By divesting it self of Religion [modern poetry] is fallen from its Dignity, and its original Nature and Excellence; and from the greatest Production of the Mind of Man, is dwindled to an extravagant and vain Amusement.

(Critical Works, I, p. 365)

Milton provided Dennis with the most recent example of an outstanding religious writer, and echoes of Paradise Lost can be found in a great deal of eighteenth-century poetry, not least in Night Thoughts. More distant in time, but no less influential, were the Old Testament writings, which, in the course of Young's lifetime, came to be appreciated in aesthetic and imaginative, as well as in theological, terms—as great literature as well as scripture, as potent examples of the oriental spirit which had also inspired the classical authors:

If not inspir'd, that pregnant Page had stood,
Time's Treasure! and the Wonder of the Wise!
(VIII. 775-6)

Many poets, hoping to inject some of the Bible's literary qualities into their verse, paraphrased well-known passages of scripture. In 1719 Young had written a paraphrase on part of what he called 'the noblest, and most antient Poem in the World', claiming that for 'Spirit in Thought, and Energy in Style … Eastern Poetry', like the book of Job, outshone the epics of Homer and Virgil (A Paraphrase on Job, notes to page I; The Guardian, II, p. 14). Young experienced in the apparent spontaneity of Old Testament literature the same exhilarating sensation of freedom that Cowley had felt on observing that the prophets 'pass from one thing to another with almost Invisible connexions' (Poems, p. 214n), and that Robert Lowth would analyse in his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, delivered in Oxford in the 1740s:

Naturally free, and of too ardent a spirit to be confined by rule, [poetry of the prophetic kind] is usually guided by the nature of the subject only, and the impulse of divine inspiration. (II, p. 69)

… the nature of the prophetic impulse … bears away the mind with irresistible violence, and frequently in rapid transitions from near to remote objects, from human to divine.

(II, pp. 85-6)

In Night Thoughts, Young overtly aspired to the free and limitless style of the Hebrew prophet-poets. 'The Method pursued in it'—he wrote in his Preface—'was rather imposed, by what spontaneously arose in the Author's Mind, on that Occasion, than meditated, or designed.' Young's method reflects the influence of Locke, who had observed 'what passes in our Minds, how our Ideas there in train constantly some vanish, and others begin to appear' (Essay, p. 195). It also reflects the popularity of the 'Pindaric' ode in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 'Rapturous, somewhat abrupt, and immethodical to a vulgar Eye' (Young, Ocean. An Ode, p. 19), these odes epitomised greatness and freedom, 'unconstricted versing, formless form' (M. A. Doody, The Daring Muse, p. 250). In the interests of poetic freedom, Night Thoughts casts off what Young had come to feel was the 'shackle', or 'manacle', or 'fetter', of rhyme.¹ Young's Conjectures on Original Composition propagates the ideal by explicitly associating the poet's sublime aspirations with blank verse: 'verse unfallen, uncurst; verse reclaim'd, reinthron'd in the true language of the gods; who never thunder'd, nor suffer'd their Homer to thunder, in rhime' (Conjectures, p. 60).

With hindsight, it is clear that English poets (such as Smart and Blake) were able to take on the mantle of the biblical writers only after they had absorbed Lowth's discovery of such Hebrew prosodic techniques as 'parallelism'. Young's metrics now sound traditional: the couplet dominates in Night Thoughts even in its absence, and the poem's diction is often just as constrained as that of the rhyming Paraphrase on Job. Many of Young's contemporaries, however, thought his blank verse integral to the formless, inspirational style, which in turn seemed particularly appropriate to the Christian rememberer meditating on the tombs:

Life glides away, Lorenzo!, like a Brook;
For ever changing, unperceiv'd the Change.
(V. 401-2)

The formlessness, the freedom and the blank verse appealed equally to the secular, associative poet. In The Prelude, the river recurs as an image of the progress of the human mind, and of the poem; and the style of Night Thoughts must have seemed highly congenial to a poet who thought his task was to awake the

