的过去式和过去分词 )；精简某事物，除去某事物多余的部分 | |
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163
yearning
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| a.渴望的；向往的；怀念的 | |
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164
retirement
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| n.退休，退职 | |
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165
stanzas
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| 节，段( stanza的名词复数 ) | |
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166
mariners
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| 海员，水手（mariner的复数形式） | |
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167
disarm
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| v.解除武装，回复平常的编制，缓和 | |
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168
slumbers
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| 睡眠，安眠( slumber的名词复数 ) | |
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169
folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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170
rehearsal
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| n.排练，排演；练习 | |
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171
reverence
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| n.敬畏，尊敬，尊严；Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称；v.尊敬，敬畏，崇敬 | |
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172
naval
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| adj.海军的，军舰的，船的 | |
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173
lyric
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| n.抒情诗，歌词；adj.抒情的 | |
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174
audacity
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| n.大胆，卤莽，无礼 | |
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175
zeal
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| n.热心，热情，热忱 | |
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176
humbly
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| adv. 恭顺地，谦卑地 | |
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177
majesties
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| n.雄伟( majesty的名词复数 )；庄严；陛下；王权 | |
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178
subscribe
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| vi.(to)订阅，订购；同意；vt.捐助，赞助 | |
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179
archer
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| n.射手，弓箭手 | |
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180
shaft
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| n.(工具的)柄，杆状物 | |
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181
slain
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| 杀死，宰杀，杀戮( slay的过去分词 )； (slay的过去分词) | |
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182
calamity
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| n.灾害，祸患，不幸事件 | |
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183
climax
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| n.顶点；高潮；v.(使)达到顶点 | |
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184
conjectured
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| 推测，猜测，猜想( conjecture的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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185
futile
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| adj.无效的，无用的，无希望的 | |
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186
necromancer
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| n. 巫师 | |
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187
conjured
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| 用魔术变出( conjure的过去式和过去分词 )； 祈求，恳求； 变戏法； （变魔术般地） 使…出现 | |
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188
demon
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| n.魔鬼，恶魔 | |
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189
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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190
perilous
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| adj.危险的，冒险的 | |
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191
juxtaposition
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| n.毗邻，并置，并列 | |
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192
incessant
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| adj.不停的，连续的 | |
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193
sarcasms
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| n.讥讽，讽刺，挖苦( sarcasm的名词复数 ) | |
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194
worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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195
descended
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| a.为...后裔的，出身于...的 | |
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196
descend
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| vt./vi.传下来，下来，下降 | |
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197
prosaic
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| adj.单调的，无趣的 | |
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198
bestowed
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| 赠给，授予( bestow的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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199
alluded
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| 提及，暗指( allude的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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200
quotations
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| n.引用( quotation的名词复数 )；[商业]行情（报告）；（货物或股票的）市价；时价 | |
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201
lapsed
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| adj.流失的，堕落的v.退步( lapse的过去式和过去分词 )；陷入；倒退；丧失 | |
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202
lapse
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| n.过失，流逝，失效，抛弃信仰，间隔；vi.堕落，停止，失效，流逝；vt.使失效 | |
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203
astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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204
emphatic
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| adj.强调的，着重的；无可置疑的，明显的 | |
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205
bosom
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| n.胸，胸部；胸怀；内心；adj.亲密的 | |
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206
clergy
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| n.[总称]牧师，神职人员 | |
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207
layman
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| n.俗人，门外汉，凡人 | |
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208
paraphrased
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| v.释义，意译( paraphrase的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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209
disparagingly
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| adv.以贬抑的口吻，以轻视的态度 | |
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210
sublime
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| adj.崇高的，伟大的；极度的，不顾后果的 | |
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211
heartily
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| adv.衷心地，诚恳地，十分，很 | |
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212
lodgings
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| n. 出租的房舍, 寄宿舍 | |
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213
sterling
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| adj.英币的(纯粹的，货真价实的)；n.英国货币(英镑) | |
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214
philosophical
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| adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的 | |
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215
ambled
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| v.（马）缓行( amble的过去式和过去分词 )；从容地走，漫步 | |
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216
valiantly
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| adv.勇敢地，英勇地；雄赳赳 | |
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217
velvet
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| n.丝绒，天鹅绒；adj.丝绒制的，柔软的 | |
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218
bask
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| vt.取暖，晒太阳，沐浴于 | |
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219
loyalty
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| n.忠诚，忠心 | |
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220
courteously
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| adv.有礼貌地，亲切地 | |
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221
gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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222
admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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223
wrought
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| v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的 | |
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224
simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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225
implicit
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| a.暗示的，含蓄的，不明晰的，绝对的 | |
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226
predilection
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| n.偏好 | |
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227
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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228
deferred
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| adj.延期的，缓召的v.拖延，延缓，推迟( defer的过去式和过去分词 )；服从某人的意愿，遵从 | |
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229
demise
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| n.死亡；v.让渡，遗赠，转让 | |
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230
centaur
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| n.人首马身的怪物 | |
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231
fabulous
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| adj.极好的；极为巨大的；寓言中的，传说中的 | |
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232
estrangement
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| n.疏远，失和，不和 | |
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233
embittered
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| v.使怨恨，激怒( embitter的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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234
discreet
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| adj.(言行)谨慎的；慎重的；有判断力的 | |
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235
housekeeper
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| n.管理家务的主妇，女管家 | |
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236
pinions
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| v.抓住[捆住]（双臂）( pinion的第三人称单数 ) | |
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237
piety
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| n.虔诚，虔敬 | |
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238
satiric
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| adj.讽刺的，挖苦的 | |
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239
banished
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| v.放逐，驱逐( banish的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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240
derived
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| vi.起源；由来；衍生；导出v.得到( derive的过去式和过去分词 )；（从…中）得到获得；源于；（从…中）提取 | |
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241
candid
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| adj.公正的，正直的；坦率的 | |
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242
Amended
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| adj. 修正的 动词amend的过去式和过去分词 | |
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243
queries
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| n.问题( query的名词复数 )；疑问；询问；问号v.质疑，对…表示疑问( query的第三人称单数 )；询问 | |
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244
mitigates
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| v.减轻，缓和( mitigate的第三人称单数 ) | |
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245
infliction
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| n.（强加于人身的）痛苦，刑罚 | |
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246
inflict
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| vt.(on)把…强加给，使遭受，使承担 | |
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247
poultry
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| n.家禽，禽肉 | |
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248
confinement
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| n.幽禁，拘留，监禁；分娩；限制，局限 | |
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249
considerably
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| adv.极大地；相当大地；在很大程度上 | |
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250
predecessors
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| n.前任( predecessor的名词复数 )；前辈；（被取代的）原有事物；前身 | |
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251
postscript
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|
| n.附言，又及；(正文后的)补充说明 | |
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252
rust
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| n.锈；v.生锈；(脑子)衰退 | |
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253
dint
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| n.由于，靠；凹坑 | |
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254
procure
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| vt.获得，取得，促成；vi.拉皮条 | |
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255
recur
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| vi.复发，重现，再发生 | |
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256
eligible
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| adj.有条件被选中的；(尤指婚姻等)合适(意)的 | |
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257
dissuade
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| v.劝阻，阻止 | |
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258
decency
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| n.体面，得体，合宜，正派，庄重 | |
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259
interval
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|
| n.间隔，间距；幕间休息，中场休息 | |
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260
intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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261
speculative
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| adj.思索性的，暝想性的，推理的 | |
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262
obstruction
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| n.阻塞，堵塞；障碍物 | |
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263
lucrative
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| adj.赚钱的，可获利的 | |
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264
entreaties
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| n.恳求，乞求( entreaty的名词复数 ) | |
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265
recurs
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| 再发生，复发( recur的第三人称单数 ) | |
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266
untoward
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| adj.不利的，不幸的，困难重重的 | |
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267
surmises
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| v.臆测，推断( surmise的第三人称单数 )；揣测；猜想 | |
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268
prudent
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| adj.谨慎的，有远见的，精打细算的 | |
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269
discourse
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| n.论文，演说；谈话；话语；vi.讲述，著述 | |
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270
affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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271
legacies
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| n.遗产( legacy的名词复数 )；遗留之物；遗留问题；后遗症 | |
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272
applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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273
submission
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| n.服从，投降；温顺，谦虚；提出 | |
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274
blessing
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| n.祈神赐福；祷告；祝福，祝愿 | |
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275
legacy
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| n.遗产，遗赠；先人(或过去)留下的东西 | |
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276
confidential
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| adj.秘（机）密的，表示信任的，担任机密工作的 | |
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277
eulogy
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| n.颂词；颂扬 | |
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278
variance
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| n.矛盾，不同 | |
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279
omission
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| n.省略，删节；遗漏或省略的事物，冗长 | |
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280
questionable
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| adj.可疑的，有问题的 | |
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281
testimony
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|
| n.证词；见证，证明 | |
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282
conversed
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| v.交谈，谈话( converse的过去式 ) | |
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283
pretensions
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| 自称( pretension的名词复数 )； 自命不凡； 要求； 权力 | |
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284
pertinacity
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| n.执拗，顽固 | |
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285
benevolence
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| n.慈悲，捐助 | |
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286
intercourse
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| n.性交；交流，交往，交际 | |
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287
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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288
frail
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| adj.身体虚弱的；易损坏的 | |
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289
shrouding
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| n.覆盖v.隐瞒( shroud的现在分词 )；保密 | |
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290
predilections
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|
| n.偏爱，偏好，嗜好( predilection的名词复数 ) | |
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291
enjoyment
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| n.乐趣；享有；享用 | |
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292
extrinsic
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| adj.外部的；不紧要的 | |
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293
stilted
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| adj.虚饰的；夸张的 | |
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294
obedience
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| n.服从，顺从 | |
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295
eminent
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| adj.显赫的，杰出的，有名的，优良的 | |
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296
eminently
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| adv.突出地；显著地；不寻常地 | |
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297
sincerity
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| n.真诚，诚意；真实 | |
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298
conspicuously
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| ad.明显地，惹人注目地 | |
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299
deficient
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| adj.不足的，不充份的，有缺陷的 | |
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300
versatility
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| n.多才多艺，多样性，多功能 | |
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301
faculty
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| n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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302
meditations
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| 默想( meditation的名词复数 )； 默念； 沉思； 冥想 | |
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303
transparent
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| adj.明显的，无疑的；透明的 | |
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304
jealousy
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| n.妒忌，嫉妒，猜忌 | |
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305
solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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306
diluted
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| 无力的，冲淡的 | |
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307
brink
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| n.(悬崖、河流等的)边缘，边沿 | |
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308
bias
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| n.偏见，偏心，偏袒；vt.使有偏见 | |
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309
scythe
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| n. 长柄的大镰刀，战车镰； v. 以大镰刀割 | |
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310
dilution
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| n.稀释，淡化 | |
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311
decrepit
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| adj.衰老的，破旧的 | |
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312
omnipotence
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| n.全能，万能，无限威力 | |
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313
stun
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| vt.打昏，使昏迷，使震惊，使惊叹 | |
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314
speck
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| n.微粒，小污点，小斑点 | |
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315
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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316
abject
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| adj.极可怜的，卑屈的 | |
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317
wondrous
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|
| adj.令人惊奇的，奇妙的；adv.惊人地；异乎寻常地；令人惊叹地 | |
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318
demons
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| n.恶人( demon的名词复数 )；恶魔；精力过人的人；邪念 | |
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319
platitudes
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| n.平常的话，老生常谈，陈词滥调( platitude的名词复数 )；滥套子 | |
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320
platitude
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| n.老生常谈，陈词滥调 | |
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321
cloys
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| v.发腻，倒胃口( cloy的第三人称单数 ) | |
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322
rapture
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| n.狂喜；全神贯注；着迷；v.使狂喜 | |
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323
raptures
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| 极度欢喜( rapture的名词复数 ) | |
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324
kindles
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| （使某物）燃烧，着火( kindle的第三人称单数 )； 激起（感情等）； 发亮，放光 | |
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325
subsist
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|
| vi.生存，存在，供养 | |
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326
palls
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| n.柩衣( pall的名词复数 )；墓衣；棺罩；深色或厚重的覆盖物v.（因过多或过久而）生厌，感到乏味，厌烦( pall的第三人称单数 ) | |
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327
distress
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|
| n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛 | |
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328
anticipation
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| n.预期，预料，期望 | |
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329
homage
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| n.尊敬，敬意，崇敬 | |
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330
vaulting
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| n.（天花板或屋顶的）拱形结构 | |
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331
sublimity
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| 崇高，庄严，气质高尚 | |
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332
wail
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|
| vt./vi.大声哀号，恸哭；呼啸，尖啸 | |
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333
animate
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| v.赋于生命，鼓励；adj.有生命的，有生气的 | |
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334
felicitous
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|
| adj.恰当的，巧妙的；n.恰当，贴切 | |
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335
counteracted
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| 对抗，抵消( counteract的过去式 ) | |
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336
constraint
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|
| n.(on)约束，限制；限制(或约束)性的事物 | |
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337
reclaimed
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|
| adj.再生的；翻造的；收复的；回收的v.开拓( reclaim的过去式和过去分词 )；要求收回；从废料中回收（有用的材料）；挽救 | |
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338
rein
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|
| n.疆绳，统治，支配；vt.以僵绳控制，统治 | |
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339
witticisms
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|
| n.妙语，俏皮话( witticism的名词复数 ) | |
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340
witticism
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| n.谐语，妙语 | |
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341
susceptible
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|
| adj.过敏的，敏感的；易动感情的，易受感动的 | |
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342
superfluous
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|
| adj.过多的，过剩的，多余的 | |
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343
inversion
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| n.反向，倒转，倒置 | |
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344
conceals
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| v.隐藏，隐瞒，遮住( conceal的第三人称单数 ) | |
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345
requisite
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|
| adj.需要的，必不可少的；n.必需品 | |
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346
counteractive
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| 反对的，反作用的，抵抗的 | |
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347
electrifying
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| v.使电气化( electrify的现在分词 )；使兴奋 | |
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348
grimaces
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| n.（表蔑视、厌恶等）面部扭曲，鬼脸( grimace的名词复数 )v.扮鬼相，做鬼脸( grimace的第三人称单数 ) | |
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349
comedian
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| n.喜剧演员；滑稽演员 | |
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350
grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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351
countenance
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| n.脸色，面容；面部表情；vt.支持，赞同 | |
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352
satirist
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| n.讽刺诗作者，讽刺家，爱挖苦别人的人 | |
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353
vigor
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| n.活力，精力，元气 | |
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354
absurdities
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| n.极端无理性( absurdity的名词复数 )；荒谬；谬论；荒谬的行为 | |
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355
epithets
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| n.（表示性质、特征等的）词语( epithet的名词复数 ) | |
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356
epithet
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| n.（用于褒贬人物等的）表述形容词，修饰语 | |
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357
antithesis
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| n.对立；相对 | |
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358
fatigues
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| n.疲劳( fatigue的名词复数 )；杂役；厌倦；（士兵穿的）工作服 | |
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359
zest
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| n.乐趣；滋味，风味；兴趣 | |
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360
follies
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| 罪恶，时事讽刺剧； 愚蠢，蠢笨，愚蠢的行为、思想或做法( folly的名词复数 ) | |
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361
sketch
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| n.草图；梗概；素描；v.素描；概述 | |
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362
stratagem
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| n.诡计，计谋 | |
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363
belle
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| n.靓女 | |
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364
vouchsafing
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| v.给予，赐予( vouchsafe的现在分词 )；允诺 | |
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365
elegance
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| n.优雅；优美，雅致；精致，巧妙 | |
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366
lampooner
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| n.讽刺文作者 | |
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367
malice
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| n.恶意，怨恨，蓄意；[律]预谋 | |
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368
piquant
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| adj.辛辣的，开胃的，令人兴奋的 | |
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369
sketching
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| n.草图 | |
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370
recurring
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| adj.往复的，再次发生的 | |
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371
inevitably
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| adv.不可避免地；必然发生地 | |
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372
bribe
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| n.贿赂；v.向…行贿，买通 | |
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373
imminent
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| adj.即将发生的，临近的，逼近的 | |
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374
morbid
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| adj.病的；致病的；病态的；可怕的 | |
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375
desolate
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|
| adj.荒凉的，荒芜的；孤独的，凄凉的；v.使荒芜，使孤寂 | |
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376
populous
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|
| adj.人口稠密的，人口众多的 | |
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377
lustre
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| n.光亮，光泽；荣誉 | |
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378
dreary
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| adj.令人沮丧的，沉闷的，单调乏味的 | |
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379
pang
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| n.剧痛，悲痛，苦闷 | |
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380
bereaved
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|
| adj.刚刚丧失亲人的v.使失去（希望、生命等）( bereave的过去式和过去分词)；（尤指死亡）使丧失（亲人、朋友等）；使孤寂；抢走（财物） | |
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381
criticise
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|
| v.批评，评论；非难 | |
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382
compassionate
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|
| adj.有同情心的，表示同情的 | |
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383
compassion
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| n.同情，怜悯 | |
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384
varied
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|
| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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385
posture
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| n.姿势，姿态，心态，态度；v.作出某种姿势 | |
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386
perversely
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|
| adv. 倔强地 | |
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387
perfectly
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|
| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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388
elastic
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|
| n.橡皮圈，松紧带；adj.有弹性的；灵活的 | |
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389
rigor
|
|
| n.严酷，严格，严厉 | |
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390
drawn
|
|
| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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391
radical
|
|
| n.激进份子，原子团，根号；adj.根本的，激进的，彻底的 | |
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392
texture
|
|
| n.(织物)质地；(材料)构造；结构；肌理 | |
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393
bombastic
|
|
| adj.夸夸其谈的，言过其实的 | |
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394
absurdity
|
|
| n.荒谬，愚蠢；谬论 | |
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395
grandiloquence
|
|
| n.夸张之言，豪言壮语，豪语 | |
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396
grandiloquent
|
|
| adj.夸张的 | |
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397
inanity
|
|
| n.无意义，无聊 | |
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398
habitually
|
|
| ad.习惯地，通常地 | |
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399
descants
|
|
| n.多声部音乐中的上方声部( descant的名词复数 ) | |
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400
eternity
|
|
| n.不朽，来世；永恒，无穷 | |
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401
proximity
|
|
| n.接近，邻近 | |
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402
monstrous
|
|
| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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403
unnatural
|
|
| adj.不自然的；反常的 | |
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404
utterly
|
|
| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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405
aspirations
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|
| 强烈的愿望( aspiration的名词复数 )； 志向； 发送气音； 发 h 音 | |
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406
guise
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|
| n.外表，伪装的姿态 | |
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407
truthful
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|
| adj.真实的，说实话的，诚实的 | |
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408
awe
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|
| n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧 | |
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409
impiety
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|
| n.不敬；不孝 | |
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410
reposing
|
|
| v.将（手臂等）靠在某人（某物）上( repose的现在分词 ) | |
