BURNS NIGHTS 
 
 AT THE 
 
 BURNS CLUB OF ST. LOUIS 
 
Bonk_ J _£_ s 3JI 
 
 PRESENTED l!V 
 

 
 President 
 
 The Burns Club of St. Louis 
 
Burns Nights 
 
 at the Burns Club of St. Louis 
 
 TWO ARTISTS OF THE PEOPLE 
 Albert Douglas 
 
 THE BIRTH O' TAM O'SHANTER 
 
 Thomas Agustine Daly 
 
 GENIUS AND GEOGRAPHY 
 Rev. Dr. James W. Lee 
 
 THE SCOTCH ACCORDING TO JOHNSON 
 Frederick W. Lehmann 
 
 ROBERT BURNS, AN IMMORTAL MEMORY 
 Henry King 
 
 THE MUSE OF ROBERT BURNS 
 Irvin Mattick 
 
 LINES TO ST. LOUIS BURNSIANS 
 M. Hunter 
 
 Edited, with Notes, by 
 WALTER B. STEVENS 
 
 Printed for Private Distribution 
 
 to Lovers of Burns 
 
 by 
 
 The Burns Club of St. Louis 
 
 1918 
 

 THE MEM'RY O' BURNS 
 
 truuz^. ft. QJuZ^. 
 
 <4 Jfm&4 
 
Burns Nights 
 
 J\ CROSS the upper front of the quaint House of the Artists' 
 Guild is the long, vaulted chamber of the Bums Club of 
 St. Louis. It is a reproduction of the* living room of the Burns 
 Cottage at Ayr. In this chamber the members of the club 
 assemble on the twenty-fifth of January to keep the anniversay of 
 the birth of the poet and at such other times as special meetings 
 may be called. With few exceptions the articles which furnish 
 the room are associated with the memory of Bums. Portraits 
 of the Burns family, pictures of the places made famous by the 
 writings of Bums, facsimiles of the letters and poems of Burns 
 cover the walls. 
 
 In one* end of the chamber is the huge, old-fashioned chim- 
 ney and fireplace, with a spinning wheel and reel of the Armour 
 family in the corner. The opposite comer contains a sideboard 
 of ancient pattern on the shelves of which are arranged plates 
 and bowls and ashets of the days of Bums. But there are other 
 things in the chamber which give even more "atmosphere." Bex- 
 side the fireplace, as if ready for immediate use, hang the iron 
 holder of "Bonnie Jean," and the* griddle on which the cakes 
 were baked over the coals. One of the tables was owned by 
 Burns zvhen he lived at Dumfries, another table was in the Tarn 
 o' Shanter Inn and a third table* was made of wood from St. 
 Michael's Church at Dumfries. A little chair was the favorite 
 seat of Burns when he was a child. The milking stool of "Bon- 
 nie Jean," an eight-day clock one hundred and thirty-five years 
 old, — these and many other relics are treasured by the club. 
 
 Burns Nights of the Bums Club of St. Louis pass all too 
 quickly. No two of them are alike but there are some features 
 which are never omitted. None of thexse Burns Nights passes 
 without additions to the Bumsiana of the club, to be inspected 
 and discussed. After the assembling in the chamber, the guests 
 and members go down to the* rathskeller and take their places at 
 the long table. They stand while the president pronounces the 
 Burns grace. Usually there is present at least one clergyman. 
 The look upon the* face of this guest is a study as President 
 Bixby seriously intones'. 
 
 "Some hae meat and nae can eat, 
 
 And some there be* that want it, 
 But we hae meat and we can eat 
 And sae the Lord be thankit." 
 
Then William Porteous, the glorious singer of the club, gives 
 "Afton Water," or something of like beautiful sentiment from the 
 Scotch. In the early service of the dinner President Bixby rises 
 to recall that on June 23rd, 1785, Robert Burns addressed his 
 famous farewell to the brethren of St. James Lodge, Tarbolton. 
 This message holds good on the anniversary of Burns' birth with 
 all Burns clubs: 
 
 "A last request permit me here* 
 When yearly ye assemble a, 
 One round, I ask it with a tear, 
 To him, the Bard that's far awa." 
 
 The members of the club stand and drink to "the Bard that's 
 far awa." Before he\ is allowed to take his seat, Mr. Porteous 
 sings, it may be "Duncan Gray." Then follow in rapid succession 
 such readings from Burns as "Address to the Unco Guid," letters 
 of greeting from other Burns Clubs, Scotch stories. In Scott H. 
 Blewett the club has a reader of rare native* power, who brings 
 out the\ full sentiment and beauty of the Scotch dialect. Again 
 and again Mr. Porteous is brought to his feet and leads the club 
 in singing "Scots Wha Hae," "Coming Through the Rye," "O — a 
 the Ants," "Red, Red Rose," "Ye Banks and Braes," "John An- 
 derson, My Joe," "My Nannie's Awa," "A Man's a Man for a' 
 That," and so on through a soul-stirring range of Scotch melodies. 
 
 At the proper stage of the dinner haggis is brought in and 
 passed around the table, a piper playing the bagpipes. Scotch 
 cakes are at every plate. 
 
 After the dinner come the more formal proceedings, the 
 address of the evening and the comments thereon by the\ mem- 
 bers and guests. 
 
 Burns Night closes invariably with guests and members as- 
 sembled again in the club room, hands joined and all singing 
 "Auld Lang Syne." 
 
The Club's Burnsiana 
 
 T N a strong box is preserved the club's growing and invalu- 
 able collection of literary Burnsiana. Here are the 
 manuscripts, or original typewritten copies, of the addresses 
 and poems which have made the Burns Nights of the club 
 historic. Among them: 
 
 "Burns and Religion," by Rev. Dr. William C. Bitting; 
 
 "Burns, the World Poet," by William Marion Reedy; 
 
 "Burns and English Poetry," by Professor J. L. Lowes; 
 
 "Burns and the Prophet Isaiah," by Judge M. N. Sale; 
 
 "Burns and the Auld Clay Biggin," by Frederick W. 
 Lehmann; 
 
 "Lines to Burns," by Chang Yow Tong, of World's Fair 
 fame; 
 
 "To Robert Burns," by Orrick Johns; 
 
 "To the Bard of Auld Lang Syne," by Professor James 
 Main Dixon; 
 
 "Robert Burns," by Willis Leonard McClanahan. 
 
 The collection of the club's publications includes the 
 large book of "Poems and Letters in the Handwriting of 
 Robert Burns, Reproduced in facsimile through the courtesy 
 of William K. Bixby and Frederick W. Lehmann;" and the 
 two smaller books, "Burns Nights in St. Louis," and "Nights 
 wi' Burns in St. Louis." 
 
 The latest addition to the contents of the strong box 
 was made at the annual meeting of 1917. It is a dainty, 
 privately-printed book containing in facsimile Burns' poem 
 "To Mary in Heaven," with an introduction by William K. 
 Bixby, who possesses the original manuscript of this "the 
 most beautiful of all the lyrics of Burns and one of the most 
 celebrated poems ever written." 
 
 From John Gribbell, of Philadelphia, the Burns Club of 
 St. Louis received one of the few copies in facsimile of the 
 Glenriddell Manuscripts. As he announced the gift and laid 
 before the members for their delighted inspection the two 
 precious volumes, President Bixby told this reminiscence of 
 his own relationship to the famous collection of Glenriddell 
 manuscripts: 
 
 "A dealer in rare books brought to my summer home on 
 Lake George the original Glenriddell Manuscripts of Burns. 
 I had seen in the newspapers accounts of the sale of these 
 Manuscripts by the Liverpool Athenaeum and of the storm 
 of condemnation from all Scotland — the calling of public 
 meetings to institute legal proceedings to compel the recovery 
 
of the Manuscripts. The dealer said to me that the collection 
 had been consigned to him to get it away from England 
 and that it was for sale. He left the two volumes with me 
 for several days. When he returned I told him that for my 
 own use I would as soon purchase the painting of Mona 
 Lisa, which had been stolen recently from the Louvre, as I 
 should feel that I had to apologize for having the collection 
 in my possession. I suggested to the dealer the name of a 
 person in Philadelphia who might be interested in the 
 volumes for a large college to which the family had given 
 a very valuable library. The dealer started for Philadelphia, 
 but sold to Mr. Gribbell. The whole world knows the splen- 
 did use that Mr. Gribbell has made of the Manuscripts, giving 
 the originals to remain alternate years in Glasgow and 
 Edinburgh until a more permanent place may be provided." 
 
 The history of the Glenriddell Manuscripts is one more 
 apt illustration of the esteem, increasing with time, for all 
 that is associated with Burns. In 1796, after the death of 
 Burns, his friends arranged for a publication of the life and 
 works of the poet for the benefit of the widow and children. 
 From various sources letters and manuscript poems were 
 assembled and delivered to Dr. Currie, who was chosen to 
 prepare the book. Dr. Currie agreed "that whatever was done 
 as to the returning any letters, papers, etc., should be con- 
 sidered the act of the widow and transacted in her name." 
 The Currie edition of Burns was issued in 1800. Dr. Currie 
 died without returning the Glenriddell Manuscripts. These 
 papers were in two volumes. The volumes were entitled: 
 "Poems and Letters written by Mr. Robert Burns and selected 
 by him from his unprinted collection for Robert Riddell, Esq., 
 of Glenriddell." As an introductive to the volumes Burns 
 wrote: 
 
 "As this collection almost wholly consists of pieces, local 
 or unprinted fragments, the effusion of a poetical moment, 
 and bagatelles strung in rhyme simply pour passer la temps, 
 the author trusts that nobody into whose hands it may come 
 will, without his permission, give or allow to be taken, copies 
 of anything here contained; much less to give to the world at 
 large, what he never meant should see the light. At the 
 gentleman's request, whose from this time it shall be, the 
 collection was made; and to him, and I will add to his 
 amiable lady, it is presented, as a sincere though small tribute 
 of gratitude for the many happy hours the author has spent 
 under their roof. There, what Poverty even though accom- 
 panied with Genius must seldom expect to meet with in the 
 circles of fashionable life, his welcome has ever been the 
 cordiality of Kindness and the warmth of Friendship. As 
 
 6 
 
from the situation in which it is now placed this Mss. may 
 be preserved and this Preface read, when the hand that now 
 writes and the heart that now dictates it may be mouldering 
 in the dust; let these be regarded the genuine sentiments of 
 a man who seldom flattered any and never those he loved. 
 27th Apir 17— 
 
 ROBT BURNS." 
 
 In 1853 Dr. Currie's daughter-in-law, possibly actuated 
 by a literary house cleaning, passed the two volumes of 
 Manuscripts to the Liverpool Athenaeum with this note: 
 
 "Will you allow me to make you the medium of present- 
 ing to the Athenaeum Library two manuscript books in his 
 own handwriting of Poems and Letters of Burns. I believe 
 they came into the possession of Dr. Currie when he was 
 engaged in writing the Life of the Poet; and I shall feel 
 gratified by their finding a place in the Library of an institu- 
 tion in which he took so great an interest." 
 
 The two books of Manuscripts lay hidden in a wooden 
 box at the Athenaeum twenty years, until 1873, so little value 
 was placed upon them. In 1873, a merchant, Henry A. 
 Bright, found the books and provided a glass case for them. 
 Forty years later, about 1913, the thrifty — to use a mild 
 word — Athenaeum management concluded to turn these 
 Burns' writings into cash. A London firm of dealers in such 
 things was given a six months' option on the two books at 
 $10,000. After a sale had actually been made the heirs of 
 Burns and the public generally learned of the action of the 
 Athenaeum. The heirs set up no claim except to insist that 
 the books be placed in some institution. But the lovers of 
 Burns organized. Through Miss Annie Burns of Chelten- 
 ham, the only surviving grandchild, they went into court. At 
 this point the dealers, who had bought as a speculation, sent 
 the two books to this country to find a purchaser. 
 
 John Gribbell bought and immediately announced his 
 purpose to send the original volumes to Scotland. He had 
 a few copies made in facsimile, one of which he gave through 
 President Bixby to the Burns Club of St. Louis. Mr. 
 Gribbell's letter which accompanies the volumes gives this 
 account of the transaction: 
 
 "The two volumes of the Manuscripts, which have been 
 long known as the 'Glenriddell Manuscripts' of Robert Burns, 
 were offered to me for sale in Philadelphia in November, 
 1913, by an American dealer, to my great surprise. I had 
 supposed they were still in England subject to the proceed- 
 ings which were contemplated by the Scotts Committee who 
 were striving to have the original sale by the Liverpool 
 
 7 
 
Athenaeum cancelled. My object in purchasing them was 
 that they might be sent to Scotland in perpetual security. 
 I purchased them on November 21st. On the same day I 
 advised the Earl of Roscbery, chairman of the Scotts Com- 
 mittee, of my possession of them, and that these Manuscripts 
 were now a gift to the people of Scotland forever. The deed 
 of gift which is herein set forth has been executed. 
 
 JOHN GRIBBELL. 
 Sept. 10, 1914, Philadelphia." 
 
 The club's Burnsiana includes a facsimile copy of the 
 famous "Geddes Burns," with the Geddes bookplate. This 
 is a copy of the first Edinburgh edition of Burns' Poems, but 
 enhanced in value with twenty-seven closely written pages 
 in the handwriting of the poet and the letter of Burns trans- 
 mitting the book to Rev. Dr. Alexander Geddes, afterward 
 Bishop Geddes, a Roman Catholic clergyman of Edinburgh. 
 Burns and Dr. Geddes were intimate friends. Burns took the 
 book from Dr. Geddes as he was starting on his tour of the 
 Highlands, with the understanding that he would jot down 
 in verse on the blank leaves whatever he found which he 
 thought might interest his friend. He wrote into the book 
 twelve poems. Further, in this book, he filled out with his 
 pen the names for which he had used only initials in print. 
 In his earlier editions Burns often used only initials of the 
 names of persons he treated with satirical freedom. The 
 history of the passage of the Geddes Burns from one posses- 
 sor to another until a limited edition in facsimile was issued 
 is a long and interesting one. A copy of this record is in 
 the possession of the Burns Club of St. Louis. 
 
 The war has bestowed its tinge on Burns Nights. Greet- 
 ing after greeting from the Federated Burns Clubs in foreign 
 parts has come to the Burns Club of St. Louis in coverings 
 bearing in ominous black type, "Opened by Censor." And 
 not seldom the contents have been impregnated with the war 
 spirit. Thus from the Kilbowie Jolly Beggars Club: 
 
 "Even in this hour 
 When Britain draws the sword 
 To save her peerless prestige from the Hun, 
 We must do honour to Scotia's greatest son. 
 Each freeman turns 
 To hear the burden of his song 
 
 That stirs the soul and makes the weakling strong, 
 And every Scot, as in the days of yore, 
 Will do or die until our cause is won. 
 
 Inspired by Burns." 
 
The Stane Mossgiel Burns Club sent this greeting: 
 
 "Though strife goes on, and discord for a while 
 May rankle in the souls of men, 
 A truce we call — symbolic of a peace to come 
 In that great prophecy for rank and file, 
 That man to man o'er land and sea 
 Shall war no more, but brithers be." 
 
 There was a Lad was born in Kyle 
 
 A favorite song of The Burns Club of St. Louis 
 Sung by William M. Porteous 
 
 "There was a lad was born in Kyle, 
 But whatna day, o' whatna stylo, 
 I doubt it's hardly worth the while, 
 To be sae nice wi' Robin. 
 
 CHORUS. 
 For Robin was a rovin' boy, 
 
 A rantin', rovin' rantin', rover, 
 Robin was a rovin' boy, 
 
 rantin', rovin' Robin. 
 
 (2) Our monarch's hindmost year but ane 
 
 Was five and twenty days begun, 
 'Twas then a blast o' Janwar' win' 
 Blew Hansel in on Robin. 
 
 (3) The gossip keekit in his loof, 
 
 Quo' she, Wha lives will see the proof, 
 This waly boy will be nae coof; 
 
 1 think we'll ca' him Robin. 
 
 (4) He'll hae misfortunes great and sma', 
 
 But aye a heart aboon them a'; 
 He'll be a credit till us a', — 
 We'll a' be proud o' Robin. 
 
 (5) But sure as three times three mak' nine, 
 
 I see by ilka score and line, 
 This chap will dearly like our kin', 
 So leeze me on thee, Robin." 
 
1917 
 
 HpHE guests of Burns Night of 1917 were John Hill, Rev. 
 A Dr. J. W. Lee, Rev. Dr. J. W. Maclvor, N. A. McMillan 
 and Irvin Mattick. 
 
 A most pleasing incident of this Burns Night was the 
 action taken on the initiative of President Bixby upon the 
 absence of the vice-president of the club, David R. Francis. 
 President Bixby offered this sentiment: 
 
 "Russian bodies, use him we'el 
 An hap him in a cozie biel. 
 Ye'll find him ay a dainty chiel 
 And fou o' glee. 
 He wad na wrang'd the vera deil 
 That's ower the sea." 
 
 The sentiment was adopted as the feeling of the club. 
 The health of the Ambassador to Russia was drank and, by 
 a unanimous vote, a cablegram of greeting was sent to the 
 absent member at Petrograd. 
 
 The address of this Burns Night was by Albert Douglas 
 of Washington, D. C. It drew a most interesting comparison 
 between Burns and Millet, developing unusual lines of 
 thought about Burns. At the conclusion of the address the 
 club expressed its appreciation in a rising vote of thanks 
 and in an earnest request that a copy of the address be given 
 by Mr. Douglas for the next edition of "Burns Nights." 
 
 Very appropriate to the treatment of Burns by Mr. 
 Douglas were the readings of two selections from "Thoughts 
 of a Toiler," a book of recent publication by W. Hunter, a 
 Scotch author, and presented by him to the Burns Club of 
 St. Louis. These readings of "Juist for Burns' Sake" in 
 verse and "Burns and the Commonplace" in prose were given 
 impressively by Frederick W. Lehmann. 
 
 A poem written for this Burns Night by Irvin Mattick 
 and read by the author was highly appreciated, as shown by 
 the hearty vote of thanks and the request for publication. 
 
 The informal program of this Burns Night was unusually 
 rich and full. Letters by Burns to Miss Craik and to his 
 longtime friend and critic, Mrs. Dunlop, were read and dis- 
 cussed. The guests of the evening, Drs. Lee and Maclvor 
 and John Hill, spoke as did Professor Lowes, Judge Sale, 
 Vice-President Johns and other members of the club. And 
 at every interval the sweet singer of the club, William 
 Porteous, responded graciously to the insistent calls. 
 