In essence, this was also Young's ambition in Night Thoughts. Evoking the religious excitement of the Old Testament writers, Young intended to show what could still be done in poetry to speak in an heroic strain of the sublime theme of Christian salvation. Moving from complaint to consolation, from atheism to a hope of immortality, the poem is an apology for Christian dogma. At one level it is therefore a moral dissertation which marshals arguments and evidences for the proof of doctrines which eighteenth-century Christians thought could be proved or disproved. Young made no attempt to disguise the hortatory nature of his poem. He is just as severe as Dennis on those who write or read poetry for fashionable but fruitless ends (II.456-60). He extols sacred wisdom over mere wit (VIII. 1237-49), asking 'Who wants Amusement in the Flame of Battle?' (II.62). He wants 'no trivial, or inglorious Thème' (VII. 1474). But Christian morality also inspires the soul to 'soar':

I find my Inspiration in my Theme;
The Grandeur of my Subject is my Muse.
(IX. 195-6)

The life of virtue recommended by the Christian priest culminates in the Christian poet's encounter with God (IX.580). Young and his Christian reader would not have consciously separated the poem's pedagogy from its sublimity. Temporal piety was conditioned by a transcendent hope, and true religion was the starting point for the sublime imaginer.

The passing of time (IX.298), the transience of fame (VIII.500-10), and the decline of empire (VII. 1033) prompted sublime thoughts in Young, but most of his illustrations of 'a Sublimity, that frightens, astonishes, and ravishes the Mind of a Reader' (Aaron Hill, The Creation, p. 7), he found in the Bible. Mount Sinai, the Red Sea, the sons of Korah, the fiery furnace of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (VII. 1108-16), Leviathan (VIII.36), Samson (IX.2431), the crucifixion (IV. 166-83, 575-95) and the last judgement are all deployed as affective examples of the sublime. Young, like many eighteenth-century poets, wrote A Poem on the Last Day (1713), finding in the last judgement a theme ideal for transcending the every-day world. It is especially imminent throughout the final Night, but Young's theology sees in 'Eruptions, Earthquakes, Comets, Lightnings' (IX. 160) and the movement of the planets, ever-present signs of the end, signals of attack which hang over 'This poor terrestrial Citadel of Man' (IX. 163). The day of judgement speaks of reasonable, appropriate rewards and final justice; but it also involves 'Comprehension's absolute Defeat' (IX. 1107), and the suprarational vision of heaven's king with 'Face unveil'd' (IX.580). This blend of reason and revelation is reflected in the texture of the verse, where theological argument is fused with, and punctuated by, sublime exclamations. Thought and sentiment coincide: 'I think of nothing else; I see! I feel it!' (IX.264).

For the poet of Night Thoughts, 'Nature is Christian' (IV.704), 'Nature … to man Speaks Wisdom' (VI.671-3). The poet's 'Song but echoes what Great Nature speaks' (IX.2022). Occasionally, therefore, the poetic self is dramatically situated amid 'Seas, Rivers, Mountains, Forests, Desarts, Rocks' (IX.908). Storms (IX.620-30) and the ocean provoke Addisonian thoughts on the 'melancholy Face of human Life' (VIII. 175), inspiring the soul to 'rise into Sublimities of Thought' (IX.635) and 'think of more than Man' (IX.630). More than anything else, though, the firmament inspired eighteenth-century poets to feel 'Rapture, involv'd in raptures' (Hill, 'The Transport', Works, III, p. 232). Like Hill, Richard Blackmore (The Creation), James Ralph (Night) and Thomson (The Seasons, 'Summer' and 'Winter'), Young embarks on a literary tour of the universe, as he had also done in Poem on the Last Day. He pours his 'flowing Numbers o'er the flaming Skies', he cannot see 'what more / Invites the Muse' (IX. 1902-5), and Night Thoughts shares the prevalent contemporary fascination with the ideas of 'boundless', unlimited space (IV.427, 512) and an infinity of worlds. Man kindles his devotion at the stars (IX. 1943), which 'were made to fashion the Sublime / Of human Hearts, and wiser make the Wise' (IX.966-7). The Cambridge Platonist Henry More had 'equated the vast distances revealed by the telescope … with the omnipresence of God as the ground of the universe' (E. Tuveson, 'Space, Deity and the "Natural Sublime,"' p. 24); and Night Thoughts encourages the belief that in the reaches of space man can find the being of God. The physical universe is endowed with significance, and demonstrates God's incomprehensibility, providence, infinity, omnipresence, power, goodness and mercy (IX.835-2027);² and astronomical contemplation inevitably prompts a rational commitment to Christian belief (VII. 1226-39). More significantly, if space, like God extended but not corporeal, can be seen as God's 'Sensory' (Newton's term), then in some sense the mind of man is also an attribute of God, for the firmament is:

The noble Pasture of the Mind,
Which there expatiates, strengthens, and exults,
And riots thro' the Luxuries of Thought.
(IX.1039-41. Cf. IX.847-8, 1061-6)

For eighteenth-century writers, the ever-expanding reaches of the universe spoke metaphorically of the imaginative progress and growth of the human mind. The telescope revealed a world

The prospects of space demanded of poets an active imaginative and devotional response. The poet of Night Thoughts finds 'some superior Point' (VI. 174) in space from where his 'due-distanc'd eye' (VI.595) will gain a 'stupendous view' (VI.600). It is a personal, individual viewpoint, the poet has an 'illumin'd Eye' (VI.176), and

The World …
Its ample Sphere, its universal Frame,
In full Dimensions, swells to the Survey;
And enters, at one Glance, the ravisht Sight.
(VI.167-73)

The preacher argues that such self-involving, all-encompassing perspectives prefigure the views which will be granted to man in eternity (IX. 1171-84). For the imaginative poet, however, the perceptions of eternity, 'Unbroken … illustrious, and entire' (VI. 170), are already available, the imagination mediating a feeling of divine presence. By exercising sensibility and feeling, man can make the grandeur of the external material world a property of the self:

How Glorious, then, appears the Mind of Man,
When in it All the Stars, and Planets, roll?
And what it seems it is; Great Objects make
Great Minds.
(IX.1062-5)

Thus, sublimity, though it might be a property of the object, is more importantly a faculty of the observer (IX.1012). By the end of the eighteenth century both object and response were in a more integrated fashion to be the concern of poets, but already in Night Thoughts the sublime is dependent on the response that nature or the firmament evokes in the observer (IX.904-16). This sublime amounts to a state of awareness. While Gray and Collins are concerned with secular creativity and self-fulfilment, Young is concerned with Christian awareness, and the complex processes of eternal selfrealisation and salvation. Behind the simple morality of 'virtuous YOUNG' (Thomson, The Seasons, 'Autumn', 667)—'teach us to be kind' (I.297), 'Man wants but Little; nor that Little, long' (IV. 118)—there is a prophetic urging to awake, to be aware: 'Hear, O ye Nations! hear it, O ye dead' (IV.272). In imaginative and Christian terms 'all Men are about to live. / For ever on the Brink of being born' (I.399-400). The poet's task, like the preacher's, is to show that men cannot wait at this point forever. They must live up to their potential dignity as sublime souls (IX. 1018-27).

To a certain extent Night Thoughts was obviously intended to be what it has often been criticised for being: a collection of biblical and astronomical images and motifs deployed by a prophet-figure searching after sublime models in an attempt to touch his readers' hearts. It was by design that Night Thoughts lacks the irony, comedy, self-deprecation and satirical exposure of a great deal of eighteenth-century literature; and Young's repeated transcendent motifs should be seen, not as marks of bathos (the occupational hazard of sublimity), but as vital signs to a predominantly Christian readership well-endowed to receive, interpret and appreciate them in imaginative terms.

Contemplating our Distant Selves

O for the Voice—of What? of Whom?—What Voice
Can answer to my Wants, in such Ascent.
(IX. 1592-3)

Night Thoughts asks what subject the sublime Christian poet might find, and what voice he might adopt. The speaker often claims an evangelical authority for his productions. He is preaching 'the Word'. The poem is therefore sustained by unquestioned doctrines of Christian revelation. But all this is not enough. Like Gray, Collins and Goldsmith, Young sets as much store by the simple authority of the individual perceiver. As in much mid-eighteenth-century poetry, this individual makes his unique presence felt by self-consciously describing the progress of his own poem (II.284, IV.124, V.294, IX.513), and by introducing personal anecdotes. The poem itself is held together to a large extent only by the poet's thoughts and sentiments. All the while, however, he is defining the characteristics of a type—whose sensibility is distinctly poetic. This type is separated from urban society, the court, and the political scene, or at least he repents of his past involvement (IV.80-96). He is uncorrupted by learning and civilisation (VII. 1138). He is shy, 'ill at Ease, / In this, not his own Place, this foreign Field' (VII.40-1). His goal is a close, solitary walk with God (III.6). He is the archetypal Christian voyager or wanderer (IX. 1-16), journeying alone 'In this our Land of Travel' (IX.538). The poem's astronomical and night-time perspectives are focused on this solitary poetic type (IX.750), and theologically too, the creation and continuance of the universe is justified by the redemption of the individual as sinner (IV.498).

In Conjectures Young wrote: 'contract full intimacy with the stranger within thee' (p. 53), and in Night Thoughts there is much of the self-questioning and introspection characteristic of religious conversions. Ostensibly, the poet is converting a character called Lorenzo—who moves from various rationalistic and Deistic positions to the knowledge of God and the hope of immortality. But Lorenzo's voice is at times so eloquent, and the poet knows so intimately the thoughts of Lorenzo, that it often seems as if the poet and Lorenzo are two sides of one personality, tormented by the feeling that 'that which I do, I allow not; for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I' (Romans 7.15). When the poet peeps into Lorenzo's covered heart (IX.2073) he is obeying the imperative of self-scrutiny. He knows himself to be diseased (IX.38). His 'Change of Heart' and 'The CONSOLATION [which] cancels the COMPLAINT' occur only when Lorenzo's arguments have been hushed (IX.510-11).

Night Thoughts was one of the first long meditative poems to speak of 'men as they are men within themselves' (Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1850, XIII.226), existing within a universe perceived as personal vision. The image of the backward-looking traveller in The Prelude (1850, IX.9-16) is Wordsworth's acknowledgement of Young's poetic individualism, for it echoes an image in Night Thoughts (IX.513-39). Wordsworth must have recognised that Young had defined his figure of the solitary poet against a contemporary suspicion of too much individuality. The hermit might be a stock figure in much eighteenth-century verse (see John Cunningham's The Contemplatist, the younger Thomas Warton's The Pleasures of Melancholy, and Thomas Parnell's 'The Hermit'), but more often than not he has a socially-derived notion of being alone. Solitude, so often, is 'the Nurse of Woe' (Parnell, 'A Hymn to Contentment', Poems, p. 159). Pope's garden at Twick enham may have provided opportunities for retirement, but it was close enough to the city for him closely to observe, and participate in, the London scene. Even Thomson's rural retirement is essentially a shared moral experience (The Seasons, 'Autumn', 1235-8). Johnson equated individuality with solitariness as a deprivation: 'Here sit poor I, with nothing but my own solitary individuality' (Johnson, Letters, II, p. 75). He links solitariness with madness and immorality: 'If I escape the example of bad men, I want likewise the counsel and conversation of the good' (Rasselas, p. 57). So Johnson claims his audience's attention because his 'opinions are the result, not of solitary conjectures, but of practise and experience' (Johnson, The Rambler, IV, p. 28).

Young tends not to see any contradiction, even though he read and appreciated The Rambler (see Boswell, Life of Johnson, I, pp. 214-15). Like Akenside in The Pleasures of Imagination (I.554-8), Young equates poetic inspiration with solitude. His vision of Socrates associates insight with being alone: 'Sacred Silence whispering Truths Divine' (IX.2412). From the beginning of Night I Young creates an alienated, solitary, but Christian frame of mind: 'I tremble at myself, / And in myself am lost! At home a Stranger' (I.80-1. Cf. VII.41). And as for Johnson's concern for moral example, Young thinks that innocence and virtue can only be safeguarded in solitude:

We see, we hear with Peril; Safety dwells Remote from Multitude.

(V.163-4)

The emphasis on individuality was of course sanctioned by the Old Testament and Christian concept of divine inspiration. Milton had stressed the authority of the inspired prophetic individual, and his poetry reaffirmed the idea that God speaks through the suffering and faith of individuals. Many of the seventeenth-century lyric writers also compared themselves with the Hebrew prophets, visionaries with a unique message from God. Milton and these poets were not afraid that it might be impossible to distinguish between true inspiration and mere enthusiasm—between (in Shaftesbury's terms) 'a real feeling of the Divine Presence … and a false one' (Characteristicks, I, p. 53). These were the fears of writers such as Swift, Hartley and Johnson. By contrast, James Hervey and the Wesley brothers approved of Night Thoughts precisely because it stresses beliefs such as the depravity of man and the reality of the supernatural which were highly congenial to enthusiastic Christianity, combining them with, and justifying them by, a belief in personal feeling as an authoritative guide to truth.³ Young's reliance on subjective individualism has much in common with the experimental faith of the Methodists; and if the doctrines of Methodism 'are a commentary on the worth and possibilities of the individual soul' (M. L. Edwards, After Wesley, p. 37—quoted in H. N. Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, II, p. 86), Young shares many Methodist principles. At one point in Night Thoughts Young is not afraid to accept the name of enthusiast (VI.603).

In Conjectures, the poet's original genius, the ability to make a powerful emotional impact on the reader, 'has ever been supposed to partake of something divine' (p. 27), and is 'from heaven' (p. 37). Like Akenside, Savage and Wordsworth, Young knows that the flame of his genius descends from heaven itself (V.97-109). Young consequently criticises the aesthetics and theology of Pope. Respect for authority and imitation of the ancients are Roman Catholic principles unworthy of a Protestant who should elevate the authority of the individual. Pope's

taste partook the error of his religion; it denied not worship to saints and angels; that is, to writers, who, canonized for ages, have received their apotheosis from established and universal fame. True Poesy, like true religion, abhors idolatory; and though it honours the memory of the exemplary, and takes them willingly (yet cautiously) as guides in the way to glory; real, though unexampled, excellence is its only aim; nor looks it for any inspiration less than divine.

(Conjectures, pp. 67-8)

In religion and in poetics the message is clear: man must discover for himself what it is like to walk with God. Young grafts the Protestant obsessions with personal status, salvation and election on to his poetry. As a justified Protestant his status depends on particular election; and his role as an inspired poet is similarly verified.

Singular and separate, the poet cannot speak on behalf of the mass of men. Rather, he preaches or prophesies, the figure of Lorenzo making possible direct address to the reader as sinner. The sublime exhortation forestalls any argument. The seer's message is true because of the status of the messenger. Night Thoughts might be a poem about Christian doctrine, an attempt, therefore, to speak of the propositional coherence of Christianity. But while never denying reasoned propositional truth, Night Thoughts also represents the most extended and ambitious attempt in the first half of the eighteenth century to revitalise locutionary truth. With Gray, Thomson, Collins, Chatterton and Macpherson, Young has his place in the development of the bardic persona. Gray's bard 'triumphs' because of strength of character and individual emotion. With a much more clearly Christian perspective Young also celebrates the creative and redemptive power of the individual prophetic imaginer, claiming as his own the prophetic, oriental force inspiring the Old Testament writers (II.405)….

Notes

¹ See Young, Ocean, An Ode, p. 26; William Thompson, Preface, Paraphrase on … Job; Thomson, The Seasons, 'Autumn', 646. Regarding Night Thoughts, Johnson wrote that 'The wild diffusion of the sentiments and the digressive sallies of the imagination would have been compressed and restrained by confinement to rhyme' (Lives, III, p. 395).

