“There is no flesh in man’s obdurate heart:
_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—
“Happy who walks with him! whom what he finds
Of flavor or of scent in fruit or flower,
Or what he views of beautiful or grand
In nature, from the broad, majestic oak
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,
“And now, all dross removed, Heaven’s own pure day,
Full on the confines of our ether, flames:
While (dreadful contrast!) far (how far!) beneath,
Hell, bursting, belches forth her blazing seas,
And storms suphureous; her voracious jaws
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 Supreme
“Shall visit earth in mercy; shall descend
Propitious 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!
“The dwellers in the vales and on the rocks
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.