 10 
 
Conversation reminiscent of the delightful Burns Night 
 of 1916 and of Tom Daly's fascinating narrative in verse of 
 "The Birth of Tarn o' Shanter" brought out the information 
 from a member that the special guest of the evening, Mr. 
 Albert Douglas, knew "Tarn" better than any other person 
 present. Prevailed upon by the members, Mr. Douglas 
 recited "Tarn o' Shanter" from beginning to end, without a 
 single halt to look at the text and in a manner which gave 
 the club a new vision of this Burns masterpiece. 
 
 Very appropriately at this time President Bixby exhib- 
 ited to the club a rare first issue of the first edition of 
 "Tarn o' Shanter." On the title page "Aloway Kirk" appears 
 with only one "1". Before the full edition was printed the 
 mistake in the title was corrected. Only two or three copies 
 of this issue are recorded as having been put on sale in 
 America, while not a single copy is listed in the English 
 "Book Prices Current." On the title page appears in quaint 
 type: 
 
 Aloway Kirk 
 or 
 Tarn o' Shanter 
 a Tale 
 by 
 Robert Burns 
 The Ayrshire Poet. 
 "Whae 'er this tale o' truth shall read, 
 Ilk man and mother's son tak heed; 
 Whane 'er to Drink you are inclin'd 
 Or Cutty Sarks run in your mind, 
 Think — ye may buy the joys o'er dear; 
 Remember Tarn o' Shanter's mare."* 
 After the recitation by Mr. Douglas and the examination 
 of the book, members of the club turned with added apprecia- 
 tion to the original drawings made by John Burnet to illus- 
 trate "Tarn o' Shanter," which hang upon the walls of the 
 club chamber. They looked with new interest upon one of 
 their relics — the old arm chair of Mrs. Tarn o' Shanter: 
 "Where sits our sulky sullen dame, 
 Gathering her brows like gathering storm, 
 Nursing her wrath to keep it warm." 
 
 11 
 
Two Artists of the People 
 
 By Albert Douglas of Washington, D. C. 
 
 January 25, 1917 
 
 A T first thought it may seem far-fetched if not fantastic 
 
 to claim that Robert Burns and Jean Francois Millet are 
 as artists near akin. But as we look more closely we may 
 come to agree that, while the career and the character of 
 the French painter differed much from those of the Scots 
 poet, yet in the outward circumstances of their lives, in their 
 artistic outlook upon nature and humanity, as well as in the 
 essential message which each as an artist has left us they 
 have much in common. 
 
 Born under very similar conditions, as sons of small 
 tenant farmers; subjected in childhood and youth to similar 
 influences; growing to manhood through years of toil and 
 self-denial; each seeking in the interest of his art his 
 country's capital; retiring one to Ellisland and Dumfries and 
 the other to Barbizon; dying both in pecuniary distress and 
 comparative obscurity; the fame of each, resting upon much 
 the same popular sentiment and appreciation, has grown 
 through all the passing years. 
 
 In temperament too the men were in many respects 
 alike; though Millet seems to have had little taste for social 
 or convivial pleasures, and either lacked or restrained the 
 ardent, illy-regulated sexual instinct which has repelled many 
 from Burns, and, as himself deplored: — "laid him low and 
 stained his name." While both men in the home exemplified 
 the ideal, so well expressed by Burns: 
 
 "To make a happy fireside clime 
 
 for weans and wife, 
 That's the true pathos and sublime 
 of human life." 
 
 But to attempt to follow this comparison item by item and 
 trait by trait would soon become uninteresting if not fantastic. 
 Rather let us take the life and the artistic career of one of 
 these men, and briefly trace his story and development; 
 trusting that the likeness may, to some extent at least, 
 suggest itself. And, because the incidents of the life and 
 career of Burns are to most of us the more familiar, we will 
 choose the story of Millet. 
 
 Few of the thousands of tourists who land each year of 
 normal travel at Cherbourg apprehend how near they are to 
 
 12 
 
one of the most beautiful, remote and interesting districts of 
 France. The city is at the eastern end of a square oeninsular 
 that thrusts itself out into the English Channel, northwesterly 
 from the mainland of France. The district is known as La 
 Manche, the very significant French name for the English 
 Channel; and its rolling downs, grey stone churches, low 
 thatched cottages; its meadows and its orchards, its cattle 
 and sheep, remind one strikingly of Dorset and Devon; and 
 the people are such as those who move in the novels of Eden 
 Phillpotts. 
 
 Far out at the northwest corner of this district, ten miles 
 west of Cherbourg, is the headland of La Hague, looking 
 out across the narrow sea, The Race of Alderney, towards 
 the Channel Islands. The coast is indeed stern and rock- 
 bound. Its granite walls, rising high above the Atlantic and 
 worn by the elements into fantastic shapes, look down upon 
 the spot where the Kearsage destroyed the Alabama in 1864. 
 
 This part of the peninsular comprises the village-dis- 
 trict of Greville, and out among the cliffs, nestling in a glen 
 almost within stone-throw of the sea, is the tiny hamlet of 
 Gruchy; consisting of eight or ten rough, grey stone houses, 
 strung along one street, that runs east and west and is 
 joined by another roadway from the south. 
 
 In one of these grey houses farthest to the east was 
 born, a century ago, Jean Francois Millet, the peasant painter 
 of France. The place today is much, indeed one may almost 
 say just, as it was one hundred years ago. The same remote, 
 brooding quiet save for the surf at the foot of the adjacent 
 rocks. The same rolling pastures. The same copious spring 
 near the fork of the road, where the village women still wash 
 and beat their linen. The same ancient well with its roof of 
 stone; and the same hard, penurious, peasant life. 
 
 It is natural for one familiar with the lives of both men, 
 as he stands beside this stone cottage, to compare this scene 
 with the clay "biggin" on the banks of Doon, near the Irish 
 sea, in Ayrshire; and Millet's with the career of the peasant- 
 poet of Scotland. Indeed one biographer of Millet, telling 
 of the associations of his youth, writes: — "In their patriarchal 
 simplicity and Puritan virtue these Norman peasants were 
 like the Scottish Presbyterians, — and in the natural order of 
 things out of this life of plain living and high thinking there 
 sprang the great poem of peasant life which was this painter's 
 message to the world." 
 
 This might have been written of Burns; for the circum- 
 stances of his early years very closely resemble those of 
 
 13 
 
Millet. Both were subject to the same pregnant influence 
 of devout parents and patriarchal home life. Both spent 
 much the same sort of laborious youth amid rural scenes in 
 the remote districts where they were born. Rigid economy, 
 toil and responsibility beyond his years brought each to an 
 early maturity. In each was developed deep religious faith 
 and strong independence of soirit; and ultimately, each in his 
 own language forcibly interpreted the dignity of labor, the 
 worth of character and the value of the individual man. To 
 each was revealed the beauty and the artistic value of the 
 common life of fireside and field, of men and women, of bird 
 and beast and flower. One became a poet and the other a 
 painter of humanity; each giving expression to new ideals 
 and to modern ideas in striking and original forms. 
 
 For twenty years and more Millet lived at Greville and 
 shared the earnest, laborious and religious life of his home 
 and surroundings. He was fortunate, as it has been suggested 
 Burns was fortunate, in his father, mother and the influences 
 of his home. Education, knowledge were for their own sake 
 greatly esteemed, so that, though books were not easy to 
 come by, Millet, like Burns, acquired a somewhat remarkable 
 mental cultivation, read much and thought deeply. His 
 father, Jean Louis Millet, a tall, slight man, had neither the 
 appearance nor the limitations of the average rustic of his 
 time. He was a man of some refinement both in his appear- 
 ance and tastes; with dark eyes, rather long, brown hair and 
 shapely hands. He too had a fine voice, was fond of music 
 and trained the village choir of Greville until it became 
 noted in the neighborhood and people came from all the 
 vicinity to hear it sing, in the low stone church which his 
 son was to immortalize in one of the last of his paintings, and 
 before which the son's statute now stands. He also modelled 
 in clay, carved wood and loved and studied, and taught this 
 eldest son to see and note the trees, birds, plants and scenes 
 of nature about him. His mother, though a hard working- 
 woman in house and field, was one who possessed some edu- 
 cation and was noted for her neat and cleanly appearance. 
 Then too his grandmother, who made her eldest grandson 
 her special property and took care of him while his parents 
 worked in the field or tended their sheep and cattle, taught 
 him much, as Burns' maternal aunt taught him, of the wisdom, 
 sayings and songs of the countryside. 
 
 So Millet grew to manhood amidst scenes and under in- 
 fluences which imparted to him the important truth which 
 he afterwards in a letter thus expressed: — "It is essential to 
 
 14 
 
use the commonplace in order to express the sublime." And 
 as we read these words how many of the lines of Burns come 
 to mind; some as familiar as these: 
 
 "But mousie thou are not thy lane 
 In proving foresight may be vain, 
 The best laid schemes o' mice an men 
 
 gang aft agley 
 An lea' us nought but grief an pain 
 for promised joy." 
 
 And what more offensively "commonplace" than a louse! 
 But one seen upon a Sunday bonnet gave us that "sublime" 
 sermon in little: 
 
 "O wad some Power the giftie gie us 
 To see oursels as others see us 
 It wad frae monie a blunder free us 
 
 an foolish notion: 
 What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us 
 and ev'n devotion." 
 
 As Millet approached manhood it was his father who 
 appreciated his artistic temperament and capacity; encour- 
 aged him to draw, praised his sketches of the men and women 
 and the scenes that attracted the boy's pencil; and finally took 
 him to Cherbourg to see old Mouchel, an artist there. They 
 took with them two of the sketches and found it difficult to 
 persuade Mouchel that the boy, unaided and untaught, had 
 made them. So this artist kept Millet by him for six months, 
 encouraged him to draw whatever he felt tempted to portray; 
 and to study the pictures in the small public gallery at 
 Cherbourg. 
 
 Then the boy's father died and, as the oldest son, he had 
 to go home and, as did Burns, in a measure take charge of 
 the family, the grandmother and the mother and the seven 
 brothers and sisters, as well as of the little farm. 
 
 But his work at Cherbourg had attracted the attention of 
 some men of influence and the Mayor wrote him urging him 
 to return to the city and pursue his artistic studies. This his 
 grandmother determined should be accomplished and so 
 finally it was, and he went into the studio of the principal 
 painter of the town, Langlois, who had studied in Paris and 
 in Italy. He like Mouchel recognized Millet's talent at once, 
 and after some months addressed a petition, in behalf of 
 young Millet, to the town council of Cherbourg, which 
 
 15 
 
resulted after some delays in an arrangement between the city 
 and the district, by which six hundred francs a year was 
 promised to Millet for his support while he studied his art 
 in Paris. 
 
 So at the age of twenty-two Millet began the second 
 period of his life. For twelve years he lived, studied and 
 suffered in Paris. At the end of two or three years he was 
 called home and lived some months there and in Cherbourg; 
 trying, often in the most humble way, to make a living with 
 his brush. In Cherbourg he now married a slight, little dress- 
 maker, whose portrait he had painted for a few francs. With 
 her he returned to his life of privation in Paris. Only the 
 first installment of six hundred francs was paid him by the 
 authorities of Cherbourg. The second year the sum dwindled 
 to three hundred and then ceased altogether; so that the 
 young artist was thrown upon his own resources for a liv- 
 ing for himself and his young wife; whose frail constitution 
 gave way until she died. Millet found Paris and his life there 
 and most of the artistic development of the time and place 
 thoroughly distasteful. The Salon and the Beaux-Arts were 
 dominated by artificial and conventional ideals. Millet, moved 
 indeed, dominated by an almost passionate sincerity and the 
 impulse to seek for essential truth, was filled with distaste 
 for the classical conventions and theatrical display of the 
 painters who for the time represented such artistic taste as 
 found official and public expression in Paris. 
 
 On another visit home he had married a young peasant 
 girl, Catherine Lemaire, and as children came to them fast, 
 he was compelled to struggle, at times desperately, for the 
 barest necessities of life. The work which he was compelled 
 to do, and in doing which he gradually obtained some renown, 
 was work of necessity rather than of his choice. He painted 
 much in the nude and did work both in paint and pastel of 
 a mythological and classical sort such as he or his friends 
 could sell at some price to the dealers. 
 
 Though Millet was essentially a countryfied young man, 
 shy in disposition, hesitating in speech and awkward in man- 
 ner, he had a personality that was in many respects attrac- 
 tive, and a fine depth of character that had but to be known to 
 be admired; so that in the atelier of Delaroche and among 
 the artists of Paris he made warm friends, and kept them; 
 but, in the language of Robert Louis Stevenson, "without 
 capitulation." Among these was the Spanish painter Dias, 
 who afterwards befriended him much, and Rousseau, and 
 Jacque, and finally during the latter years of his stay in 
 
 16 
 
Paris, Alfred Sensier, his future biographer, his ever faith- 
 ful and useful friend. By profession a lawyer, Sensier had 
 been appointed to some post in the Museum of the Louvre, 
 which brought him into contact with many of the painters 
 of his day. He was strongly attracted to Millet, visited him 
 much in his studio, loved to watch him at his work, and in 
 many ways made himself liked by and exceedingly useful to 
 the artist; who seems to have possessed even less of worldly 
 wisdom or the money getting faculty than Burns. Sensier 
 did much to promote Millet among his friends, and finally 
 when one of his more characteristic pictures was exhibited 
 in the Revolutionary Exhibition of 1848, the picture was pur- 
 chased, largely through the influence of Sensier, by M. 
 Rollin, the Minister of the Interior. Through Rollin the 
 same year Millet obtained a commission from the new 
 Republic for a picture; the subject to be of his own choos- 
 ing, and the price to be eighteen hundred francs; of which 
 sum 700 francs were paid at once. After several false starts 
 Millet finally began and finished the picture now known as 
 "The Haymakers;" and in April, 1849 he received the other 
 instalment of eleven hundred francs for the canvas. 
 
 During the years of his life there the distaste of Millet 
 for Paris had steadily grown, and with it the longing to get 
 once more into the country. This desire was shared by his 
 friend Jacque; so when the eleven hundred francs was paid 
 to him he hurried to Jacque, and though Millet was, as he 
 seems always to have been, considerably in debt, he offered 
 to lend his friend half of his wind-fall provided he would 
 join him in leaving Paris. Jacque readily accepted this 
 proposal and with their families they hied them away, first 
 to Fontainebleau and then, after a few days, through the 
 forest to the village of Barbizon; a name which they and 
 their like were destined to make a household word throughout 
 the artistic world. 
 
 With Barbizon the third, final and great period in the 
 life of Millet began; and the happiest too in spite of continued 
 harassment by debt and poverty, and by what perhaps is 
 best described by the homely phrase "poor management." 
 
 In a little while Millet had rented the curious cottage in 
 which the next twenty-five years of his life were passed, in 
 which he died and which may still be seen in something of 
 the same condition in which he left it, in the quaint French 
 hamlet just beyond the great forest of Fontainebleau. Two 
 rooms eight feet high and twelve feet square accommodated 
 himself, his wife and growing family; made habitable, cheer- 
 
 17 
 
ful and homely by the wise and devoted wife. Then came 
 upon a somewhat lower level a stable room with a door and 
 a single window, used by Millet for the next five or six years 
 as his studio. Along the side of this humble dwelling was 
 a rather narrow paved court, enclosed by a wall and in this 
 court stood a well as it is today; and back of the house was 
 a small orchard and beyond was the meadow, skirting the 
 forest. This scene appeared in many of Millet's subsequent 
 pictures, and may be seen in "La Becque;" than which he 
 seldom painted a dearer or more characteristic one. 
 
 Soon after his removal to Barbizon Millet wrote a letter 
 to Sensier, a part of which reveals the artist in a way that 
 the world has learned to recognize as near the truth about 
 him. He tells of three pictures he is about to send his friend 
 for sale, of which he gives the titles as: A Woman Crush- 
 ing Flax, A Peasant and his Wife Going to Work in the 
 Fields, and Gatherers of Wood in the Forest, and he says: 
 
 "As you will see by the titles of the pictures there are 
 neither nude women nor mythological subjects among them. 
 I mean to devote myself to other subjects, not that I hold 
 that sort of thing to be forbidden but that I do not wish to 
 feel % myself compelled to paint them." 
 
 "But to tell the truth peasant subjects suit my nature 
 best; for I must confess, at the risk of your taking me to be 
 a Socialist, that the human side is what touches me most in 
 art; and that, could I only do what I like, or at least attempt 
 to do it, I would paint nothing that was not the result of 
 an impression directly received from nature, whether in land- 
 scape or in figures. The joyous side never shows itself to 
 me. I know not if it exists, but I have not seen it. The 
 greatest thing I know is the calm, the silence which are so 
 delicious both in the forest and in the cultivated fields. 
 Whether the soil is good for culture or not you will confess 
 that it always gives you a very dreamy sensation and that the 
 dream is a sad one, although very delicious. You are sitting 
 under a tree enjoying all the comfort and quiet which it is 
 possible to find in this life, when suddenly you see a poor 
 creature loaded with a heavy fagot coming up the narrow 
 path opposite. The unexpected and striking way in which 
 this figure appears before your eyes reminds you instantly 
 of the sad fate of humanity — weariness." 
 
 "In cultivated land, or in places where the ground is 
 barren, you see people digging or hoeing and from time to 
 time one raises himself and 'stretches his back,' as they call 
 it, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, for 'Thou 
 shalt eat bread in the sweat of thy brow.' " 
 
 18 
 
The words are the words of Millet but the voice certainly 
 resembles the voice of Burns: bringing to mind "Man was 
 made to Mourn:" 
 
 "When age and want, Oh! ill-matched pair, 
 Show man was made to mourn." 
 
 And such poems as "Despondency," "Winter, a Dirge," 
 and even such homely ones as "The Farmer's Address to his 
 Old Mare" "The Cottar's Saturday Night," and others in 
 the same 'vein. But, while it is true that there was in the 
 artistic temperament of both Millet and Burns a tone, if not 
 sad certainly serious; it is not true of either that— "the joyous 
 side never shows itself" to them. Many of Burns' poems and 
 songs are exceeding humorous, some full of fun; and where 
 can be found a picture more delightfully joyous than Millet's 
 "Springtime," gay with blossoms and sunshine, which hangs 
 beside "The Gleaners" in the Louvre. 
 