² See I. St J. Bliss, 'Night Thoughts in Relation to Contemporary Christian Apologetics', p. 60.

³ In Meditations and Contemplations, Hervey quotes extensively from Night Thoughts (I, pp. 86-7; II, pp. 203-4). See Charles Wesley, Journal, II, p. 106; T. W. Herbert, John Wesley as Editor and Author, pp. 79-82.

Works Cited

Primary works

Biblical citations refer to the Authorised Version, in particular to an edition published in London in 1702, which also contains the 1662 Book of Common Prayer referred to above.

Addison, Joseph, Works, edited by Thomas Tickell, 4 vols. (London, 1721)

Akenside, Mark, The Pleasures of Imagination (London, 1744)…

Biographia Britannica, 6 vols, and Supplement (London, 1747-66)

Blackmore, Richard, The Creation: A Philosophical Poem (London, 1712)…

Blair, Robert, The Grave (London, 1743)

Blake, William, Complete Writings, edited by G. Keynes (Oxford, 1966)

——, Designs for Edward Young's 'Night Thoughts ': A Complete Edition, edited by D. V. Erdman, J. E. Grant, E. J. Rose and M. J. Tolley, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1980)…

Boswell, James, Life of Johnson, edited by G. B. Hill, revised by L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934-64)…

Butler, Joseph, The Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (London, 1736)…

Cecil, Richard, Works, 3 vols. (London, 1816)…

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Collected Letters, edited by E. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1956-71)…

Cowper, William, Letters and Prose Writings, edited by J. King and C. Ryskamp, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1979-86)

——, Poems, 1742-82, edited by J. D. Baird and C. Ryskamp (Oxford, 1980)

——, Poetical Works, edited by H. S. Milford, fourth edition (London, 1967)

Crabbe, George, Poetical Works and Life, edited by his son, 8 vols. (London, 1834)…

Cudworth, Ralph, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (London, 1731)…

Dennis, John, Critical Works, edited by E. N. Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore, Ohio, 1939-43)…

Eliot, George, 'Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young', The Essays of George Eliot, edited by T. Pinney (London, 1963), 335-85…

Forbes, William, An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1806)…

Gastrell, Francis, A Moral Proof of the Certainty of a Future State (London, 1725)…

Goldsmith, Oliver, Collected Works, edited by A. Friedman, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1966)…

Gray, Thomas, Poetical Works, edited by R. Lonsdale (Oxford, 1977)

Guardian, The, fourth edition, 2 vols. (London, 1726)…

Herbert, George, Works, edited by F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941)

Hervey, James, Meditations and Contemplations, seventh edition, 2 vols. (London, 1750)

Hill, Aaron, The Creation … With a Preface to Mr. Pope concerning the Sublimity of the Ancient Hebrew Poetry, and a material and obvious Defect in the English (London, 1720; edited by G. G. Pahl, Augustan Reprint Society, Los Angeles, 1949)

——, Works, 4 vols. (London, 1753)…

Hume, David, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, edited by N. K. Smith (Oxford, 1935)

Johnson, Samuel, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, edited by G. Tillotson and B. Jenkins (Oxford, 1971)

——, Letters, edited by R. W. Chapman, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1952)

——, Lives of the English Poets, edited by G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905)

——, The Rambler (vols. III-V of the Yale Edition), 3 vols., edited by W. J. Bate and A. B. Straus (New Haven, Connecticut and London, 1969)…

Keats, John, Letters, 1814-1821, edited by H. E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1958)…

Law, William, Works, 9 vols. (London, 1762)…

Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1971)

Lowth, Robert, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, translated by G. Gregory, 2 vols. (London, 1787)

Milton, John, Poems, edited by J. Carey and A. Fowler (London, 1968)

Montagu, Henry, First Earl of Manchester, Manchester al Mondo: Contemplatio Mortis Et Immortalitatis, ninth impression (London, 1667)…

Parnell, Thomas, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1722)…

Pope, Alexander, The Iliad of Homer, edited by M. Mack et al., 2 vols. (London, 1967)