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411
fumes
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|
| n.(强烈而刺激的)气味，气体 | |
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412
eloquence
|
|
| n.雄辩；口才，修辞 | |
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413
guilt
|
|
| n.犯罪；内疚；过失，罪责 | |
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414
explicitly
|
|
| ad.明确地，显然地 | |
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415
teeming
|
|
| adj.丰富的v.充满( teem的现在分词 )；到处都是；（指水、雨等）暴降；倾注 | |
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416
doting
|
|
| adj.溺爱的，宠爱的 | |
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417
relish
|
|
| n.滋味，享受，爱好，调味品；vt.加调味料，享受，品味；vi.有滋味 | |
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418
innocence
|
|
| n.无罪；天真；无害 | |
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419
revolves
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|
| v.（使）旋转( revolve的第三人称单数 )；细想 | |
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420
bounteous
|
|
| adj.丰富的 | |
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421
amiable
|
|
| adj.和蔼可亲的，友善的，亲切的 | |
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422
sublimely
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|
| 高尚地，卓越地 | |
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423
azure
|
|
| adj.天蓝色的，蔚蓝色的 | |
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424
peal
|
|
| n.钟声；v.鸣响 | |
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425
wilderness
|
|
| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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426
villas
|
|
| 别墅，公馆( villa的名词复数 )； （城郊）住宅 | |
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427
descending
|
|
| n. 下行 adj. 下降的 | |
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428
allusion
|
|
| n.暗示，间接提示 | |
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429
allusions
|
|
| 暗指，间接提到( allusion的名词复数 ) | |
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430
injustice
|
|
| n.非正义，不公正，不公平，侵犯（别人的）权利 | |
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431
brook
|
|
| n.小河，溪；v.忍受，容让 | |
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432
mingle
|
|
| vt.使混合，使相混；vi.混合起来；相交往 | |
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433
mingled
|
|
| 混合，混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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434
evergreen
|
|
| n.常青树；adj.四季常青的 | |
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435
adherence
|
|
| n.信奉，依附，坚持，固着 | |
参考例句： |
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436
allied
|
|
| adj.协约国的；同盟国的 | |
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437
serene
|
|
| adj. 安详的，宁静的，平静的 | |
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438
dwelling
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|
| n.住宅，住所，寓所 | |
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439
courageous
|
|
| adj.勇敢的，有胆量的 | |
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440
resentment
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|
| n.怨愤，忿恨 | |
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441
orator
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|
| n.演说者，演讲者，雄辩家 | |
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442
eloquently
|
|
| adv. 雄辩地(有口才地, 富于表情地) | |
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443
throb
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|
| v.震颤，颤动；(急速强烈地)跳动，搏动 | |
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444
implicitly
|
|
| adv. 含蓄地, 暗中地, 毫不保留地 | |
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445
vividly
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|
| adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地 | |
参考例句： |
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446
repels
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|
| v.击退( repel的第三人称单数 )；使厌恶；排斥；推开 | |
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447
miserable
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|
| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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448
superstition
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|
| n.迷信，迷信行为 | |
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449
hatred
|
|
| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
参考例句： |
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450
vengeance
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|
| n.报复，报仇，复仇 | |
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451
contemplating
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|
| 深思，细想，仔细考虑( contemplate的现在分词 )； 注视，凝视； 考虑接受（发生某事的可能性）； 深思熟虑，沉思，苦思冥想 | |
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452
execration
|
|
| n.诅咒，念咒，憎恶 | |
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453
kindled
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|
| （使某物）燃烧，着火( kindle的过去式和过去分词 )； 激起（感情等）； 发亮，放光 | |
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454
savage
|
|
| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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455
odiously
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|
| Odiously | |
参考例句： |
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456
depict
|
|
| vt.描画，描绘；描写，描述 | |
参考例句： |
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457
hideous
|
|
| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
参考例句： |
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458
abode
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|
| n.住处，住所 | |
参考例句： |
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459
exalts
|
|
| 赞扬( exalt的第三人称单数 )； 歌颂； 提升； 提拔 | |
参考例句： |
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460
prudence
|
|
| n.谨慎，精明，节俭 | |
参考例句： |
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461
swollen
|
|
| adj.肿大的，水涨的；v.使变大，肿胀 | |
参考例句： |
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462
negation
|
|
| n.否定；否认 | |
参考例句： |
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463
consistency
|
|
| n.一贯性，前后一致，稳定性；(液体的)浓度 | |
参考例句： |
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464
ethics
|
|
| n.伦理学；伦理观，道德标准 | |
参考例句： |
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465
unpaid
|
|
| adj.未付款的，无报酬的 | |
参考例句： |
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466
revel
|
|
| vi.狂欢作乐，陶醉；n.作乐，狂欢 | |
参考例句： |
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467
avarice
|
|
| n.贪婪；贪心 | |
参考例句： |
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468
plank
|
|
| n.板条，木板，政策要点，政纲条目 | |
参考例句： |
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|
469
labor
|
|
| n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦 | |
参考例句： |
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470
slay
|
|
| v.杀死，宰杀，杀戮 | |
参考例句： |
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471
parricide
|
|
| n.杀父母；杀亲罪 | |
参考例句： |
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|
472
insufficient
|
|
| adj.(for，of)不足的，不够的 | |
参考例句： |
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473
opposition
|
|
| n.反对，敌对 | |
参考例句： |
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474
attained
|
|
| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的过去式和过去分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
参考例句： |
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475
sonata
|
|
| n.奏鸣曲 | |
参考例句： |
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|
476
pique
|
|
| v.伤害…的自尊心，使生气 n.不满，生气 | |
参考例句： |
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|
477
doctrine
|
|
| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
参考例句： |
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478
well-being
|
|
| n.安康，安乐，幸福 | |
参考例句： |
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479
participation
|
|
| n.参与，参加，分享 | |
参考例句： |
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|
480
intensification
|
|
| n.激烈化，增强明暗度；加厚 | |
参考例句： |
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481
pathos
|
|
| n.哀婉，悲怆 | |
参考例句： |
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482
proprietors
|
|
| n.所有人，业主( proprietor的名词复数 ) | |
参考例句： |
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483
dread
|
|
| vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧 | |
参考例句： |
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484
decries
|
|
| v.公开反对，谴责( decry的第三人称单数 ) | |
参考例句： |
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485
brutes
|
|
| 兽( brute的名词复数 )； 畜生； 残酷无情的人； 兽性 | |
参考例句： |
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486
fathomless
|
|
| a.深不可测的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
487
fathom
|
|
| v.领悟，彻底了解 | |
参考例句： |
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|
488
buoys
|
|
| n.浮标( buoy的名词复数 )；航标；救生圈；救生衣v.使浮起( buoy的第三人称单数 )；支持；为…设浮标；振奋…的精神 | |
参考例句： |
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|
489
sediments
|
|
| 沉淀物( sediment的名词复数 )； 沉积物 | |
参考例句： |
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|
490
certified
|
|
| a.经证明合格的；具有证明文件的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
491
benevolent
|
|
| adj.仁慈的，乐善好施的 | |
参考例句： |
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492
maim
|
|
| v.使残废，使不能工作，使伤残 | |
参考例句： |
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|
493
colossal
|
|
| adj.异常的，庞大的 | |
参考例句： |
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494
discourses
|
|
| 论文( discourse的名词复数 )； 演说； 讲道； 话语 | |
参考例句： |
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|
495
consolation
|
|
| n.安慰，慰问 | |
参考例句： |
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|
496
exuberant
|
|
| adj.充满活力的；（植物）繁茂的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
497
descends
|
|
| v.下来( descend的第三人称单数 )；下去；下降；下斜 | |
参考例句： |
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|
498
groans
|
|
| n.呻吟，叹息( groan的名词复数 )；呻吟般的声音v.呻吟( groan的第三人称单数 )；发牢骚；抱怨；受苦 | |
参考例句： |
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|
499
throng
|
|
| n.人群，群众；v.拥挤，群集 | |
参考例句： |
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|
500
abodes
|
|
| 住所( abode的名词复数 )； 公寓； （在某地的）暂住； 逗留 | |
参考例句： |
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501
ambrosial
|
|
| adj.美味的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
502
exquisite
|
|
| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
503
delicacy
|
|
| n.精致，细微，微妙，精良；美味，佳肴 | |
参考例句： |
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504
wards
|
|
| 区( ward的名词复数 )； 病房； 受监护的未成年者； 被人照顾或控制的状态 | |
参考例句： |
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|
505
hurls
|
|
| v.猛投，用力掷( hurl的第三人称单数 )；大声叫骂 | |
参考例句： |
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|
506
resounds
|
|
| v.（指声音等）回荡于某处( resound的第三人称单数 )；产生回响；（指某处）回荡着声音 | |
参考例句： |
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|
507
melancholy
|
|
| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
508
blessings
|
|
| n.（上帝的）祝福( blessing的名词复数 )；好事；福分；因祸得福 | |
参考例句： |
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|
509
fiery
|
|
| adj.燃烧着的，火红的；暴躁的；激烈的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
|
510
gulf
|
|
| n.海湾；深渊，鸿沟；分歧，隔阂 | |
参考例句： |
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|
511
wrath
|
|
| n.愤怒，愤慨，暴怒 | |
参考例句： |
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|
512
omnipotent
|
|
| adj.全能的，万能的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
513
wholesome
|
|
| adj.适合；卫生的；有益健康的；显示身心健康的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
514
averts
|
|
| 防止，避免( avert的第三人称单数 )； 转移 | |
参考例句： |
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|
515
dreaded
|
|
| adj.令人畏惧的；害怕的v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的过去式和过去分词) | |
参考例句： |
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|
516
exuberance
|
|
| n.丰富；繁荣 | |
参考例句： |
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|
517
vindicate
|
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| v.为…辩护或辩解，辩明；证明…正确 | |
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518
ethical
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| adj.伦理的，道德的，合乎道德的 | |
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519
forsake
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| vt.遗弃，抛弃；舍弃，放弃 | |
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520
perceptive
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| adj.知觉的，有洞察力的，感知的 | |
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521
innate
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| adj.天生的，固有的，天赋的 | |
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522
labored
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| adj.吃力的，谨慎的v.努力争取(for)( labor的过去式和过去分词 )；苦干；详细分析；（指引擎）缓慢而困难地运转 | |
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523
affinity
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| n.亲和力，密切关系 | |
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524
mingles
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| 混合，混入( mingle的第三人称单数 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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525
watts
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| （电力计量单位）瓦，瓦特( watt的名词复数 ) | |
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526
ardent
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，强烈的，烈性的 | |
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527
overflow
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| v.(使)外溢，(使)溢出；溢出，流出，漫出 | |
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528
flux
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| n.流动；不断的改变 | |
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529
wailing
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| v.哭叫，哀号( wail的现在分词 )；沱 | |
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530
parenthesis
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|
| n.圆括号，插入语，插曲，间歇，停歇 | |
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531
creed
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| n.信条；信念，纲领 | |
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532
miscreant
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|
| n.恶棍 | |
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533
unlimited
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|
| adj.无限的，不受控制的，无条件的 | |
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534
disposition
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| n.性情，性格；意向，倾向；排列，部署 | |
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535
instructor
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|
| n.指导者，教员，教练 | |
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536
perusal
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| n.细读，熟读；目测 | |
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537
insistence
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| n.坚持；强调；坚决主张 | |
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538
recurrence
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|
| n.复发，反复，重现 | |
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539
fatiguing
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|
| a.使人劳累的 | |
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540
monotonous
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|
| adj.单调的，一成不变的，使人厌倦的 | |
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541
renounced
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| v.声明放弃( renounce的过去式和过去分词 )；宣布放弃；宣布与…决裂；宣布摒弃 | |
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542
prone
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|
| adj.(to)易于…的，很可能…的；俯卧的 | |
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543
enthralled
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|
| 迷住，吸引住( enthrall的过去式和过去分词 )； 使感到非常愉快 | |
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544
graceful
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|
| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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545
salvation
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|
| n.（尤指基督）救世，超度，拯救，解困 | |
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546
truthfulness
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|
| n. 符合实际 | |
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547
pompous
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|
| adj.傲慢的，自大的；夸大的；豪华的 | |
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548
spoutless
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|
| adj.无喷口的 | |
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549
dingy
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|
| adj.昏暗的，肮脏的 | |
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550
edify
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|
| v.陶冶；教化；启发 | |
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551
supercilious
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|
| adj.目中无人的，高傲的；adv.高傲地；n.高傲 | |
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552
wrenched
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|
| v.（猛力地）扭( wrench的过去式和过去分词 )；扭伤；使感到痛苦；使悲痛 | |
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553
petrified
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|
| adj.惊呆的；目瞪口呆的v.使吓呆，使惊呆；变僵硬；使石化(petrify的过去式和过去分词) | |
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554
ascends
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|
| v.上升，攀登( ascend的第三人称单数 ) | |
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555
beech
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|
| n.山毛榉；adj.山毛榉的 | |
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556
perks
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| 额外津贴，附带福利，外快( perk的名词复数 ) | |
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557
insignificantly
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558
curt
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| adj.简短的，草率的 | |
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559
reproof
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|
| n.斥责，责备 | |
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560
melodious
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|
| adj.旋律美妙的，调子优美的，音乐性的 | |
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561
utterance
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|
| n.用言语表达，话语，言语 | |
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562
augment
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|
| vt.(使)增大，增加，增长，扩张 | |
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563
hearth
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|
| n.壁炉炉床，壁炉地面 | |
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564
cowering
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|
| v.畏缩，抖缩( cower的现在分词 ) | |
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565
exhortations
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|
| n.敦促( exhortation的名词复数 )；极力推荐；（正式的）演讲；（宗教仪式中的）劝诫 | |
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566
meditate
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| v.想，考虑，（尤指宗教上的）沉思，冥想 | |
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567
scrupulous
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|
| adj.审慎的，小心翼翼的，完全的，纯粹的 | |
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568
remonstrance
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| n抗议，抱怨 | |
参考例句： |
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569
mutual
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|
| adj.相互的，彼此的；共同的，共有的 | |
参考例句： |
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570
dependence
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|
| n.依靠，依赖；信任，信赖；隶属 | |
参考例句： |
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571
obdurate
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|
| adj.固执的，顽固的 | |
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572
scent
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| n.气味，香味，香水，线索，嗅觉；v.嗅，发觉 | |
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573
majestic
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|
| adj.雄伟的，壮丽的，庄严的，威严的，崇高的 | |
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574
dross
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|
| n.渣滓；无用之物 | |
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575
belches
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|
| n.嗳气( belch的名词复数 )；喷吐；喷出物v.打嗝( belch的第三人称单数 )；喷出，吐出；打（嗝）；嗳（气） | |
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576
voracious
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|
| adj.狼吞虎咽的，贪婪的 | |
参考例句： |
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577
jaws
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|
| n.口部；嘴 | |
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578
supreme
|
|
| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
参考例句： |
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579
propitious
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|
| adj.吉利的；顺利的 | |
参考例句： |
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580
dwellers
|
|
| n.居民，居住者( dweller的名词复数 ) | |
参考例句： |
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