 Nevertheless it is obviously true that the appeal made by 
 nature human-nature, the human side of life closest to nature, 
 was the strongest appeal that could be made to the artistic 
 temperament of both men, the one to which each yielded most 
 readily and with the most memorable artistic results. 
 
 And so at Barbizon Millet, the artist, came into his own, 
 and proceeded to exemplify how "essential it is to use the 
 commonplace to express the sublime:" as in The Sower The 
 Gleaners, The Water Carrier, The Flight of Birds, The Man 
 with the Hoe, The Sheperdess, as she knits in the twilight 
 The Angelus and in many other world-famous canvases. And 
 it is significant that these great pictures were, many of them, 
 a growth of years. The first sketch of The Sower was made 
 long before he finally left Greville, and repeated with added 
 and ever added power and significance in his portfolio, until 
 it grew to fullness of stature, as the world knows it now. So 
 with The Gleaners: first came a sketch of the woman under 
 the green handkerchief (the "marmotte" of the Norman peas- 
 ant) to the left of the group, leaning down, her worn hand 
 and blunt fingers outstretched to reach the stalk of wheat 
 and her left arm crossed over her weary back. Then followed 
 from time to time other sketches, first of the second woman 
 in the red marmotte; and finally the third figure, standing 
 bent and weary but ready to stoop again. Even in the earlier 
 sketches the wide stubble with the growing stacks appear, 
 and gradually there came into the picture the other workers, 
 the loaded wagon and the farmer on his horse over-seeing the 
 work. The whole scene of the completed picture, perhaps 
 
 19 
 
Millet's best, can yet be seen at any harvest time at Barbizon; 
 for the wide plain still stretches away from the trees and 
 walls of the village that close the background of the paint- 
 ing, the wheat is still stacked upon the same spot and the 
 gleaners still follow the harvesters as of old. 
 
 With all such scenes of rural life, with the sowing and 
 the reaping, with the fields and their workers, with the toil 
 by which a man and the world may live, Millet and Burns 
 were intimately familiar: 
 
 "The thresher's weary flingin-tree 
 
 The lee-lang day had tired me" wrote Burns in 
 "The Vision." 
 
 From their own experiences they knew the secrets of 
 the poor; the pathos and the poetry of their eternal struggle. 
 Each apprehended the relationship between the acts and 
 scenes of the daily life of the lowly men and women about 
 him and the highest art. Each of them lived in near compan- 
 ionship with these men and women and recognized the value, 
 dignity and integrity of a life lived worthily amid surround- 
 ings however humble. Each too knew something of the life 
 and people of another social scale, had "dinnered wi' a Lord," 
 and each profoundly, almost militantly, realized how unes- 
 sential was social rank as compared to individual character; 
 that indeed: 
 
 "The rank is but the guinea's stamp, 
 The man's the gowd for all that." 
 
 However commonplace these truths may seem now we 
 should realize that they were well night revolutionary an 
 hundred years ago. "At the risk of your taking me for a 
 Socialist," Millet wrote to Sensier; and when the next year 
 "The Sower" was exhibited: that strong, tragic, heroic, typi- 
 cal figure, striding over the plowed and harrowed soil, fling- 
 ing abroad the seed of a new harvest on the earth: the 
 individual man, back of all human life; the profound sensa- 
 tion it created was political as well as artistic. It had in- 
 deed something of the same social significance as had "The 
 Cottar's Saturday Night," or "A Man's a Man for a' that." 
 
 It was Gambetta, the most popular statesman of republi- 
 can France, an agnostic, who wrote of The Angelus: "That 
 master-piece, in which two peasants, bathed in the pale rays 
 of the setting sun, bow their heads, full of mystical emotion 
 at the clear sound of the bell ringing for evening prayer, 
 compels us to acknowledge the still powerful influence of 
 the religious tradition on the rural population. You feel that 
 
 20 
 
the artist is not merely a painter but that, living ardently 
 amid the passions and the problems of the age, he has his 
 share and plays his part in them. The citizen is one with the 
 artist, and in this grand and noble picture he gives us a great 
 lesson of social and political morality." 
 
 For more than twenty years Millet lived in this quaint 
 out-of-the-way village of Barbizon, which became a Mecca 
 for the world's artistic people, one of the national shrines 
 of France, and gave it's name to the artistic renaissance of 
 France. At his death the tardy nation rose to do him honor 
 and to proclaim him one of, if not her greatest modern 
 master. His paintings, pastels, etchings and drawings are 
 scattered among the great galleries, public and private, of 
 the world; their value enhanced literally more than a thous- 
 and fold since his death; so that a proof of his early etchings, 
 such as brought ten cents when printed, now sells for forty 
 and fifty pounds sterling. The Angelus, for which he re- 
 ceived twenty-five hundred francs, sold for five hundred and 
 fifty-three thousand, not very long after his death, at one of 
 the most remarkable public sales of pictures that ever took 
 place; was subsequently purchased by M. Chouchard for some 
 eight hundred thousand francs, and now with his splendid 
 collection rests in the Louvre. 
 
 And the Burns cottage at Ayr is visited annually, in peace- 
 ful times, by tens of thousands from all the ends of the earth. 
 And the grave in St. Michael's church-yard at Dumfries, 
 beside which Wordsworth stood and wrote, ever so long 
 ago: 
 
 "Through busiest street in lonliest glen 
 
 Are felt the flashes of his pen. 
 He rules 'mid winter snows, and when 
 
 Bees fill their hives, 
 Deep in the general heart of men 
 
 His power survives." 
 
 The Kilmarnock edition, in its light blue boards, pub- 
 lished by subscription at eight pence, selling recently for four 
 thousand dollars. More editions of Burns since his death 
 than of any other book, so it is said, save the Bible. More 
 statutes of him in more cities than of any other man that 
 ever lived. Over two hundred "Burns Clubs," scattered 
 through all the English speaking world, yet federated, just 
 to honor his name and memory. A magazine, ably edited, 
 devoted solely to his cult. 
 
 Such wide-spread fame must have it's roots deep in 
 congenial soil. Time does not lightly nor mistakenly bestow 
 
 21 
 
such guerdon of praise, homage and affection as she has given 
 Robert Burns and Jean Francois Millet. Great artists both, 
 each in his way unique; and prophets too, interpreters not 
 only of new artistic but of new social ideals. Their pictures 
 and verses are still active, living forces among men; and will 
 continue to be until the day come, whose coming they cer- 
 tainly have promoted: 
 
 "That come it may, as come it will for a' that, 
 That man to man, the world o'er, 
 Shall brothers be for a' that." 
 
 Neither of these seers for a moment believed that Nature, 
 whatever her seeming, as Tennyson suggests, is indeed "care- 
 less of the single life." Each as artist did much to hearten 
 men, for each in his own way dignified, yes, glorified the 
 common life of men and women. Each teaches us, with a 
 passion and artistic power which few indeed have equalled, 
 to see and feel and sympathize with the lowly, obscure and 
 poor, the hewer of wood, the sower of seed, the gleaner of 
 the harvest, the cotter by his hearth; to apprehend the worth 
 and the significance of the individual life. 
 
 The Melody of Burns 
 
 The first reviewers of Burns gave the plowman poet of 
 Ayr credit for talent, but criticised unfavorably his use of 
 the Scotch dialect. They said that his fame could not become 
 more than local because readers, other than the Scotch, could 
 not appreciate many of the words and phrases. They were 
 badly mistaken. The poems of Burns which are the most 
 loved and most quoted today are those in which Scotch words 
 and Scotch spelling are frequent. There is natural melody 
 in the Scotch dialect. This gives to the sentiment of Burns 
 poems, when read aloud, added expression. 
 
 William Vincent Byars, the linguist, who has delved 
 deeply into the philosophy of music, or melody, in spoken 
 languages, and who is recognized as international authority 
 on this subject, has pointed out the comparative strength of 
 this quality of melody in the dialect as used by Burns and 
 has shown how the poems of Burns gain thereby. He 
 illustrated this for the Burns Club of St. Louis by the para- 
 phrase in Lowland Scotch of one of the most familiar Psalms. 
 
 22 
 
Juist for Burns' Sake 
 
 By W. Hunter 
 
 of Kilbowie Jolley Beggars Burns Club 
 
 Read by Frederick W. Lehmann at the meeting of the Burns Club 
 
 of St. Louis, January 25, 1917 
 
 When Januar' winds blaw cauld and keen, 
 And frost and snaw aft deck the scene, 
 A Scotchman's prood to meet a frien', 
 Juist for Burns' sake. 
 
 Big heaped plates of hamely fare, 
 Wi' halesome haggis here and there — 
 A dish that noo is something rare, 
 Juist for Burns' sake. 
 
 And syne the whisky's haunded roon, 
 Wi' stops o' ale to wash it doon, 
 Their cares and sorrows a' to droon, 
 Juist for Burns' sake. 
 
 Wi' stamacks fu', and hearts content, 
 Ilk mind becomes on pleeasure bent, 
 The while some chiel that statins weel kent, 
 Juist for Burns' sake. 
 
 That glorious Immortal toast, 
 That mak's the greatest Scotchman boast, 
 He gies in language richly glossed, 
 Juist for Burns' sake. 
 
 'Mang muckle glee the glesses clink, 
 And ere ye could get time to blink, 
 They rise and hae anither drink, 
 Juist for Burns' sake. 
 
 Noo, see them grip each ither's haun, 
 While twa or three can hardly staun; 
 They've taen ower much a' whit was gaun, 
 Juist for Burns' sake. 
 
 "There was a lad was born in Kyle," 
 Is sung in sic a jovial style, 
 Ye'd hear it, aye, a hauf a mile, 
 Juist for Burns' sake. 
 23 
 
Nane o' your low, saft, wheedlin tunes, 
 Aft sang by lang haired German loons, 
 But yin that fills your briest wi' stouns, 
 Juist for Burns' sake. 
 
 And noo they tak' their sates yince mair, 
 Whilst no a bosom hauds a care, 
 But a' are fixed to do and dare, 
 Juist for Burns' sake. 
 
 The nicht is spent wi' joke and sang, 
 The time flees merrily alang, 
 Unheeded by the jovial thrang, 
 Juist for Burns' sake. 
 
 But time brings a' thing to an end, 
 The sweetest joy that e'er was kenned, 
 Is faur ower short a time to spend, 
 Juist for Burns' sake. 
 
 When "Auld Lang Syne" is sung they pairt, 
 And a' tak aff their separate airt, 
 Resolved to meet again if spairt, 
 Juist for Burns' sake. 
 
 The Twenty-third Psalm 
 
 A Paraphrase in Lowland Scotch 
 
 By William Vincent Byars 
 Kirkwood, Mo., October, 1916 
 
 (1) The Lord himsel, he leads me. I dree nae need. 
 (2) In pasturs green he feeds me; by pools sae clear he 
 lets me rest. (3) My sicknen saul he qwickens; the way 
 I tak, my ain best way, he gars me gae for his name's sake. 
 (4) As noo I grope the dead-mirk thru', I hope an' dinna 
 fear; yersel, my Gawd, are near, an' ye hae led the way; 
 your stock and rod sail be my stay. (5) My buird before 
 my faes ye spread; wi' oyle o' joy ye drook my head; my 
 bicker ye fill fu'. (6) Sae truth an' gude gree hansell me, 
 an' mercy too my last days thru; and at lang last, when 
 earth's nae use, in Gawd's fair hus, Ise dwell forevir mair. 
 
 Note: "Broad Scotch" vowels still have much of the same 
 quantity which developed melody in Hebrew as a spoken 
 language in the time of David. With the 23d Psalm, compare 
 the 131st, 128th, 127th, 126th. 90th, 42d and 19th. 
 
 24 
 
Burns and the Commonplace 
 
 From "Thoughts of a Toiler" by W. Hunter 
 
 Read by Frederick W. Lehmann at the meeting of the Burns Club 
 of St. Louis, January 25, 1917 
 
 VX7HATEVER else contributes to our growing estimation 
 of Robert Burns, whether it be his outspoken con- 
 demnation of hypocritical action or his inimitable lays of 
 love, there exists no dubiety as to the real source of his 
 popularity. The most superficial observer cannot fail to 
 notice that the secret of his power breathes itself out in his 
 rapturous expression on the simpler things of life. Whilst 
 other gifted children of the Muse have floated on the wings 
 of inspiration far up and beyond the trivialities of earthly 
 existence, and wandered in a fairyland of rich imagination 
 and fancy, the cotter of Ayrshire confined himself to a lowlier 
 range of vision, which included all that had a bearing on the 
 lives of struggling humanity. He never sought to withdraw 
 his gaze from the scenes he witnessed around him, but on the 
 contrary actually stopped to apply his transforming touch 
 to the hitherto despised and unnoticed creations of Nature. 
 
 No form of life, either plant or animal, was too insignifi- 
 cant to merit the breath of his genius. In this respect he 
 proved himself more true to nature than any poet who ever 
 sang. It requires no great stretch of imagination to feel that 
 within the soul of Robert Burns there existed a holy alliance 
 between a tender sensitiveness and a reverent love for the 
 humblest and most unassuming of earthly things. Who 
 beside him ever dreamt of giving utterance to such divine 
 eloquence on so common and unheeded an object as the "wee, 
 modest crimson-tipper flower?" To no one else but him did 
 the daisy appeal successfully for recognition. Its fate had 
 always been to meet with nothing but an occasional passing 
 glance, and to be ruthlessly trampled underfoot; to be 
 esteemed but the plaything of children, and of no value what- 
 ever to men and women fighting the battle of existence. But 
 to Burns the handiwork of the Divine was as beautifully 
 expressed and as apparent in the simple beauty of this tiny 
 flower of the field as in the most stupendous and awe-inspir- 
 ing of his works. 
 
 How faithfully he has described the "early humble birth" 
 of the "bonny gem," and told how "cheerfully it glinted forth 
 
 25 
 
amid the storm!" And with what kindly grace he spoke 
 of its unsheltered situation: 
 
 "The flaunting flowers our gardens yield 
 High sheltering woods and wa's maun shield, 
 But thou, beneath the random bield 
 
 O' clod or stane, 
 Adorns the histie stibble-field 
 
 Unseen, alane." 
 
 Then from the manner of its untimely death he drew the 
 melancholy moral of such a similar fate overtaking the "art- 
 less maid" or the "simple bard." 
 
 Again, our poet became inspired on the notable occasion 
 when his servant Blane so far forgot himself as to set out 
 to kill the "wee, sleekit, courin', tim'rous beastie," which had 
 been so unceremoniously turned out of its "wee bit housie." 
 How freely his sympathy ran out to the startled "mousie" 
 whom he designated as his "poor earth-born companion and 
 fellow-mortal." His poetic utterance glorified the simple 
 theme of his musing, and therein Burns accomplished the real 
 mission of his genius in directing the sympathy of men into 
 the same channel as his own. In so doing he served the 
 double purpose of attracting human interest to the smaller and 
 less understood affairs of life, and also endearing himself 
 to the toiling masses of his countrymen. And like a. true 
 poet he utilized the occasion to give expression to a truism 
 brought home to us with unerring certainty: 
 
 "The best-laid schemes o' mice and men 
 Gang aft a-gley, 
 And lea'e us nought but grief and pain 
 For promised joy." 
 
 The poet gave way to a still more remarkable outburst 
 of feeling at the sight of the wounded hare, which managed 
 to "hirple" past him after being shot by a neighbor of his 
 own. In a fit of anger he went so far as to threaten to throw 
 Thomson into the burn. He cursed the "barbrous act" which 
 brought the career of the swift-footed "wanderer of the wood 
 and field" to such a painful end. 
 
 Such leal-hearted sympathy with the distressed and 
 suffering in the humbler spheres of life betokened the 
 presence of intense interest in the lives of the homely and 
 hardy peasantry with whom he was most closely associated. 
 The heart which could feel a pang of pity for the misery and 
 wretchedness of the meaner animal creation was bound to 
 
 26 
 
give fitting response to the yearnings of the oppressed human 
 family. And so it proved. Burns entered fully into the mode 
 and manner of their living, cast a halo of brightness around 
 their rustic joys and pleasures, and brought into bold relief 
 the hardships and privations of their lives. 
 
 Not only so, but through the exertion of his powerful 
 genius and personality he raised the people to their proper 
 level and placed them on an equal social footing with the 
 peer and the prince. He recognized neither rank nor posi- 
 tion, class nor distinction: 
 
 "The rank is but the guinea stamp, 
 The man's the gowd for a' that." 
 
 Thus in the grandest possible sense Burns glorified the 
 commonplace as exemplified in the lower forms of creation 
 and in the lowly lives of the Scottish peasantry. His greater 
 productions "Tarn o' Shanter," "The Cotter's Saturday 
 Night," and "Hallowe'en," are epitomes of the national life 
 and character portraying on the one hand the saintly devo- 
 tion, and on the other the superstitious spirit which pervaded 
 the lives of the people. His touch transfigured the hitherto 
 dull and obscure environment in which they lived and died. 
 Fresh beauties were discovered in the life of the nation. The 
 despised and down-trodden toilers of the byre and the hay- 
 field were suddenly found to possess the truest dignity of 
 manhood and all the grace and charm of feminine witchery. 
 The revelation ennobled the class from which the poet 
 sprang. In return they have showered upon him the wealth 
 of their adoration, and today, after a lapse of a century and 
 a half from the date of his birth, he finds an immortal abiding 
 place, enshrined in the hearts of the people. 
 
 For ages Nature sought a voice 
 
 To make the soul of man rejoice; 
 
 To lure him back to taste the springs 
 
 Of purest joy in simple things. 
 
 At length she found a son of toil, 
 
 "Oor Rabbie," tiller of the soil, 
 
 At once she set his heart on fire, 
 
 Then smiled when he took up his lyre, 
 
 Full well she knew his song sublime 
 
 Would vibrate till the end of time. 
 
 And year by year the world acclaim 
 
 His matchless worth and deathless fame. 
 
The Muse of Burns 
 
 By Irvin Mattick 
 January 25, 1917 
 
 'Twas winter, and the fields of Ayr 
 
 Like painted seas rolled still and bare, 
 
 And from the hills the boreal wrath 
 
 Made eddies in the snowy path 
 
 Where all the milkwhite hawthorn slept, 
 
 Where all the tiny rivers crept, 
 
 Or parent streams in anger tore 
 
 Along their ice-bound, jagged shore! 
 
 Upon the patient, pregnant dell 
 
 Snowflakes like spirit petals fell, 
 
 Clothing the naked shrubs and trees 
 
 In robes of spectral tapestries; 
 
 When in the chariot of the storm 
 
 There rode a lustrous spirit form, 
 
 Bearing a faint song's magic strain 
 
 In all the wonder of its train! 
 
 The vision was no Attic shape, 
 
 Wearing a huge decorous cape, 
 
 But seemed some Naiad of the air 
 
 With graceful arms and bosom bare; 
 
 Who stepped with pretty twinkling feet, 
 
 Who smiled with amorous kindness sweet, 
 
 Whose glowing eye betrayed the mind 
 
 That loved the whole of humankind! 
 
 Above an honest plowman's hut, 
 
 Whose dearest wealth was one pure cot, 
 
 The muse of Scotland's matchless song 
 
 'Twixt life and death despairing hung: 
 
 The wind now ceased its weary drone, 
 
 Through drifting clouds the starlight shone, 
 
 And o'er the frozen field and hill 
 
 The winter world grew deathly still: 
 
 When suddenly an infant's cry 
 
 Rose to the spirit maid on high, 
 
 Who gathered in Scotland's noblest hour 
 
 The ebbing vestige of her power, 
 
 And dropped from heaven with graceful turns 
 
 Into the heart of Robert Burns! 
 
 2S 
 
O Burns, I wonder if you knew 
 That God a task had given you, 
 When into your warm human heart 
 He cast Truth's sharp poetic dart; 
 That stung your spirit into song, 
 That made you suffer woe and wrong, 
 That made you laugh and weep and jest 
 Until your over-flowing breast 
 Poured all its pity and its mirth 
 Upon the great and humble of the earth. 
 Ah, when the fair dame Poesy, 
 Among her sisters set you free, 
 She never left you quite alone, 
 But stayed, a careless chaperone: 
 Perhaps she grew so fond of how 
 You praised each lassie's bonnie brow, 
 That she preferred to let you rove 
 Unfettered through the realms of love! 
 
 She must have loved you for the way 
 
 You healed the plight of Duncan Gray, 
 
 And when you stopped between your plowing, 
 
 Great glory on a mouse bestowing". 
 
 She must have looked with moistened eye 
 
 Upon your kindred misery. 
 
 When for the rights of love and hate 
 
 The Twa Dogs held their high debate, 
 
 Perhaps she yearned to taste the change 
 
 Of living in a lower range. 
 
 And when upon that glorious morn 
 
 The diadem of tales was born, 
 
 Were you the one who bowed and said 
 
 That pleasures were like poppies spread? 
 
 Were you the one who took his hand 
 
 And led him to the Nith's green strand, 
 
 Within whose waters he could read 
 
 The racing mettle of Meg's speed? 
 
 And when beside the new-mown stack 
 
 He lounged upon a weary back, 
 
 And gazed at that pure lingering star, 
 
 Did you transport his soul afar, 
 
 Into those realms of silence, where 
 
 He brooded oft with miser care? 
 
 * * * * * * 
 
 You were the truest friend he had: 
 Whether his soul was bright or sad, — 
 You came with gentle hands and pressed 
 
 29 
 
The bursting trouble from his breast, — 
 In sober moments and in wild, 
 You were the guardian of this child; 
 You urged him to plunge deep into folly, 
 But wound the green immortal holly 
 Around his head to pay the cost 
 Of what his waning life had lost. 
 
 And when he came with footsteps slow, 
 And life's warm lamp was flickering low- 
 You were the one who took his pen, 
 And led him back to his God again, — 
 Laid him in rest, to sleep serene 
 With his Highland Mary and Faithful Jean! 
 
 Ben Blewett • 
 1856-1917 
 
 By George J. Tansey 
 Between the above dates, what? 
 
 Sixteen years of boyhood in a home surrounded by lov- 
 ing care and gentle, up-building influences; four years of 
 intensive study in Washington University and nearly forty- 
 one years of service as teacher and director of education in 
 the public schools of St. Louis. 
 
 In 1876 Ben Blewett graduated from Washington Univer- 
 sity, having during the four years of his college course main- 
 tained himself, and paid for his tuition by his own labors. 
 
 At graduation he was at once tendered a position as 
 Superintendent of the Cote Brilliante High School. Teaching 
 was his chosen profession and his worth was speedily recog- 
 nized. Steady advancement through the recognition of his 
 capacities, enthusiasm and sincerity of purpose carried him 
 as Principal of various schools in St. Louis from the extreme 
 limits of the city on the West, then to the North, then to the 
 South and later to the central section of the city, again to the 
 middle W T est, and finally to the position of Superintendent of 
 all the schools of our city. 
 
 When a Committee from the Board of Education, seek- 
 ing for a man to be placed in charge of our educational 
 system, visited noted educators and educational institutions 
 
 30 
 
throughout the country they were told with unanimity: 
 "Return to St. Louis. The man you seek (Ben Blewett) is 
 at your hand; better qualified for this work than any that we 
 could name." 
 
 He was ever guided by the highest ideals and might well 
 have taken for his motto, "There shall be no compromise with 
 error." He was deeply religious, but without religiosity. In 
 his dealings with teacher and pupil he was ever gentle, for 
 gentleness was the basic portion of his composition: but 
 when firmness was demanded he could be firm without being 
 harsh. 
 
 The death summons came, as he would like to have had 
 it come, while he was in the performance of a public duty, 
 delivering an address on "Constructive Patriotism" at Wash- 
 ington. His last breath was given in the service of his 
 profession and to his country. 
 
 We, of the Burns Club, who knew him in the delightful 
 intimacy of our meetings, as man, teacher and public spirited 
 citizen, had full opportunity in those off-guard moments, 
 when a man best shows himself, to realize the kindliness of 
 his nature, the sweetness of his disposition, the generosity 
 of his heart and his powers as a man. 
 
 The record of his career will be an inspiration to the 
 teachers who follow him, and his benefaction a substantial 
 asset for all time to the teaching corps of the St. Louis 
 Public Schools. Though dead, his spirit shall live, and we, 
 his intimate friends, will cherish the recollection of that 
 friendship and rejoice that we knew him in the fullness of 
 his powers and feel that this world is a better place for his 
 having lived. 
 
 "His life was gentle and the elements 
 So mixed in him that Nature might stand up, 
 And say to all the world: this was a man." 
 
 31 
 
1916 
 
 HpHOMAS AUGUSTINE DALY of Philadelphia, was the 
 guest of honor at Burns Night of 1916. Mr. Daly's visit 
 to St. Louis to participate in the annual meeting of the Burns 
 Club was brought about by his personal friends, William 
 Marion Reedy and Frederick W. Lehmann, both members 
 of the club. Of Mr. Daly, Mr. Reedy said: 
 
 "His verses in 'dago' dialect portray with tenderness and 
 humor the aspects of life as it appears and appeals to Ameri- 
 cans of Italian origin. His poetical interpretations of the 
 spirit of the Irish in America are of like charm. His child 
 verse is of as rare quality as that of Father Tabb or Robert 
 Louis Stevenson. In the Lyric Year competition some years 
 ago for the prize for the best poem of the twelve month, his 
 lines "To a Thrush" received the second award, the first 
 going to Orrick Johns, son of one of our club members, who 
 read a fine poem on Burns at a former celebration. Mr. 
 Daly's poems have been published in three volumes, entitled 
 respectively 'Carmina,' 'Canzoni, and 'Madrigali.' " 
 
 Mr. Daly read a charming narrative in verse written for 
 the occasion, "The Birth of Tarn o' Shanter." Members hailed 
 this as a most valuable contribution to their next Burns 
 Nights book. "The Birth of Tarn o' Shanter" was printed 
 and sent to Burns Clubs throughout the world. 
 
 "Lines to Robert Burns," dedicated to the Burns Club 
 of St. Louis by Irvin Mattick, the St. Louis poet, were read. 
 A letter from James Whitcomb Riley made pleasant acknowl- 
 edgment to President Bixby of one of the Burns Club books. 
 It referred to Mr. Riley's own poem on Burns, speaking of 
 Burns as his most loved poet, in these words: 
 
 "Sweet singer that I lo'e the maist 
 
 any sin wi eager haste, 
 
 1 smacket bairn lips ower the taste 
 
 hinnied sang. 
 
 1 hail thee though a blessed ghaist 
 In Heaven lang. 
 
 Wi brimman lip and laughin' ee 
 Thou shookest even grief wi' glee, 
 Yet had nae niggart sympathy 
 Where sorrow bowld, 
 But gavest a thy tears as free 
 As a thy Gowd." 
 
 32 
 
The Birth O' Tarn O'Shanter 
 
 By Thomas Augustine Daly 
 
 of Philadelphia 
 
 Written for the Burns Club of St. Louis and read by the author 
 
 at the meeting January 25, 1916 
 
 TO a friendly challenge from Captain Grose we are indebted 
 for this admirable masterpiece. Burns having entreated 
 him to make honorable mention of Alloway Kirk in his 
 Antiquities of Scotland, he promised compliance with the re- 
 quest upon one condition, namely, that the poet should supply 
 him with a metrical witch story, as an accompaniment to the 
 engraving 1 . Mrs. Burns it was who related to Kromek the 
 marvelous rapidity with which this poem was produced. Ac- 
 cording to her, it was the work of a single day — one account 
 even stating that it was composed between breakfast and 
 dinner. 
 
 As Alexander Smith put it, with an exultant chuckle, the 
 best day's work ever done in Scotland, since Bruce won Ban- 
 nockburn. Burns, during the early part of that memorable day, 
 had passed the time alone in pacing his favorite walk upon the 
 river bank. Thither in the afternoon he was followed by his 
 "bonnie Jean" and some of their children. Finding that he was 
 "crooning to himself," and fearing lest their presence might be 
 an interruption, his considerate wife loitered some little dis- 
 tance behind among the bloom and heather with her brood of 
 young ones. There her attention was caught by the poet's 
 impassioned gesticulations. She could hear him repeating 
 aloud, while the tears ran down his face: "Now, Tarn! O, Tarn! 
 had they been queans." Toward evening, when the storm of 
 composition had fairly run out, Burns, we are told by M'Diar- 
 mid, committed the verses to writing upon the top of a sod 
 dyke, overhanging the river; and directly they were completed 
 rushed indoors to read them aloud by the fireside in a tone 
 of rapturous exultation. 
 
 — Rev. Dr. J. Loughran Scott, in the Alloway Edition of Burns* 
 Works. 
 
 How broke the east upon that day, 
 
 In fire and blood or ashes gray? 
 
 And did a rich or niggard boon 
 
 Of sunlight gild the Nith at noon? 
 
 Who knows or cares? For on that morning, 
 
 When Tarn o'Shanter, without warning, 
 
 Came gloriously down to earth, 
 
 The river, singing at his birth, 
 
 Wore on its face a mystic light; 
 
 For in that moment reached its height 
 
 The lyric fire, the zenith flare 
 
 From out the heart of Burns of Ayr! 
 
 33 
 
O! little Nith! O! happy river 
 
 You shall not lose that gleam forever; 
 
 Your waves, whatever moods betide them, 
 
 Shall sing of him who walked beside them 
 
 And from his great, heart wove a story 
 
 That was the crown upon his glory. 
 
 And on that morning when he came 
 
 With frenzied eye and cheek aflame 
 
 To feast his soul upon the food 
 
 That poets find in solitude, 
 
 What was the charm you held him with, 
 
 O! helpful little river Nith? 
 
 Ah, well I know the way you did it! 
 
 I shall not mince nor gloss the credit, 
 
 But, auditing the dim dead past, 
 
 Shall here set down your score at last. 
 
 To you, that morning (Who shall care 
 
 If skies above were dull or fair?) 
 
 The poet, seeking comfort, brought 
 
 His fecund fancy, big with thought. 
 
 Beside your bonnie banks he walked, 
 
 And ever as he went he talked 
 
 The quaint, blithe things that thronged his brain 
 
 And conned them o'er and o'er again; 
 
 And presently the liquid laughter 
 
 Of pleasant waters gurgled after, 
 
 And, as a voice by harp attended, 
 
 With borrowed beauty grows more splendid, 
 
 So waxed the poet's budding song 
 
 Where light your ripples leaped along. 
 
 You smiled and danced and made your measures 
 
 To match his song of ale-house pleasures, 
 
 Where Tarn and cronies came to mingle 
 
 Beside their comfortable ingle; 
 
 But when the "reaming swats" came thicker 
 
 And Robin's tongue, that sang of liquor, 
 
 Grew overload and full of yearning, 
 
 No doubt you set your rapids churning, 
 
 To draw his thoughts from off the "nappy" 
 
 And keep him singing, blithe and happy. 
 
 Then, when he pushed those joys aside 
 And sallied forth with Tarn to ride, 
 (For well you know that Tarn o'Shanter 
 Was not alone upon that canter) 
 How well again his mood was fellowed! 
 Among your rocks the thunder bellowed; 
 34 
 
Your spray "upon the light breeze passed 
 
 For "rattlin' showers upon the blast"; 
 
 You made the "Doon pour all his floods," 
 
 The "doubling storm roar through the woods"; 
 
 And somewhere in your shadows lurk 
 
 The dancers in the ruined kirk. 
 
 But when that dance grew wild and furious 
 
 And Tarn, with watching, much too curious; 
 
 An Robbin, prattling of the "queans, 
 
 A' plump and strapping in their teens," 
 
 Seemed bent on lingering overlong, 
 
 I like to think that then the song 
 
 In all your rippling waves you stilled, 
 
 As by the breath of winter chilled, 
 
 That Robin, in the pause, might hear 
 
 His "bonnie Jean" and children near; 
 
 And draw his thoughts from "sarks o' flannel" 
 
 And back into the proper channel. 
 
 Then with your song and liquid laughter 
 You rose again to follow after, 
 With O! what sympathetic feeling, 
 Where faithful Meg, the mare, goes reeling 
 Across the bridge that spans the flood, 
 By all the ghostly crew pursued, 
 And carries off her master, hale, . 
 But leaves behind her own grey tail. 
 
 And when the day was done you knew 
 The poet's exaltation, too; 
 'Twas yours at fall of dusk to share 
 The calm that soothed the bard of Ayr, 
 And through the night, O happy stream! 
 You were a music in his dream. 
 There, musing by some mossy stone, 
 Perhaps, ah, yes, you must have known 
 That though again upon your shore 
 The poet still would walk, no more 
 Would Time bring round to you the bliss 
 Of any day to match with this — 
 The very cap-sheaf on the past, 
 The greatest labor and the last. 
 
 Oh! in the fire of that one day 
 How many years were burned away? 
 And in the torrents of his tears 
 Were lost how many unborn years? 
 For this man took life's cup and laughed 
 35 
 
A 
 
 And strove to drain it at a draught. 
 
 What tragedy was in this mirth, 
 
 O! river, singing at its birth? 
 
 What holocaust was in the light 
 
 With which your morning face was bright? 
 
 O! little Nith! O! happy river, 
 You shall not lose that gleam forever; 
 Your waves, whatever moods betide them, 
 Shall sing of him who walked beside them 
 And from his great heart wove a story 
 That was the crown upon his glory! 
 
 To Henry King 
 
 T the annual dinner of the Burns Club of St. Louis in 
 1914, the address of the evening was by Captain Henry 
 King, editor of the Globe-Democrat. Two years later a chair 
 at the long table in the Burns Club room was vacant. Captain 
 King was one of the original promoters of the movement 
 which created the replica of the Burns Cottage on the 
 World's Fair grounds in 1904. Captain King presided most 
 happily over the sessions of the World's Press Parliament, 
 organized by Walter Williams, the first assemblage of the 
 kind in the history of the world's journalism, which was 
 followed by the distinct recognition of the newspaper pro- 
 fession in the educational institutions of the United States. 
 Captain King became one of the organizers of the Burns 
 Club of St. Louis and a regular participant in the Burns 
 Nights to honor the anniversary of the poet's birth. At the 
 meeting in 1916, the members stood in silence as President 
 Bixby announced the passing of Captain King. This tribute 
 was offered by Walter B. Stevens and was adopted by the 
 club: 
 
 Several years ago Henry King wrote this of his profes- 
 sion: 
 
 "But over and above all considerations of financial profit 
 and of attractive employment, there is the opportunity, which 
 is also an obligation, to promote truth and justice, to expose 
 fraud and crime, to favor honest and decent government, to 
 stand for education, morality, patriotism and all the whole- 
 some influences of society. That is where the profession of 
 journalism reaches the summit of its philosophy and its dis- 
 tinction and demonstrates that Shakespeare was never wiser 
 than when he wrote: 
 
 36 
 
"'Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, 
 Not light them for themselves; but if our 
 Virtues did not go forth of us t'were all alike 
 As if we had them not.' " 
 
 Henry King lived these, his ideals of his profession, 
 throughout his allotted years. 
 
 His philosophy of life in general might be summed up 
 in the bard's epitaph: 
 
 "Reader, attend — whether thy soul 
 Soars fancy's nights beyond the pole, 
 Or darkling grubs this earthly hole, 
 
 In low pursuit; 
 Know prudent, cautious self-control 
 
 Is wisdom's root." 
 
 And when the peaceful end came, Henry King could, 
 with Burns, have sung the "Song of Death": 
 
 "Farewell, thou fair day, thou green earth, and ye skies, 
 
 Now gay with the bright setting sun; 
 
 Farewell loves and friendships, ye dear tender ties— 
 
 Our race of existence is run!" 
 "Thou grim king of terrors, thou life's gloomy foe! 
 
 Go, frighten the coward and slave; 
 
 Go teach them to tremble, fell tyrant! but know, 
 
 No terrors hast thou for the brave." 
 
 And we, his associates of the Burns Club of St. Louis, 
 can say of Henry King, as did Burns of his friend: 
 
 "An honest man here lies at rest 
 As e'er God with his image blest! 
 The friend of man, the friend of truth; 
 The friend of age, and guide of youth; 
 Few hearts like his, with virtue warm'd, 
 Few heads with knowledge so inform'd; 
 If there's another world, he lives in bliss; 
 If there is none, he made the most of this." 
 
1915 
 
 t>EV DR. JAMES W. LEE, the Methodist divine of inter- 
 national fame, was the speaker of Burns Night of 1915. 
 "Genius and Geography" gave Dr. Lee his opportunity to 
 show how Burns had bestowed perpetual distinction upon his 
 birthplace, upon Alloway Mill, upon the Nith and upon the 
 villages, rivers and various localities which had prompted 
 his muse. "When a spot has become sacred to men," said 
 Dr. Lee, "it is always in the first place because a great spirit 
 has dwelt there, but another feature is the way in which, in 
 the making of a shrine like the birthplace of Burns, for 
 instance, the physical surroundings have managed, in some 
 way, to absorb the very soul of the poet; as though emana- 
 tions from his spirit had been shot into the house in such a 
 way as to humanize it with the flavor of Burns' personality; 
 and into the fields around the house in such a way as to fill 
 them with the aroma of Burns' spirit; and into the little 
 river flowing near the house in such a way as to put it to 
 singing with music caught from the melody of Burns' songs." 
 From Burns, the speaker passed to others of the world's 
 greatest to illustrate this relationship of Genius and 
 Geography. 
 
 Letters were read from two absent members, David F. 
 Houston, the Secretary of Agriculture in the Cabinet of 
 President Wilson, and David R. Calhoun. 
 
 Saunders Norvell, a member of the club, sent from 
 Missoula, Montana, a greeting by wire with couplets in 
 Scotch humor for several members: 
 
 "To Bixby: 
 
 At any time I'd rather sit with you than ride, so 
 Were I Royal Georgie. The Lord in Heaven reward 
 ye." 
 "To Douglas: 
 
 Auld comrade dear and brother sinner, how's the 
 folks about guid commer. For me my faculties 
 are frozen, my dearest member nearly dozened." 
 
 "To Blewett: 
 
 Is there a man whose judgment clear 
 Can others teach the course to steer, 
 Yet runs himself life's mad career, 
 Wild as a wave?" 
 
"To Wright: 
 
 He sang with joy his former day. He, we weeping, 
 
 wailed his latter times. 
 But what he said it was nae play, I winna venture 
 in my rhymes." 
 
 "To Johns: 
 
 Your news and reviews, sir, we read through and 
 
 through, sir, 
 "With little admiring and blaming. The papers are 
 
 barren of home news or foreign. No murders or 
 
 rapes worth the naming." 
 
 "To Johnson: 
 
 A man may drink and not be drunk. A man may 
 fight and not be slain. 
 
 A man may kiss a bonnie wench and, aye, be wel- 
 comed back again." 
 
 "To Crawford: 
 
 An lastly Hanford, for yoursel' may guardian angels 
 
 tak' a spell 
 And steer you seven miles south of Hell. 
 But first, before you see Heaven's glory 
 May ye get monie a story, monie a lark and monie a 
 
 drink 
 And, aye, enough o' needful clink." 
 
 "To All: 
 
 And there's a hand my trusty frien' 
 And gies a hand o' thine 
 And we'll tak' a right guid willie waught 
 For auld lang syne." 
 
 SANDY NORVELL. 
 
 A paper by Frederick W. Lehmann on "The Scotch 
 According to Johnson," added greatly to the interest of this 
 Burns Night of 1915. It had been delivered before the Cale- 
 donian Society, but was repeated before the Burns Club at the 
 request of the club. 
 
 30 
 
Genius and Geography 
 
 By Rev. Dr. James W. Lee 
 January 25, 1915 
 
 A SERIES of articles appeared in the London Times of 
 last year, entitled "A Dickens' Pilgrimage," in which 
 Dickens was treated as a country and was traveled through 
 and explored as a tourist would make his way through 
 Greece or France. The. novelist was represented as spread 
 out like Missouri or Tennessee. A remarkable thing about 
 this Dickens country was that not a sprig of grass or tree 
 or rock or mountain or country house or mansion or hotel 
 or vehicle or cow or horse or man or woman or child in it 
 but was enhanced in value and in importance by all 
 the wealth of the author's personality. If the geographical 
 method of treating a personality such as that of Dickens 
 were applied to all the great people who have ever lived, we 
 would find that instead of a few countries such as we now 
 know by the name of England or Germany or Egypt or 
 Palestine, we would have thousands of them such as we 
 know by the name of Moses, Isaiah, St. Paul, Philo Judaeus, 
 Plato, Sir Walter Scott, Burns, and so on through the list 
 of all those, who, by living or thinking or singing or serving, 
 have lifted the places and things with which they were 
 associated, from the realm of time to that of eternity. 
 
 The publishers of Everyman's Library are now bringing 
 out a series of historical geographies, in which only the 
 places, cities and towns of each county are put down that 
 stand out above the general deal level of human monotony, 
 because of their connection with decisive battles, heroic 
 deeds, literary triumphs or other extraordinary achievements. 
 In these books the patches of territory on the earth's surface 
 that have not been saturated with the personality of some 
 great saint or artist or hero are not considered at all. 
 Railroads, warehouses, vast fields of wheat, pork and beef 
 plants, add in themselves alone nothing of permanent value 
 to these countries, which are being mapped and geograph- 
 ically described from the standpoint of historic people and 
 historic deeds. The Andes would not be down in any of 
 these historical geographies but for the fact that Alexander 
 Von Humboldt climbed Chimborazo, one of its peaks, and 
 made observations. The Taj Mahal, Shah Jehan's twenty 
 million dollar tomb at Agra in India, does not occupy as 
 much space as the two hundred dollar cottage in Ayr, Scot- 
 
 40 
 
land, where Robert Burns was born. The County of Hamp- 
 shire, England, where John Keble preached in Hursley 
 twenty-five years, and where Gilbert White preached in Sel- 
 bourne twenty years, and where Charles Kingsley preached 
 in Eversley thirty years, is given more attention than all 
 Texas, with area enough to make more than a thousand 
 counties as large as Hampshire. 
 
 The geography enhanced by the genius of Burns does 
 not cover much of the earth's surface. A few little rivers 
 and villages and towns and the City of Edinburgh were 
 sufficiently illuminated by association with the poet to se- 
 cure perpetual distinction in the geography of genius. Take 
 the humble cottage in which the poet was born. It consists 
 of but two small rooms, paved with flagstones, and with but 
 one window of four small panes, while the thatched roof 
 forms the only ceiling. It is difficult to imagine a father 
 and mother and seven small children living in such a place. 
 But this little house, multiplied by Burns, is of more value, 
 from the standpoint of pounds, shillings and pence, than 
 the Taj Mahal multiplied by Shah Jehan. About fifty 
 thousand people a year visit the cottage in which Burns was 
 born. Estimate what it costs for each one of these persons 
 to go up from London to Ayr and return, adding what they 
 pay for pictures and bric-a-brac connected with the cottage, 
 and you will perhaps get a sum equal to one million five 
 hundred thousand dollars. This is an annual income at five 
 per cent, on thirty millions of dollars. We may say then, 
 measured by the annual income it produces, Burns' cottage is 
 worth thirty millions of dollars, while the Taj Mahal, that 
 cost twenty millions of dollars to build, does not perhaps 
 produce an income of one hundred thousand dollars. 
 
 It is certainly not through any reasoning or calculation 
 that pilgrimages are made to places made famous because 
 of their relation to great men. The disposition to see the 
 Scotland of Burns does not grow out of the aesthetic sense 
 or the desire for trade and profit. It is simply due to one of 
 those forces outside of reason, which far more than reason 
 have to do with the making of man. The secret is one of 
 the soul but not of the soul only. When a spot has become 
 sacred to men, it is always in the first place because a great 
 spirit has dwelt there, but another feature is the way in 
 which, in the making of a shrine like the birthplace of Burns, 
 for instance, the outside conditions, the physical surround- 
 ings, have acted as a kind of reflex of his soul, as an 
 absorbent of it. Such that by dwelling in the place, the poet 
 saturated it with his personality, as though emanations from 
 
 41 
 
his spirit had been poured into the house, into the fields 
 around it, and into the little river flowing near it. One 
 feels, in the region, as if there had been a subtle giving off 
 of the poet's interior being, a passing of its essence into 
 its immediate surroundings, a process which might be com- 
 pared to the outrush of electrons from the atom, which we 
 are now taught is one of the forms of radio-activity. This 
 subtle reaction of mind and matter is a very remarkable 
 fact. Every feeling of Burns, every aspiration, his own inner- 
 most heartbeats are held and reflected by the environing 
 conditions in which he spent his short life of thirty-eight 
 years. As the violin, played on by a master, acquires a new 
 value because his melody manages to find its way into the 
 wood, so the earthly surroundings of Burns have acquired 
 a value because seemingly saturated with the wonder and 
 mystery of the poet's soul. His spirit continues to vibrate 
 through his physical surroundings. The peculiar quality of 
 his dominating personality colors the whole impression made 
 upon those who visit the Scotland of the poet, by the 
 scenery in the midst of which he lived. 
 
 More tourists visit the birthplace of Burns, two miles 
 southward out of Ayr on the Maybole road, than ever see 
 the birthplace of any other poet or literary man who ever 
 lived. The cottage was built literally of clay by the poet's 
 father, on a small holding of six or seven acres, which he 
 had leased as a means of adding to his livelihood as a gar- 
 dener. Because Burns first saw the light in this cottage, 
 and because he spent the first six years of his life under its 
 thatched roof, it has come to have a larger place in the 
 imagination of mankind than the palace of the Caesars. Allo- 
 way Mill, a mile away, where the poet went to school, has 
 a place in literature equal to that of a great university. 
 When the poet was six years old, the little household moved 
 over the hill to Mount Oliphant, and by so doing made that 
 the most distinguished mountain in Scotland. There the next 
 six years were spent. "We lived very poorly," said Burns, 
 "I was a dexterous plowman for my age, and the next eldest 
 to me (Gilbert) could drive the plow very well, and help me 
 to thresh the corn." 
 
 At the same time, the future poet was imbibing other 
 influences. In the evenings his mother's ballads were sup- 
 plemented by the stories of Jennie Wilson, an old woman 
 who lived in the family, and whose astonishing store of 
 tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, 
 witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, 
 wraiths, apparitions and the like, ceased to be provincial and 
 
 42 
 
local when touched by the universal genius of Burns. He 
 read the "Life of Hannibal" and the "History of Sir William 
 Wallace," and thus gave them a circulation wider than they 
 had ever before attained. 
 
 In the town of Ayr itself one may still see that other 
 bridge, the "Auld Brig," which owes its preservation and the 
 popular fervor of 1906, which produced ten thousand pounds 
 for the nurpose, to the fact that it figures in Burns' poem, 
 "The Twa Briggs." The farm of Mossgiel, near Mauchline, 
 secured and stocked by the poet and his brothers and sisters 
 when the clouds of ruin were gathering around their father's 
 head, will outlive any other farm in Great Britain, because 
 it was in the fields of Mossgiel itself that the incidents 
 occurred which suggested the poems, "To a Mouse," "To a 
 Mountain Daisy," "Death and Dr. Hornbrook," "The Twa 
 Dogs," "The Cottar's Saturday Night," and "Hallowe'en." 
 
 In the neighborhood of this region is a little stream, 
 flowing through deeply wooded banks, known as Bonnie 
 Doon, which is larger, measured by the space it occupies on 
 the map of literature, than the Mississippi river. Then there 
 is the Alloway Kirk, not far away, that is perhaps the small- 
 est church that ever filled so large a place in the thought of 
 the world. No grand and storied cathedral pile in all Europe 
 is better known, and to no shrine of famous Minster do 
 more pilgrims journey, than to this little church immortal- 
 ized by the pen of Burns. 
 
 Like immortal ships, the spirits of great men sail the 
 Ocean of Time, bearing the treasures and archives of the 
 civilization which gave them birth, and also the names of 
 places with which they were associated on earth. They out- 
 ride the fury of all the storms, and will sail on till 
 
 "The stars grow old, 
 The sun grows cold, 
 And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold." 
 
 The nation is unfortunate beyond expression that has no 
 son, with genius wide and universal enough to convey to 
 the future her history. Whatever may be her wealth and 
 her commercial importance, she is without a future. Babylon 
 was a vast and rich empire; she was situated in the most 
 fertile portion of the globe. She had a capital that eclipsed 
 all others in splendor and wealth, but among her people she 
 found no man amply endowed enough to understand and 
 give permanent mental setting to her faith and her civiliza- 
 tion. Her heartthrobs, whatever they were, got interpreted 
 in no poem, explained in no philosophy, and written in no 
 
 43 
 
history. Into oblivion has fallen that bejeweled and pam- 
 pered life that reveled in her magnificent palaces and amid 
 her far-famed hanging gardens. Over it all has settled the 
 stillness of the desert and the gloom of eternal night. 
 
 On the other hand, how secure is the Greece that flow- 
 ered in her great men. She has been despoiled of her art 
 treasures, her temples have fallen, the Parthenon is in ruins, 
 but the two hundred years of her life, which she deposited in 
 her great men, are immortal. No tooth of time, no war's 
 bloody hand, no devastation of years, can take from her the 
 glory which she lifted and locked in the genius of her artists, 
 her statesmen and her philosophers. Plato and Aristotle still 
 interpret her problems of destiny. Sophocles and Pindar still 
 sing her glories, Herodotus and Thucydides still keep the 
 record of her victories. Demosthenes and Aeschines 
 still declare her matchless eloquence. Appelles still gives 
 expression to her conceptions of form and beauty. Her 
 riches were shipped to the future in the spirits of great men. 
 The unfolding centuries may look in upon them and enjoy 
 them, but their passage through the years cannot be 
 arrested. 
 
 The most trifling and seemingly unimportant activities 
 of Burns, when multiplied by his personality, became signi- 
 ficant. Not far from the Solway shore, Burns with a small 
 party of revenue officers was left to watch the motions of 
 an armed smuggling brig, which had got into shallow water, 
 while a brother exciseman went to Dumfries for a guard of 
 dragoons, and the superintendent went to Ecclefechan on a 
 similar errand. While the party lay in the wet salt-marsh 
 chafing at the exciseman's delay, Burns, on the hint of one 
 of his men, composed and recited on the spot his well-known 
 set of verses, "The Deil's awa' wi' the Exciseman," and by 
 so doing put the adventure of the day down in the Geography 
 of Genius. 
 
 Directly after the flush of his success and fame as a 
 great poet, he came into Nithsdale and built the farmhouse 
 of Ellisland, which is still standing on the bank of the Nith, 
 some six or seven miles from Dumfries. This house will 
 stand forever because the object for which he built it is 
 expressed in his own lines: 
 
 "To make a happy fireside clime 
 For weans and wife — 
 That's the true pathos and sublime 
 Of human life." 
 
 Here in these happy days, after his marriage to Jean 
 Armour, while superintending the building of the house in 
 
 44 
 
Ellisland, the poet composed that most exquisite of all love 
 songs, in the music of which his house and his Jean will 
 float down the ages forever: 
 
 "Of a' the airts the wind can blaw I dearly like the west, 
 For there the bonnie lassie lives, the lassie I lo'e best; 
 There wildwoods grow and rivers row, and many a hill 
 
 between. 
 But day and night my fancy's flight is ever wi my Jean." 
 
 On the gable window of the house Burns built, which is 
 still standing, looking south, one may still see the poet's 
 handwriting. Under its roof, in these first halcyon days, he 
 gave the place immortality by writing such fine things as 
 "Gae fetch to me a pint o' wine," "My heart's in the Hie- 
 lands," "Willie brewed a peck o' maut." 
 
 The place is enhanced still more, because it was here, 
 on the anniversary of the day on which he heard of the 
 death of his early love, Mary Campbell, stretched on a mass 
 of straw in the barnyard with his eyes fixed on a planet 
 that shone like another moon, he composed that noblest of 
 all his ballads, "To Mary in Heaven": 
 
 "Thou lingering star with lessening ray 
 That lov'st to greet the early morn, 
 Again thou usher'st in the day 
 
 My Mary from my soul was torn." 
 
 Below the house there still may be seen the path running 
 along the bank of the Nith, which was his favorite walk, and 
 where, in the hours of a single day, he forged white-hot on 
 the anvil of his genius, the most famous of all his master- 
 pieces, "Tarn O'Shanter." He committed the verses to writ- 
 ing, it was said, on the top of a turf-dyke over the water, 
 and when the whole was finished came into the house and 
 read them in high triumph at the fireside. Many other spots 
 in this neighborhood have been made illustrious in the poet's 
 verse. 
 
 But the farming failed and his work as exciseman began 
 toward the close of 1791, when Burns moved into Dumfries 
 again. Here he wrote "Duncan Gray," "Tha Lee Rig," and 
 "Highland Mary." 
 
 His duties as an exciseman entailed his riding some two 
 or three hundred miles every week, and in consequence the 
 countryside far and near was illuminated by celestial fire, 
 flaming hot from the poet's soul. At Brownhill on the Glas- 
 gow road, one evening, Burns, noticing a weary soldier limp 
 past the window, called him in, regaled him heartily, and 
 
 45 
 
after hearing his pathetic story, enshrined it in his fine 
 stanzas, "The Soldier's Return," and so gave to that soldier 
 the glorious privilege of limping past that window to be 
 hailed and regaled by Robert Burns throughout all time. 
 
 The same hotel at Brownhill saw the composition con- 
 cerning Bacon, the landlord, who was in the habit of inflict- 
 ing his company, uninvited, rather constantly on his guests, 
 and this fact Burns immortalized, as follows: 
 
 "At Brownhill, we always get dainty good cheer, 
 And plenty of Bacon each day in the year; 
 We've all things that's nice, and mostly in season, 
 But why always bacon? — come, give me a reason." 
 Not many landlords ever found such a chance for a place 
 in the sun of the literary heavens. On a tumbler belonging 
 to Mrs. Bacon, Burns wrote: 
 
 "You're welcome, Willie Stewart; 
 
 Your're welcome, Willie Stewart; 
 
 There's ne'er a flower that blooms in May 
 
 That's half so welcome's thou art." 
 Airs. Bacon made much ado about this damage to her prop- 
 erty, till a gentleman present paid her a shilling for the 
 glass. This afterwards found a place among the most valued 
 relics at Abbottsford. Thus Mrs. Bacon and her husband 
 will occupy places forever, in the sun of the literary heavens, 
 the one inflicting his company, uninvited, on his guests, 
 while the other, his wife, has been given the opportunity to 
 complain throughout all ages, about the damage to her 
 tumbler caused by the writing of Robert Burns. 
 
 Among other spots in the neighborhood rendered famous 
 by the presence and the muse of Burns, the most interesting 
 is Lincluded College ruin, close by the town. The green 
 bank of the river there was a favorite walk of the poet's, 
 and he mentioned it in at least two of his compositions. By 
 these walls, hoary with memories, within which lies buried 
 the daughter of King Robert III, who was wife of Archibald 
 the Grim, Earl of Douglas and Duke of Touraine, Burns 
 composed his "Vision of Liberty": 
 
 "As I stood by yon roofless tower 
 
 Where wallflower scents the dewy air, 
 Where the owlet mourns in her ivy bower, 
 And tells the midnight moon her care. 
 "By heedless chance I turned mine eyes, 
 And by the moonbeams shook to see 
 A stern and stalwart ghaist arise, 
 
 Attired as minstrels wont to be." 
 46 
 
Other pieces written at this time in this neighborhood 
 were "My Nannie's awa'," and "A Man's a man for a' that." 
 
 The convivialities of Dumfries formed a drain upon the 
 health of Burns, which he could no longer bear. One tavern 
 in particular, in the town, keeps splendid and disastrous 
 memories of Robert Burns. The Globe, in its narrow entry 
 off High Street, has changed little since he frequented it. 
 His writing is still legible on several of its windows, and 
 in its dark, low-roofed, wainscoted parlor is preserved the 
 rough round chair in which he used to sit and keep the mirth 
 flying till the small hours. But his visits to the Globe were 
 made at a terrible cost. It was there he accepted an invita- 
 tion to dine with friends. He remained till three in the 
 morning, and on leaving the company sat down on the step 
 of the tavern stable and there fell asleep. It was January 
 and there was snow on the ground, and from that hour he 
 felt the grasp of death upon him. Bodily pain and mental 
 anxiety for the future of those dear to him made day and 
 night alike a misery. 
 
 "He erred, he sinned; and if there be 
 Who, from his hapless frailties free, 
 Rich in the poorer virtues, see 
 
 His faults alone — 
 To such, O Lord of Charity, 
 
 Be mercy shown! 
 
 "Singly he faced the bigot brood, 
 The meanly wise, the feebly good; 
 He pelted them with pearl, with mud; 
 
 He fought them well — 
 But ah, the stupid million stood, 
 And he — he fell! 
 
 "All bright and glorious at the start, 
 'Twas his ignobly to depart, 
 Slain by his own too affluent heart, 
 
 Too generous blood; 
 And blindly, having lost Life's chart, 
 
 To meet Death's flood. 
 
 "So closes the fantastic fray, 
 The duel of the spirit and clay! 
 So come bewildering disarray 
 
 And blurring gloom, 
 The irremediable day 
 And final doom. 
 47 
 
"So passes all confusedly 
 As lights that hurry, shapes that flee 
 About some brink we dimly see, 
 
 The trivial, great, 
 Squalid, majestic tragedy 
 
 Of human fate. 
 
 "Not ours to gauge the more or less, 
 The will's defect, the blood's excess, 
 The earthly humors that oppress 
 
 The radiant mind, 
 His greatness, not his littleness, 
 Concerns mankind." 
 
 Not only did Burns enhance every place he passed, every 
 object he saw, every spot upon which he stood, but he left 
 the color of his very mood upon the places associated with 
 him. Perhaps the happiest and gayest and most radiant 
 period of Burns' life was during the first months he spent 
 in Edinburgh. No city in all Europe ever had its palaces 
 and towers, its halls of justice, its sons and daughters, lifted 
 before all nations in such beautiful rhythm, and assured it 
 so splendid a fashion of holding its place in the realms of 
 thought forever. 
 
 "Edina! Scotia's darling seat! 
 
 All hail thy palaces and towers, 
 Where once beneath a monarch's feet 
 
 Sat Legislation's sovereign powers! 
 From marking wildly-scatter'd flowers, 
 
 As on the banks of Ayr I stray'd, 
 And singing, lone, the ling'ring hours, 
 
 I shelter in thy honour'd shade." 
 
 Contrast the radiant mood with which Burns illuminated 
 the beautiful city of Edinburgh with the sad, depressed state 
 of mind in which he came to the village of Brow, near Dum- 
 fries, on the Solway shore, in the last fortnight of his life, 
 to try what sea-bathing and sea-air might do for his failing 
 powers. Here it was he wrote the last song he was ever to 
 pen, entitled "The Fairest Maid on Devon's Banks." Here 
 it was that he wrote that last letter to Thomson, his pub- 
 lisher, imploring five pounds to prevent a rascal haberdasher 
 putting his emaciated body into jail. This is perhaps one of 
 the most pathetic letters ever written: "Brow, on the Solway 
 Firth, 12th July, 1796. After all my boasted independence, 
 curst necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds. 
 A cruel wretch of a haberdasher, to whom I owe an account, 
 
 48 
 
taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a 
 process and will inevitably put me into jail. Do, do, for 
 God's sake, send me that sum, and that by return post! For- 
 give me this earnestness, but the horrors of jail have made 
 me half distracted. I do not ask this gratuitously, for upon 
 returning health I hereby promise and engage to furnish you 
 with five pounds worth of the neatest song genius you have 
 seen. I tried my hand on the poem this morning. The 
 measure is so difficult that it is impossible to infuse much 
 genius in the lines. They are on the other side. Forgive 
 me! Forgive me!" 
 
 "Fairest maid on Devon's banks, 
 Crystal Devon! Winding Devon! 
 Wilt thou lay that frown aside 
 And smile as thou wert wont to do?" 
 
 Here is a letter to his wife, from the same place, the last 
 he ever wrote to her: "My dearest Love: I delayed writing 
 until I could tell you what effect sea-bathing was likely to 
 produce. It would be injustice to deny that it has eased my 
 pains and I think has strengthened me, but my appetite is 
 still extremely bad. No flesh nor fish can I swallow. Por- 
 ridge and milk are the only things I can taste. I am very 
 happy to hear from Miss Jessie Lewars that you are all well. 
 My very best and kindest compliments to her and all the 
 children. I will see you on Sunday. Your affectionate hus- 
 band." 
 
 Then we can follow the poet to that low-roofed upper 
 room of the house still standing in Dumfries, whither he 
 returned to die. The room is still said to contain the round 
 mahogany table at which he was sitting for one of his last 
 meals, when a friend asked him how he felt and was 
 answered by the ominous words, "Posting fast to the grave, 
 madam." 
 
 The last scene was not far off. It was the 18th of July 
 when he returned home, with difficulty able to stand upright 
 and reach his own door. On the 21st of July, 1796, he died. 
 Not far away, in St. Michael's kirkyard, is to be seen the 
 mausoleum to which the remains of the poet were removed 
 in 1815. Tens of thousands visit the shrine every year. Here 
 a modern poet, William Watson, stood and afterward wrote 
 those pathetic lines: 
 
 "What woos the world to yonder shrine? 
 What sacred clay, what dust divine? 
 Was this some Master faultless — fine, 
 
 In whom we praise 
 The cunning of the jeweled line 
 
 And carven phrase? 
 
 49 
 
"A searcher of our source and goal, 
 A reader of God's secret scroll? 
 A Shakespeare, flashing o'er the whole 
 
 Of Man's domain 
 The splendor of his cloudless soul 
 
 And perfect brain? 
 
 "Some Keats, to Grecian gods allied, 
 Clasping all beauty as his bride? 
 Some Shelley, soaring dim-descried 
 
 Above Time's throng, 
 And heavenward hurling wild and wide 
 
 His spear of song? 
 
 "A lonely Wordsworth, from the crowd 
 Half-hid in light, half-veiled in cloud? 
 A sphere-born Milton cold and proud 
 
 In hallowing dews 
 Dipt, and with gorgeous ritual vowed 
 
 Unto the Muse? 
 
 "Nay, none of these — and little skilled 
 On heavenly heights to sing and build! 
 Thine, thine, O Earth, whose fields he tilled 
 
 And thine alone, 
 Was he whose fiery heart lies stilled 
 
 'Neath yonder stone. 
 
 "He came when poets had forgot 
 How rich and strange the human lot; 
 How warm the tints of Life; how hot 
 
 Are Love and Hate; 
 And what makes Truth divine, and what 
 Makes Manhood great." 
 
 Thus we are able to see what genius has to do with 
 the making of geography. Concord, Mass., with its thou- 
 sand inhabitants, multiplied by Emerson, Thoreau and Haw- 
 thorne, occupies a larger place in the world of thought than 
 Buenos Ayres multiplied by more than a million of the com- 
 mon run of South American mortals. The earth would be 
 only so much gravel were it not for the great people who have 
 lived upon it and lifted it from the realm of matter to that 
 of spirit. They tell us that it will finally be left without heat 
 and cease at length to be a dwelling place for man. One 
 thing is certain, the parts of it associated with the lives of 
 great men and women are eternally safe. 
 
 Through genius matter is transmuted into thought, and 
 thought is immortal. Not one village or city or countryside 
 
 50 
 
or field or bridge or river that Burns ever saw but will live 
 forever. 
 
 "No mystic torch through Time he bore, 
 No virgin veil from Life he tore; 
 His soul no bright insignia wore 
 
 Of starry birth; 
 He saw what all men see— no more— 
 In heaven and earth; 
 
 "But as, when thunder crashes nigh, 
 All darkness opes one flaming eye, 
 And the world leaps against the sky — 
 
 So fiery clear 
 Did the old truths that we pass by 
 
 To him appear. 
 
 "A dreamer of the common dreams, 
 A fisher in familiar streams, 
 He chased the transitory gleams 
 
 That all pursue; 
 But on his lips the eternal themes 
 
 Again were new." 
 
 In the direction of this line of study, we learn the secret 
 of why more than a hundred thousand people go to Europe 
 every year and none to South America. The Rhine and the 
 Rhone are tiny brooks compared with the Amazon. The Alps, 
 the Apennines and the Pyrenees combined are but hills com- 
 pared to the mighty chain of the Andes. Why does Europe 
 draw the people while the vaster Southern continent does 
 not? It is because Europe has been idealized and lifted by 
 genius out of the realm of nature into that of art. The 
 Amazon is mere hugeness and bulk of matter and does 
 not interest the soul because the advent of man has not yet 
 given it history and converted it into art. The Avon, the 
 Thames, the Cam, the Isis and even the tiny rill of Bonnie 
 Doon, a million times surpasses because Shakespeare, Milton 
 and Burns have made them great and started their waters 
 to flowing all around the globe. No one goes to Scotland 
 to see the country God made but to see the land made t)y 
 Scott and Burns and Hume and John Knox. The countries 
 made by the Creator are infinitely less interesting than the 
 countries made by great men, or rather it is truer to say 
 that the only countries which draw the people are such as 
 God has made through man. 
 
 In the realm of pure creative art are not the names 
 which the poet and the novelist have given us often more real 
 
 51 
 
to us than any historic character? King Lear is far more real 
 than George III, and Hamlet far more real than any man 
 whoever enacted the part. William Pitt once said that he 
 had learned from Shakespeare all he knew of English his- 
 tory. On reflection we see the truth of this most pregnant 
 saying. Within the limits of a single historical play, like 
 that of "Henry VIII," which can be read or enacted in a 
 single evening, Shakespeare has put into a single art form 
 the whole movement — the essential truth — of a great epoch 
 of history. It might be granted that not one word which 
 Shakespeare puts into the mouth of king or queen or cardi- 
 nal was actually uttered by them. Yet these words express 
 to us what these people stood for in the world, and what 
 they did, and far more truly, in fact, than would all the multi- 
 tude of their actual words and deeds convey it to us if they 
 could be recorded. And thus we arrive at the surprising 
 truth that true art is truer than fact. 
 
 It is not, therefore, nature herself which we love in the 
 highest, most enduring way, but nature interpreted and puri- 
 fied and transformed and endowed by the genius of man. 
 Nature does not interpret herself. It is the penetrating eye 
 of the man of spiritual insight which alone can do this; and, 
 if his insight be true, he sees at the same time that, higher 
 than nature, is art. Art is the articulate, the rational, the 
 clearly spoken word. It is art which has, in very literal 
 truth, given nature to our comprehension and love, and 
 never nature which has given art. 
 
 The presence of art in the world will only be explained 
 when we see that it comes from the demand of the soul 
 of man to image to itself the true, the ideal, and hence the 
 permanent; and this must be, in the case of art, the beautiful. 
 Art springs from the power of man's mind to create ideals 
 and its impulse to realize them. Nature deals with the acci- 
 dental, art with what is permanent. Nature has no definite 
 aesthetic purpose. Art selects, creates and preserves, and 
 has definite aim and unity, and all with reference to the 
 soul of man. True art is the portrayal of the true and admir- 
 able and divine in forms appreciable to the senses. The 
 same quality of our nature which gives us through the me- 
 dium of our senses, art, gives us in the realm of the intellect, 
 science and philosophy, and, in the realm of conduct and the 
 emotions, morals and religion. Viewed thus, we see that art 
 is the product of reason, and takes its high rank along with 
 the other rational products of — not nature, but human nature 
 — mankind. 
 
 Is it not the finest of all tributes to humanity that it is 
 left to humanity itself to make our world significant and 
 
 52 
 
attractive? Man has universally and instinctively put his 
 final award only on the highest qualities. He has been 
 greedy often and selfish, but to his credit it must be said he 
 he has never canonized greed and selfishness. He has called 
 his cities and his famous places after the names of his saints 
 and heroes. There is a certain exaggeration in this saying 
 of Renan, yet a truth in it: "What is the whole of America 
 beside a ray of that infinite glory with which a city of the 
 second or third order — Florence, Pisa, Sienna, Perugia — 
 shines on Italy? 
 
 The geography of the earth's surface is only the descrip- 
 tion of so much commonplace gravel until the whole is ideal- 
 ized and transformed and illuminated by the genius of man. 
 
 Lines to Robert Burns 
 
 By Irvin Mattick 
 Dedicated to The Burns Club of St. Louis 
 
 The cruel North wind's bitter gale 
 
 Beat on the silent fields of Avhite, 
 When in this beauteous, mortal vale 
 
 Thy spirit first beheld the light; 
 The lintwhite's warbling song was hushed, 
 
 The leafless woods were brown and still, 
 And 'neath its snowy mantle rushed 
 
 The ever restless, whimpling rill. 
 
 Across un-charted seas of Youth, 
 
 Harassed by many a treach'rous strand — 
 Led by the constant star of Truth, 
 
 Thy soul hath gained the Promised Land: 
 And from thy streams, thy fields and flowers, 
 
 From quiet shades of trembling groves, 
 Thy songs arise, — and vine-clad bowers 
 
 Breathe tunes of thy immortal loves! 
 
 For each wee creature, great and small, 
 
 That drinks the wine of heaven's air, — 
 Thy heart some tenderness lets fall, 
 
 Thy love some earnest praise doth spare: 
 And like the blushing rose that spreads 
 
 Its perfume on the breath of morn, 
 Thy spirit's anguish ever sheds 
 
 A gentle sweetness round its thorn! 
 
 In songs like thine, both coofs and kings 
 
 The warm, fraternal glow can find; 
 From hearts like thine, great Nature sings 
 
 Equality to humankind! 
 And while beneath thy native skies 
 
 Thy dust in Scotia's bosom sleeps, — 
 Through the immortal centuries 
 
 The world reveres thee, — sings and weeps I 
 
 53 
 
The Scotch According to Johnson 
 
 By Frederick W. Lehmann 
 January 25, 1915 
 
 TT IS said that the ancient Egyptians had always a death's 
 head at their feasts, to remind the guests in the height of 
 their enjoyment, that they were but mortal, and that the hour 
 of doom might strike for any of them at any time. To intro- 
 duce Doctor Samuel Johnson at a banquet of the Caledonian 
 Society, is very much like bringing a death's head to a feast, 
 for if heed is taken of his opinions, the guests will have small 
 occasion to congratulate themselves upon their nationality. 
 Of the scenery of Scotland the Doctor said, that "the noblest 
 prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that 
 leads him to England," and of its resources, that it afforded 
 "meat and drink enough to give the inhabitants sufficient 
 strength to run away from home." In his Dictionary he 
 denned "oats," as "a grain which in England is generally given 
 to horses, but in Scotland supports the people." Upon this 
 Lord Elibank cleverly retorted, "very true, and where will 
 you find such horses as in England and such men as in Scot- 
 land." The Doctor decried the Scotch universities for their 
 mediocrity of knowledge and said that the reputation of the 
 Scotch for learning was sustained by a conspiracy to cheat 
 the world by false representations. They would come up 
 by droves, he said, and attest anything for the honor of Scot- 
 land. In the course of a discussion concerning the literary 
 achievements of Scotland and England, a Scotchman ex- 
 claimed, "Ah, Dr. Johnson, what would you have said of 
 Buchanan had he been an Englishman?" "Why sir," said 
 Johnson, "I should not have said of Buchanan, had he been 
 an Englishman, what I will now say of him as a Scotchman, 
 that he was the only man of genius his country ever pro- 
 duced." A severe thing to say of a country that in all its 
 history it produced but one man of genius. 
 
 Doctor Johnson was born in the year 1709 and died in 
 1784. The Scotland of his youth was a greatly distracted 
 country and had been for more than a hundred years. Re- 
 mote and isolated as it is from the field of such conflicts 
 as the Thirty Years war and the war of the Spanish Succes- 
 sion, it could yet not escape the spirit of the times and was 
 scourged with its full share of the strifes of religious bigotry 
 and the contentions of opposing dynasties. In Scotland too 
 
 54 
 
the feudal system had been carried to the ultimate and per- 
 sisted in its worst features long after it had disappeared 
 elsewhere. North of the Forth, Scotland was not a nation, 
 but a loose aggregation of clans, whose members recognized 
 no loyalty except to their chief. He was to them the sole 
 and visible embodiment of sovereignty, whose will was law 
 even to taking the life of their fellowman or laying down 
 their own. This division into clans meant frequent quarrels 
 in which the sword and the brand had a constant part. The 
 energy and the efforts of the people were divided and ex- 
 hausted in opposition and the united endeavor essential to the 
 general welfare and a great national development was utterly 
 impossible. Sir Walter Scott tells an anecdote of Lady Elph- 
 instonn, who lived to the great age of more than a hundred 
 years. When Claverhouse, or Claverse, as the name was 
 called, was introduced to her, he said that having lived so much 
 beyond the allotted term of humanity she must in her time 
 have seen many changes. "Hout na, sir," said the old lady, 
 "the world is just to end with me as it began. When I was 
 entering life there was ane Knox deaving us a' wi' his 
 clavers, and now I am ganging out, there is ane Clavers 
 deaving us a' wi' his knocks." England yielded without com- 
 motion its allegiance to the House of Hanover, but Scotland 
 had its uprising for the Stuarts in 1715 and again in 1745. 
 Clan against clan, creed against creed, dynasty against dyn- 
 asty, it was a sorry time for Scotland, "poor auld Scotland" 
 even Burns called her when he recorded the youthful wish 
 that he for his country's sake, 
 
 "Some useful plan or book could make 
 Or sing a sang at least." 
 
 W T hat it all meant, not when the Cotter's Saturday Night 
 was written but only a little before Doctor Johnson was born, 
 is grimly indicated by old Fletcher of Saltoun, the man who 
 said that if he could write the songs of a nation, he would 
 not care who wrote its laws. He published a plan for the 
 restoration of peace and order in Scotland. The land was 
 overrun with bands, half mendicant, half brigand, a menace 
 everywhere to life and property and subversive of all stabil- 
 ity and order. Fletcher estimated the number of them at 
 two hundred thousand or one fifth of the entire population. 
 The only means of discipline he could see for these people 
 was to subject them to a kind of domestic slavery. Counsels 
 more humane and wiser prevailed. The national determina- 
 tion was to help these people up, and not to hold them down. 
 
 55 
 
Education instead of repression was employed and the 
 inherent virtues of the Scottish character were given right 
 direction and ample scope. 
 
 The change from the old Scotland to the new was not 
 and could not be instant. Here and there, no doubt in too 
 many places and comprehending too many people, far into 
 Johnson's time, lingered a reminder and remainder of the 
 evil days that had been, but true it was now of Scotland as 
 was said by Curran that "she winged her eagle flight, full 
 into the blaze of every science, with an eye that never 
 winked and a wing that never tired" and by virtue of the 
 labors of men whom Dr. Johnson knew or might have known, 
 "she was crowned with the spoils of every art and decked 
 with the wreaths of every muse." She need not hark back 
 two hundred years to George Buchanan as a solitary son of 
 genius, but could present her children of high achievement 
 in every field of civilized endeavor and challenge fair com- 
 parison with the world. 
 
 In philosophy there was Thomas Reid and later Dugald 
 Stewart, as subtle reasoners as any of the metaphysicians of 
 Europe, in physical science Doctor Joseph Black, whose ex- 
 periments and discoveries in chemistry made him in the judg- 
 ment of Lavoisier "the Nestor of the Chemical Revolution," 
 and Dr. John Hunter, first among the surgeons of the day. 
 In literature there were Blair, Mackenzie and Thomson, 
 looming now less large than once they did, dwarfed by com- 
 parison with younger sons of Scotland. Smollett was divid- 
 ing honors with Fielding and Richardson in English fiction. 
 Robertson and Hume were writing their histories and if Rob- 
 ertson is not read so much as he was in his own time, if 
 later works have taken the place of his, Hume's history is 
 still the book through which we know the England of the 
 period to which it relates. William Murray had come to 
 England and won high place as a statesman, but greater 
 renown as Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of King's 
 Bench, the greatest judge Britain ever produced. It was his 
 work that brought the commercial law of England into har- 
 mony with its commercial usages, and it was he who declared 
 as a principle of law that the air of England was too pure 
 for a slave to breathe. Mansfield's accomplishments were 
 too much for even Johnson's prejudice to resist, and he con- 
 ceded, saving his consistency by the qualification, that 
 "much may be made of a Scotchman if he be caught young." 
 There came another Scotchman to England, beginning his 
 career in the army, but leaving the profession of arms for 
 that of the law, he attained a first place in the annals of 
 
 56 
 
the English bar, Thomas, afterward Lord Chancellor Erskine, 
 whose forensic arguments are today the inspiration and 
 despair of every lawyer ambitious of the fame of eloquence. 
 Him also, the Doctor would accept as a great man and also 
 explain as having been caught young. There was a third 
 however, caught young, but caught in America, of whom 
 we may be sure the Doctor did not approve, and we need not 
 wonder at this, and that was John Paul Jones, the first man 
 to carry the American flag across the seas, and the first to 
 whom in fair and equal fight a British frigate was made to 
 lower her colors. And this Scotchman had humor as well as 
 courage, for when he learned that his opponent, Captain 
 Pearson, had been made a baronet for his gallant defense of 
 his ship, he said, if he will give me another chance I'll see 
 to it that they make a lord of him. 
 
 In the year 1776 appeared the Wealth of Nations, by 
 Adam Smith, a book that marks an era in political literature 
 and that may fairly be said to have created the science of 
 political economy. Much as has been written upon the sub- 
 ject it maintains its place as the classic of economic science. 
 The principles it announces are the staples of present day 
 political discussion and it is the armory from which are 
 drawn the arguments by which those principles are supported. 
 Its doctrines have not received universal assent, but they 
 compel universal attention and consideration. Around them 
 was waged the chief controversy in the Presidential contest 
 just closed. The quality of genius must reside in a book 
 which dealing with a subject of perennial controversy has 
 maintained its supremacy for more than a hundred years. 
 
 In the science and art of engineering the Scotland of 
 Johnson's later days claims absolutely first place. James 
 Watt did not discover the great power that was dormant in 
 the elusive vapors of the tea kettle, he did not invent the 
 steam engine. The Marquis of Worcester, Savery, New- 
 comen and others had labored in that field before him and 
 had done something, much indeed, to make it a thing of util- 
 ity. But as they left it and as it was found by Watt, it was 
 a crude machine and of simple and limited function. What 
 James Watt did has been so happily described by one of his 
 own countrymen that I would not venture to speak of it in 
 other terms. 
 
 "We have said that Mr. Watt was the great improver of 
 the steam engine; but in truth as to all that is admirable in 
 its structure, or vast in its utility, he should rather be 
 described as its inventor. It was by his inventions that its 
 action was so regulated as to make it capable of being 
 
 57 
 
applied to the finest and most delicate manufactures, and its 
 power so increased as to set weight and solidity at defiance. 
 By his admirable contrivance, it has become a thing stupen- 
 dous alike for its force and its flexibility, for the prodigious 
 power which it can exert, and the ease, ductility and precision 
 with which it can be varied, distributed and applied. The 
 trunk of an elephant, that can pick up a pin or rend an oak, 
 is as nothing to it. It can engrave a seal and crush masses 
 of obdurate metal before it, — draw out without breaking, a 
 thread as fine as gossamer, and lift a ship of war like a bauble 
 in the air. It can embroider muslin, and forge an anchor, cut 
 steel into ribands and impel loaded vessels against the fury 
 of the winds and waves." 
 
 It would be hard to set bounds to the blessings which 
 the inventions of this man have conferred not upon his 
 country, but upon humanity. They have multiplied, many 
 times the productivity of human labor in every field of 
 industry, they have enormously reduced and are further 
 reducing the element of mere drudging toil, and they have 
 increased in every rank of life the sum of man's comforts and 
 enjoyments, and the measure of his happiness. Of all the 
 sons of Britain, whose lineaments are presented in the mar- 
 bles of Westminster Abbey, there is none who has a greater 
 claim upon our gratitude than James Watt. His long life 
 was one unbroken course of well-doing for his fellowmen. 
 
 Robert Burns had written, but had not published when 
 Doctor Johnson died. Would the Doctor have found his 
 verse crude, because it was in a dialect the Doctor may have 
 thought barbarous, could he have resisted the wonderful 
 appeal of the Scottish songster? I do not believe it. And 
 indeed I cannot help but think that the greater part of John- 
 son's manifestation of prejudice against the Scotch was mere 
 pretense. He was fond of controversy and felt that he must 
 maintain any opinion he had once expressed. Besides he 
 loved to play with his follower Boswell, to try his forbear- 
 ance and friendship, and there was no way to do this so well 
 as by taunts upon his nationality. But the genius of Burns 
 needs not the seal of any man's approval. He had the power 
 of insight which discovers charm and beauty, where to the 
 common vision things are ugly or barren, and he had the 
 power of expression which made others see things as he saw 
 them, and so made the world brighter and better for them. 
 A greater genius he by far than George Buchanan. The Latin 
 verse of Buchanan impressed Johnson with its learning, but 
 it is dead today as the language in which it was written, 
 while the songs of Burns, if the tongue cannot give them 
 tune, sing themselves in the hearts of Britain's sons and 
 
 58 
 
daughters widely as they have wandered over the world and 
 the fame of the Lowland bard is fixed as first and unrivalled 
 in English lyric verse, fixed as that of Shakespeare in dra- 
 matic poetry. 
 
 The themes of Burns' songs were humble and domestic. 
 He found his highest inspiration in the peasant life of the 
 time, into which his lot had been cast. It was for another 
 bard to sing of the picturesque past of the country as seen 
 through the glamour of high life. Through Sir Walter Scott, 
 who was a lad of thirteen at Johnson's death, we were to 
 hear the Lay of the Last Minstrel and to meet with Marmion 
 and Douglas, the Lady of the Lake, and the Knight of Snow- 
 down and Rhoderick Dhu. And more than this, we were to 
 get from him that wonderful store of historic fiction, which 
 presented to us the life of every century from the eleventh 
 to his own, saving only the thirteenth, and of nearly every 
 country of Europe and even of then far away India. The 
 last of the Waverly novels was prepared for the press in 
 1831 and more than a hundred years have passed since they 
 first appeared, but they are read and reread with as fresh 
 interest by the present generation as by that generation for 
 which they were written and for whom their author was for 
 a long time the mysterious Wizard of the North. 
 
 In another field of literature another Scotch lad, 
 younger by two years than Walter Scott, was to make his 
 mark. Francis Jeffrey was not the first in time of literary 
 critics, as the Edinburgh Review was not the first of Re- 
 views in time. But Jeffrey did, with the help of other Scotch- 
 men and with the help of Englishmen who were glad to 
 become their allies, elevate literary and political criticism to 
 a position of higher dignity and greater power; and for years, 
 two Scotch publications, the Edinburgh Review, edited by 
 Jeffrey, and Blackwood's Magazine, edited by John Wilson, 
 were supreme in this field, and as they were in that time they 
 have nothing to fear from comparison with the magazines 
 and reviews that lie upon our tables today. 
 
 The Scotchmen of whom I have thus briefly spoken were 
 men of Johnson's time, whom he knew or might have known; 
 the work of some of them was open to his knowledge, the 
 work of others came too late for him. There was one other 
 to whom I have referred, who has a peculiar claim to con- 
 sideration here, for he also did a great work and was a man 
 of genius and through him the Scotch have had a Scriptural 
 revenge upon Doctor Johnson, returning indignities with 
 benefits, heaping coals of fire upon his head, and that is 
 James Boswell, the laird of Auchinleek. But for this Scotch- 
 man, Doctor Johnson would be today a faint and half 
 
 59 
 
extinct tradition. His writings are little more read than those 
 of George Buchanan. We recall now and then an eccentric 
 definition from his Dictionary, the opening paragraph of his 
 Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, a few lines from the Vanity 
 of Human Wishes, and that perhaps is all. But because of 
 this Scotch laird and because of what he did, Johnson is the 
 best known man of the Eighteenth Century. He lives for us, 
 and he lives only, in Boswell's life of him, a book of which it 
 is to be said, that it is the best of its kind ever written in 
 any language. In the field of biography, it stands without a 
 rival. Johnson would have scouted the idea that he was to 
 owe his fame to this man, who when both were living owed his 
 position among men of letters to his obsequious attendance 
 upon him. Johnson was a lexicographer, essayist, poet, dra- 
 matist, conversationalist, the great Cham of literature, the 
 autocrat of intellectual society, whose opinion was the final 
 judgment upon every question in dispute. Boswell was 
 looked upon as the lackey of this great man, with just enough 
 of mind to qualify for the place. For twenty years they 
 were in intimate personal relation. Boswell knew Johnson 
 much as a valet knows his master and Johnson knew Boswell 
 much as the master knows his valet. But here the master 
 was a hero to his valet. No indifference could cool the ardor 
 of Boswell's affection, and no indignity could provoke him to 
 leave from following after his master. His fidelity seems at 
 times servile as that of a dog and our feeling for him has 
 often a tinge of contempt. But through it all he had a pur- 
 pose and he realized it. He proposed to himself to write the 
 Life of Johnson, and he wrote it, and through this book, for 
 all posterity, Johnson is the child of Boswell, the valet has 
 become father to the master. In its pages we see the great 
 Doctor, in his waking and even in his sleeping hours, at 
 home and abroad, at work and at rest, in sickness and in 
 health, in good humor and in ill. We know his walk and 
 his talk, his great cane and his great words, his scrofula 
 marked face and his snuff colored clothes. We know all his 
 haunts and habits, his taste in food and drink, his choice of 
 books and friends, his manners and his morals, and we know 
 that this great gruff man is a kind man and a good one, and 
 we bear with him as did Boswell, and we bear with Boswell, 
 because of his vital book, which gives us a man of a century 
 that has gone, to know him as no other book makes us know 
 a man, as a familiar and a friend, and not as a mere steel 
 engraving with a catalogue of virtues inscribed beneath. And 
 so, let us because of Johnson according to the Scotch, for- 
 give the Scotch according to Johnson. 
 
 60 
 
1914 
 
 (^ UESTS at the Burns Night of 1914 were Charles Nagel, 
 Max Kotany, Clark McAdams, James D. Grant and 
 Rev. Dr. J. F. Dickie, senior pastor of the American church 
 at Berlin. 
 
 Among many others who sent greetings this year to the 
 Burns Club of St. Louis were Lord Rosebery, Lord Dun- 
 fermline, Sir James Sivewright, and Professors Wilson and 
 Lawson of the Glasgow University. 
 
 The address of this Night was delivered by Henry King, 
 editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. It was almost the 
 last of Captain King's appearances as a speaker, a career 
 which began in the first year of the Civil war when he was 
 known in Central Illinois as "the boy orator" and when he 
 was in demand at the patriotic meetings to give voice to 
 recruiting enthusiasm. 
 
 Rev. Dr. Dickie recited with Scotch spirit "The Songs 
 of Robert Burns" and at the earnest plea of the members 
 gave the verses for publication in the Burns Nights book. 
 
 Manuscript Poems Attributed 
 to Burns 
 
 Through Archer Wall Douglas, one of the members, the 
 club recently came into the possession of poems attributed 
 to Burns and not found in the usual editions of Burns. 
 Joseph Welsh of Pasadena, a correspondent of Mr. Douglas, 
 knowing his interest in all that pertains to the poet, sent 
 him two poems which Mr. Douglas promptly added to the 
 literary Burnsiana of the club. Mr. Welsh explained that 
 these poems were sent to him by his brother who lives in 
 Glasgow and who is something of an antiquarian and a lover 
 of Burns. One of these poems is "Words o' Cheer." Another 
 is Burns' reply "To a Lord's Invitation." The original ot 
 this poem is said to be in the possession of Mrs. John Moffatt 
 of St. Andrews. Burns, the explanation is, had been invited 
 by a nobleman to go on an excursion with a party to Bass 
 Rock. On returning to the castle, the poet was directed to 
 the servants' hall to dine. When the lord and his guests 
 had finished dinner, Burns was called in to entertain. He 
 handed to the lord this poem, turned and left the castle. 
 
 61 
 
The authenticity of this poem was claimed by Robert 
 Dunn, president of the Aberdeen Border Counties Associa- 
 tion. Mr. Dunn read the lines at a meeting of the associa- 
 tion. He said the grandfather of Mr. Moffatt had copied it 
 from the manuscript of Robert Burns. But D. McNaught, 
 of Kilmaurs, editor of the Burns Chronicle and the Scottish 
 authority on Burns, commented upon the discovery of a new 
 Burns poem and gave this terse opinion: "This Robert 
 Burns, who is on such good terms with himself, is certainly 
 not the poet." 
 
 To a Lord's Invitation 
 
 Manuscript Poem Attributed to Burns, Presented by Joseph Welsh 
 
 of Pasadena, through A. W. Douglas, to the 
 
 Burns Club of St. Louis. 
 
 My lord, I would not fill your chair, 
 Tho' you be proudest noble's heir. 
 I come this night to join your feast 
 As equal of the best at least. 
 'Tis true that cash with me is scant, 
 And titles trifles that I want; 
 The king has never made me kneel 
 To stamp my manhood with his seal. 
 But what of that? The king on high 
 Who took less pains with you than I 
 Has filled my bosom and my mind 
 With something better of its kind 
 Than your broad acres — something which 
 I cannot well translate to speech, 
 But by its impulse I can know 
 'Tis deeds, not birth, that make men low. 
 Your rank, my lord, is but a loan, 
 But mine, thank heaven, is all my own. 
 A peasant, 'tis my pride to be; 
 Look round and round your hall and see 
 Who boasts a higher pedigree. 
 I was not fit, it seems, to dine 
 With those fox-hunting heroes fine, 
 But only came to bandy jests 
 Among your lordship's hopeful guests. 
 There must be here a sad mistake — 
 To be a buffoon for drink and meat 
 And a poor Earl's tax-paid seat! 
 No! die my heart ere such a shame 
 Descends on Robert Burns' name. 
 62 
 
Robert Burns, an Immortal Memory 
 
 By Captain Henry King, Editor of The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 
 January 26, 1914 
 
 f WISH I could say something new about Burns. But you 
 know it is practically impossible, and to attempt such a 
 task would be to invoke the censure of his last injunction: 
 "Don't let the awkward squad fire above me." His fame has 
 run all over the world, like one of the wild flowers he loved 
 so well. He has been discussed from every angle of his 
 career, from every point of analysis in his works and his 
 character. His name is in the full sense a household word; 
 his songs are a part of nature, so to speak, like those of the 
 birds and rippling brooks and the winds in the trees. It is 
 easy to say that the way of his life was not wise, which is 
 only to say that he was human — so very human that man- 
 kind proudly claims him for its own over all other poets, by 
 reason largely of his elemental kinship in the blunders and 
 follies that constitute a large share of all our lives. There 
 is one feature in his wayward record, to be sure, which stands 
 out as a glaring admonition to those who need it; but for 
 obvious reasons I am not going to dwell upon it in this 
 goodly company. The St. Louis Burns Club is a place where 
 temperance abides, within the rule of reason, tempered by 
 charity and good-fellowship. Only one of its members, so 
 far as I know, has ever been on the water-wagon, and he 
 declares that he got up and gave his seat to a lady. He was 
 right, manifestly, for George is always Wright, and could not 
 be otherwise without changing his name. 
 