——, The Odyssey of Homer, edited by M. Mack et al., 2 vols. (London, 1967)

——, Poems, edited by J. Butt (London, 1963)

——, Works, edited by Joseph Warton, 9 vols. (London, 1797)…

Richardson, Samuel, Aesop's Fables. With Instructive Morals and Reflections … design'd to promote Religion, Morality, and Universal Benevolence (London, no date)

——, Correspondence, edited by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 6 vols. (London, 1804)

Russell, W. C., The Book of Authors (London, 1871)

Savage, Richard, Poetical Works, edited by C. Tracy (Cambridge, 1962)…

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of, Characteristicks, 3 vols. (London, 1714)…

Taylor, Jeremy, The Worthy Communicant, or A Discourse of the Nature, Effects, and Blessings Consequent to the Worthy Receiving of the Lord's Supper (London, 1660)

Thompson, William, A Poetical Paraphrase on Part of the Book of Job (London, 1726)

Thomson, James, Complete Poetical Works, edited by J. L. Robertson (London, 1908) The Seasons, edited by J. Sambrook (Oxford, 1981)

——, Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale 1776-1809, edited by K. C. Balderstone, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1942)

Tillotson, John, Works, 2 vols. (London, 1712)…

Vaughan, Henry, Works, edited by L. C. Martin (Oxford, 1957)

Virgil, with a translation by H. R. Fairclough, 2 vols. (London, 1968)

Wake, William, Preparation for Death. Being a Letter Sent to a Young Gentlewoman in France, in a Dangerous Distemper, of which She Died, fifth edition (London, 1719)…

Warton, Joseph, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, fifth edition, 2 vols. (London, 1806)

Warton, Thomas, Thomas, and Joseph, The Three Wartons: A Choice of their Verse, edited by E. Partridge (London, 1927)…

Wesley, Charles, Hymns and Sacred Poems, 2 vols. (Bristol, 1755) Journal, edited by T. Jackson, 2 vols. (London, 1849)…

Wordsworth, William, Poetical Works, edited by E. de Selincourt and H. Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1940-9)

——, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, edited by J. Wordsworth et al. (New York and London, 1979)

Young, Edward, Busiris, King of Egypt, A Tragedy, second edition (London, 1722)

——, Conjectures on Original Composition. In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison, second edition (London, 1759)

——, Correspondence, 1683-1765, edited by H. Pettit (Oxford, 1971)

——, Love of Fame, the Universal Passion. In Seven Characteristical Satires, second edition (London, 1728)

——, Ocean. An Ode. Occasion'd by His Majesty's late Royal Encouragement of the Sea-Service. To which is prefix'd, An Ode to the King: And a Discourse on Ode. By the Author of the Universal Passion (London, 1728)

——, A Paraphrase on Part of the Book of Job (London, 1719)

——, A Poem on the Last Day (Oxford, 1713)

——, The Revenge, A Tragedy (London, 1721)

Secondary works

Bliss, I. St J., 'Night Thoughts in Relation to Contemporary Christian Apologetics', PMLA, 49 (1934), 37-40…

Doody, M. A., The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge, 1985)

Edwards, M. L., After Wesley (London, 1935)…

Fairchild, H. N. Religious Trends in English Poetry, 6 vols. (New York, 1939-68)…

Herbert, T. W., John Wesley as Editor and Author (Princeton, N. J., 1940)

O'Connor, H. W., 'The Narcissa Episode in Young's Night Thoughts', PMLA, 34 (1919), 130-49…

Pettit, H., 'A Bibliography of Young's Night Thoughts', University of Colorado Studies, Series in Language and Literature, 5 (1954), 1-52

Price, M., 'The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers', Yale Review, 58 (1968-9), 194-213…

Tuveson, E., 'Space, Deity and the "Natural Sublime,'" Modern Language Quarterly, 12 (1951), 20-38

Wicker, C. V., Edward Young and the Fear of Death: A Study in Romantic Melancholy (Albuquerque, 1952)…