the brute is to be humbled by being reminded of its “relation to the stalls,” and frightened into moderation by the contemplation of death-beds and skulls; the angel is to be developed by vituperating this world and exalting the next; and by this double process you get the Christian—­“the highest style of man.”  With all this, our new-made divine is an unmistakable poet.  To a clay compounded chiefly of the worldling and the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of Promethean fire.  He will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his astronomical religion and his charnel-house morality, in lasting verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold and jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive; for this divine is Edward Young, the future author of Night Thoughts.

She says, “One of the most striking characteristics of Young is his radical insincerity as a poetic artist.”

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, 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 star light.  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....  He describes nothing so well as a comet, and is tempted to linger with fond detail over nothing more familiar than the day of judgment and an imaginary journey among the stars....  The adherence to abstractions, or to the personification of abstractions, is closely allied in Young to the want of genuine emotion.  He sees Virtue sitting on a mount serene, 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 dwelling 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 courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the internal triumph of justice and pity over personal resentment, in all the sublime self-renunciation and sweet charities which are found in the details of ordinary life.

In these essays there are various indications of her religious opinions, and those of a decided character.  In that on Dr. Cumming, she has this word to say of the rationalistic conception of the Bible: 

He seems to be ignorant, or he chooses to ignore the fact, that there is a large body of eminently instructed and earnest men who regard the Hebrew and Christian scriptures as a series of historical documents, to be dealt with according to the rules of historical criticism, and that an equally large number of men, who are not historical critics, find the dogmatic scheme built on the letter of the scriptures, opposed to their profoundest moral convictions.

This statement is suggestive of her position on religious subjects: