On Dr. Young's Night Thoughts
Nights Thoughts – What are they? what is night and thought?
Night is a sable Gloom that covers all things
Below the Skies; here colour, form, and space
Promiscuous undistinguishable lie,
Save where when the silver Moon in her pale Lustre 5
Emit[s] her feeble Rays and glimering snows
To represent Reason’s dimsighted beam.
And what is thought? thought is the child of reason
By understanding or by Ignorance receiv’d
By wit or and Judgment or its stepdame folly. 10
Borne on the Wings of fancy round the Globe,
Above, Below, fleeting from World to World
Or else by Dullness clogg’d and fetter’d down,
Slowly it creeps along from thing to thing.
Young’s is a Moonshine Night – here reason’s child 15
Is nurs’d by Understanding, Wit, and Judgment.
Fancy too lends her aid and bears his thought.
Above the Sceptic’s reach who falsely boasts
A power of thinking; free deluded mortals,
Freethinkers, cannot dare nor think of bliss 20
Beyond the Grave, a bliss they cannot reach,
And misery at Death they would not think of.
Viler than brutes they spend their transient life
And therefore wish (in vain) like them to perish.
Not so ^the^ good the Man; he with boundless view 25
Joyful contemplates immortality.
Thrice happy Young, whose heavenly pen instructs
A Child in thought ambitiously to soar
Above this clod of Earth, above this bubble world,
Beyond this narrow span, this fleeting point 30
Of Life, he kindly wafts the flying thought
To yon unnumber’d Worlds, those glittering specks
Which we call Stars, freely to roam among them
And praise the wise omnipotent Creator.
And Our thoughts by his assisted climb above 35
Those unknown Worlds to Realms of bright glory,
Where God enthron’d in Majesty supreme
Smiles Happiness unspeakeable around.
Thought falters here – unable to conceive
The least, the thousandth part, of half the bliss 40
Abounding there. –
April 4, 1748
Text: Steele Collection, 10/2, Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford; also Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 4, p. 132.