 The passion of Burns for strong drink was supplemented, 
 you are well aware, by a besetting fondness for pretty girls. 
 Being a poet, that was perhaps to be expected of him, though 
 such a habit, I am bound to say, is not restricted to poets. 
 Nor should it be. For my part, I distrust the sanity, or at 
 least the good taste, of any man who does not admire a 
 pretty girl — and all girls are pretty, more or less. Certainly 
 Burns seemed to think so, and told them so as fast as he came 
 in contact with them. Thereby hang many tales of romance, 
 of intrigue, of adventure, and often of trouble and bitter 
 sorrow. He flattered and courted the comely girls of the 
 neighborhood as a regular pastime, and it must be admitted 
 that he did not always play a fair game with them. He 
 swore eternal pledges to them which mostly proved to be 
 mere perjuries for Jove to laugh at. His fancy turned from 
 
 63 
 
one to another of them as frequently as the changes of the 
 moon beneath which he was wont to sing his enticing songs 
 to them and take his pay in the sweetness of their cheeks 
 and lips. He captured their hearts and played with them, 
 and broke them, and now and then left behind him in their 
 laps wee, bonnie hostages to fortune having the father's eyes 
 but the mothers' names. Possibly there is some ingenuity 
 of deduction by which this phase of the poet's life may be 
 justified as a necessary factor in the development of his 
 genius. That is a question for the casuists. At any rate, 
 we have the poetry as a rich heritage, and the charming 
 girls who inspired so much of it cannot be spared from the 
 story of Burns and his literary distinction. 
 
 It would be interesting as well as instructive to learn 
 how many people have read and treasured the writings of 
 Burns as compared with those of other distinguished authors. 
 His books are oftener quoted, perhaps, than any other, ex- 
 cepting the Bible and Shakespeare. In the William A. Smith 
 collection in Washington — the best Burns collection in this 
 country — there are 550 separate editions of his works, 135 of 
 them being American. This gives a suggestive idea of the 
 number of his readers and admirers. He is known to be 
 almost, if not quite, as popular in the United States as he is 
 in Scotland. This is easy to understand when we take 
 account of the fact that there is probably a stronger and 
 wider infusion of Scotch than of any other alien blood in our 
 country. There can be little doubt about it if we include 
 with the Scotch strain proper that extraordinary blend known 
 as Scotch-Irish, which has exerted and is still exerting such 
 a pronounced influence in our affairs. You cannot read a 
 chapter of American history — political, industrial, literary or 
 ecclesiastical — without finding in it the leaven of oatmeal and 
 heather. If the Puritans had not come over here and estab- 
 lished civil and religious liberty, and evolved the Yankee 
 type of character, the Scotch would have done it sooner or 
 later. Indeed the Scotch and the Yankees have so much in 
 common that it is hard to tell where the one stops and the 
 other begins. They step on one another's heels and replicate 
 one another's ruling traits and tendencies throughout the 
 course of our national growth and progress. Just now, for 
 immediate example, and by no means for the first time, we 
 have a President whose best and strongest qualities came 
 from Scotland. Those not so good, if any there be, have 
 probably been picked up in his dealings with the irrepressible 
 office-seekers. 
 
 Burns did not know much about America, but he shared 
 its spirit and its dreams or he could never have written 
 
 64 
 
"A Man's a Man for a' That." He was only a lad of seven- 
 teen when our Declaration of Independence was sent out to 
 the world, but he was old enough to realize its significance 
 and to applaud its sentiments. When somebody proposed 
 the health of the British prime minister, it was young Bobby 
 Burns who rose and exclaimed, "Here's to the health of a 
 better man, George Washington." Thus his reason con- 
 firmed his imagination, and both as citizen and as poet he 
 was a steadfast apostle of democracy. It is trite but ever 
 proper to repeat that the crowning, merit of his literary work 
 is its close adherence to common facts and familiar symbols. 
 His feet are always on the homely soil, his heart is always 
 keeping time with the impulses and the interests of the plain 
 people, of whom it has been said that God must love them or 
 there would not have been so many of them made. His 
 poems contain no problems. They are as simple as grass 
 and sunshine, as kitchen smoke and spring water. But gen- 
 erally speaking, aside from verses of the antic disposition, 
 they are not trivial. For while they are thronged with the 
 ordinary things and everyday people of the earth, there is 
 always at the core of these humble objects a meaning that 
 makes for truth and right and widespread beneficence. 
 
 It is a curious fact — a paradox, we might say — that while 
 Burns was thoroughly Scotch in most respects, he utterly 
 lacked one notable characteristic of his countrymen. He was 
 a lifelong failure in money matters. Scotland denied him 
 nothing but her proverbial sense of thrift. He was born in 
 poverty and he remained there. With all his brilliant intel- 
 lect, he could not make a living. When he was doing some 
 of his best work, you remember, he was keeping the wolf 
 from the door by acting as a whiskey-gauger. His pay was 
 less than $30.00 a month, and on that he had to support 
 himself, a wife and three children. Little wonder that he 
 sought the flowing bowl and drowned his bad luck in ribaldry 
 and carousal. How pleased he must have been when the 
 first edition of his poems — 600 copies — brought him a profit 
 of $100.00; and he was thus enabled to appease his insistent 
 creditors and keep himself out of jail. Then came his visit 
 to Edinburgh, and the publication of a second edition of the 
 poems, which yielded him $2,500.00 — a princely sum for him, 
 but it was soon squandered. His business operations were 
 a constant irony, due to the defects of his qualities. So, with 
 rare intervals of relief, the claws of penury were ever at his 
 throat. 
 
 He met adversity with little patience and less wisdom; 
 it must be said. His mind was in a constant state of pro- 
 test and antipathy against his material conditions. He was 
 
 65 
 
an indefatigable insurgent. To hate the rich in particular 
 was a kind of religion with him. If he were living now he 
 might find cause to qualify his animosity in that relation. I 
 am sure he could be persuaded to admire Andrew Carnegie, 
 in spite of his riches, and because of his fine example as a 
 philanthropic spendthrift. And surely he would be glad to 
 shake hands with Mr. Bixby, the amiable and excellent Presi- 
 dent of this Club, who has bought so many Burns manu- 
 scripts, not always at a bargain, and one of whose avocations, 
 the one he likes best, I think, is that of cheerfully paying the 
 annual deficits of various useful organizations to which he 
 belongs. But with Burns throughout his life there was no 
 armistice and no compromise in his warfare upon wealth and 
 power and privilege. The trodden worm in his case was 
 always turning; indeed, the worm was so fond of turning that 
 it often turned when it was not trodden upon at all, but only 
 fancied that it was, or feared that it might be. 
 
 There are those who contend that poverty, with all its 
 drawbacks, has yet some points of advantage. As fine a 
 writer and critic as Lord Rosebery recently asserted that 
 the production of a poetical masterpiece seems almost to 
 demand the spur of want and distress. We know that the 
 poverty of Burns did not prevent him from achieving his 
 fame. Would it have been equally as well with him had he 
 lived in ease and luxury? Alas, his experiences in Edin- 
 burgh do not justify this belief. His success there was 
 remarkable, but short-lived and really detrimental. The 
 glamour and elation of it turned his head, and put him hope- 
 lessly in the grasp of his passions and his frailties. A process 
 of steady deterioration ensued and ran its cruel course to 
 the last day of his broken and shortened life. In all literary 
 history there is nothing more pathetic than that scene in the 
 Dumfries cottage where he lay waiting for the pale messen- 
 ger with the inverted torch. His face was seamed with the 
 ravages of sin and disease, and the light flickered in the 
 sunken eyes — the eyes that had seen and won Nellie Kirk- 
 patrick, and Peggy Thompson, and Highland Mary, and the 
 rest. The place was growing dark to him, his consciousness 
 was fading away. May we not imagine that he heard ghostly 
 pipes and flutes and trumpets in the distance, the wistful 
 echoes of his own tender and incomparable songs? His two 
 children tiptoed to his bedside, illy clad and poorly fed. 
 Then, as the end drew near, they sent for the wife and 
 mother, the Jean Armour of his buoyant youth, and she came 
 promptly, bless her heart, and took his hands in hers, and 
 kissed him, as he passed tranquilly hence, and became to the 
 world an immortal memory. 
 
 66 
 
The Songs of Robert Burns 
 
 Given by Rev. Dr. J. F. Dickie of Berlin 
 
 Recited at the meeting of the Burns Club of St. Louis, 
 January 26, 1914 
 
 When Januar' wind blaws sharp and snell, 
 The heart aye fondly turns 
 To the banks and braes o' Bonnie Doon, 
 The home of Robert Burns. 
 
 A hundred years are past and gone 
 And four and fifty more, 
 Since Robin cam' — Aye! sent of God 
 Unto the Carrick shore. 
 
 The gaucy gossip yet we see 
 Keek in the bairnies' loof. 
 Ye'll follow love's recruiting drum, 
 But, bairn, ye'll be nae coof. 
 
 Belyve, he hears his mither croon 
 Some auld, auld, Scottish tune, 
 And aye his faither maks the Buik 
 When ance the day's wark 's dune. 
 
 The auld Scots sang stoon thro his heart 
 As tides run in the sea; 
 His faither's prayer he'll ne'er forget, 
 Until the day he dee. 
 
 O'er sune the laddie feels the grip 
 O' poortith cauld and care, 
 And sees his faither sair distrest 
 Wi' griefs he fain would share. 
 
 Then love to Rab came flichtering down 
 As gloaming comes at e'en, 
 And in love's light each Scottish lass 
 Shines fair as Scotia's queen. 
 
 Thus love -and song twin born spring up 
 From fountains in his heart, 
 He loves because he needs must love, 
 He sings by Nature's art. 
 
 67 
 
He sings the Lass o' Ballochmyle, 
 And money a sonsy quean, 
 He sings John Anderson, my Joe, 
 And eke o' bonnie Jean. 
 
 He sings "A man's a man for a' " 
 Though man was made to mourn; 
 Laments puir Mary Queen o' Scot 
 Wi' grief and sorrow born. 
 
 He tells how lion-hearted Bruce, 
 
 Put proud King Edward down, 
 
 And grieves to think Tarn Samson's gone, 
 
 Frae auld Kilmarnock town. 
 
 He paints the jolly beggars met 
 
 A raudy gangrel core, 
 
 Wha's den shook Poosie Nancy's wa's, 
 
 That night they held the splore. 
 
 He pictures Tarn o' Shanter's ride 
 In nicht o' blackest murk, 
 Pursued by witching Kutty Sark 
 Frae Alloway's haunted kirk. 
 
 But yet our poet — soothe to say 
 In Change House tarries long, 
 And oft, alas! the reins are given 
 To passions wild and strong. 
 
 Then black remorse takes up its seat 
 Within his troubled breast — 
 Yet aye he hears the voice that says, 
 "Come unto Me and rest." 
 
 And aye he cries, O Scotia's sons 
 Shun ill; than me be wiser. 
 O may ye better reck the rede, 
 Than ever did the adviser. 
 
 Repentance hill is hard to spiel, 
 Stey, Stey's repentance brae, 
 Sin's joys are short, its grief is long 
 And thorns bestrew its way. 
 68 
 
As thus he spake death timed his breath, 
 But splendor crowns his name, 
 O'er all the earth his songs are heard, 
 Aye, greener grows his fame. 
 
 Wherever beats the Scottish heart, 
 Who speaks with Scottish tongue, 
 Leaps at the name of Robert Burns, 
 Joys when his songs are sung. 
 
 And Scotia's sons shall bear the gree 
 So long's each peasant learns 
 The Psalms our fathers loved so well 
 And the songs of Robert Burns. 
 
The Bixby and Lehmann Collections 
 
 T N President Bixby and Frederick W. Lehmann the club 
 has two members whose collections of Burns manuscripts 
 and Burns rare editions are of international repute. At one 
 Burns Night, Mr. Bixby and Mr. Lehmann showed from their 
 collections two copies of the same poem by Burns, both 
 copies fully authenticated as in the handwriting of Burns. 
 This was easily explained. The poet in his earlier efforts not 
 infrequently made several copies of the same unpublished 
 poem to send to intimate friends. 
 
 At one meeting the members handled reverently the 
 "Kilmarnock Burns," a small, cheaply printed book, the 
 first issue of Burns in print, with this title and preface: 
 
 Poems 
 
 chiefly in the 
 
 Scottish Dialect 
 
 by 
 
 Robert Burns 
 
 "If any Critic catches at 'the word genius, the author 
 tells him, once for all, that he certainly looks upon himself 
 as possest of some poetic abilities, otherwise his publishing 
 in the manner he has done would be a manoeuvre below the 
 worst character, which, he hopes, his worst enemy will ever 
 give him; but to the genius of a Ramsay, or the glorious 
 dawnings of the poor, unfortunate Ferguson, he with equal 
 unaffected sincerity, declares, that, even in his highest pulse 
 of vanity, he has not the most distant pretensions. These 
 two justly admired Scotch Poets he has often had in his 
 eye in the following pieces; but rather with a view to kindle 
 at their flame, than for servile imitation." 
 
 In the second Edinburg edition the club traced the pro- 
 gress of the poet. The copy viewed was the identical one 
 presented by the author to "John McMurdo, esq., Drum- 
 lanrig." On the flyleaf, in Burns' handwriting, was: "Will 
 Mr. McMurdo do me the favor to accept of these volumes; 
 a trifling, but sincere mark of the very high respect I bear 
 for his worth as a man, his manners as a gentleman, and his 
 kindness as a friend. However inferior, now or afterwards, 
 I may rank as a poet; one honest virtue, to which few poets 
 can pretend, I trust I shall ever claim as mine: to no man, 
 whatever his station in lite, or his power to serve me, have 
 I ever paid a compliment, at the expense of truth. 
 
 THE AUTHOR" 
 
 70 
 
Burns was wont to write in presentation copies of his 
 books something which has added lasting value to those 
 copies which have been preserved. In a copy of "The Scotch 
 Musical Museum, humbly dedicated to the Catch Club insti- 
 tuted at Edinburgh, June, 1771, by James Johnson, Pub- 
 lished 1787," the poet wrote: 
 
 "To Ann Masterton from Robert Burns. Beware of 
 Bonnie Annie. I composed this song out of compliment to 
 Miss Ann Masterton, the daughter of my friend, Allan Mas- 
 terton, the author of the air, 'Strathallan's Lament,' and two 
 or three others in this work." 
 
 A laugh went round the club chamber as President Bixby 
 held up and read from an ancient looking book which had 
 recently come into his possession. The title was: "Catalogue 
 of Five Hundred Celebrated Authors of Great Britain now 
 living, the whole arranged in alphabetical order; and includ- 
 ing a complete list of their publications, with occasional 
 strictures and anecdotes of their lives, London, 1788." 
 
 "Burns, Robert. A ploughman in the County of Ayr in 
 the Kingdom of Scotland. He was introduced to notice by 
 a paper in a periodical publication called 'The Lounger,' and 
 his poems were published in the year 1787. Mr. Burns was 
 upon the point of embarking for America, when he was pre- 
 vented from executing his intention by a letter exciting him 
 to further pursuit of his literary career by Doctor Blacklock." 
 
 And this was all the Who's Who of 1788 had to say of 
 Robert Burns! 
 
 Another of President Bixby's marvelous collection, which 
 the club viewed with no ordinary interest, was Charles Lamb's 
 Commonplace Book. It afforded a revelation of what Lamb 
 thought of Burns. The first thing in the book, copied in 
 Lamb's handwriting, is a song by Burns, "Oh, Saw ye Bonie 
 Lesley." Burns often used this form of one "n" in bonnie. 
 Nearly at the end of the book, again in Lamb's hand, is 
 "John Anderson, My Joe." And at the end of the book 
 is, copied by Lamb, "Auld Lang Syne." 
 
 A very rare edition which President Bixby brought to 
 one meeting of the club was printed in 1795, — "An address 
 to the Deil, by Robert Burns, with the Answer by John 
 Lauderdale, near Wigton." 
 
 Another very rare edition of Burns, only one copy of which 
 has appeared in the English or American marts of rare books, 
 consists of "Verses to the Memory of James Thomson, 
 Author of the Seasons," together with "A Poem written in 
 Carse Hermitage by Nithside" and an epitaph on Sir Isaac 
 Newton. 
 
 71 
 
And still another edition bears the long title of "The 
 Auld Farmer's Salutation to His Auld Mare Maggie on Giv- 
 ing Her a Ripp of Corn to Hansel in the New Year, to which 
 are added An address to Scotch Haggis New Year's Day 
 and Tarn Samson's Elegy by Robert Burns, the Ayrshire 
 Poet." The autograph of Burns appears on the title page. 
 
 Lines to St. Louis Burnsians 
 
 By W. Hunter, author of "Thoughts of a Toiler," 
 
 Clydebank, Scotland 
 
 In honor of their latest publication 
 
 Dear Brither Burnsians owre the sea, 
 Accept this hamely screed frae me, 
 Wha never in this worl' may see 
 
 You o' your faces; 
 But yet as plain as ocht can be 
 
 True freenship traces. 
 
 I tak' my bannet off my broo 
 Wi' great respect to sic as you; 
 And let a Scotchman tell ye hoo 
 
 You're gien him pleasure; 
 I've read your "Nichts Wi' Burns" richt throo — 
 
 It's juist a treasure. 
 
 On ilka page gleam gems o' thocht, 
 Weel polished and sae finely wrocht, 
 They match the richest ever brocht 
 
 Frae wit or learnin'; 
 Tho' faur and wide sae keenly socht 
 For speech or sermon. 
 
 It pleases me mair than ye ken 
 
 To learn ye ha'e sic able men, 
 
 -Sae eloquent wi' tongue and pen 
 
 To gie Rab honour. 
 Ye speak o' glorious nichts ye spen'; 
 
 I dinna wonner. 
 
 But mind ye we've a guid club here, 
 I wish ye were a bit mair near, 
 Then feth ye wadna need to speir 
 
 Hoo we are daein'. 
 The "Jolly Beggars" herty cheer 
 
 Ye wad be ha'ein'. 
 
 That canna be, yet prood I feel 
 
 In twa three lines to wish ye weel, 
 
 Wi' money anither Clydebank cheil 
 
 Wha sends his greetin'; 
 And fain wad owre the waters steal 
 
 To your next meetin'. 
 
 72 
 
In Memory of Robert Burns 
 
 By Irvin Mattick 
 January 26, 1914 
 
 I 
 
 O Bard of the beatific soul, 
 
 Thou master of the heart's true chords, — 
 Though Scotia's skies above thee roll, 
 
 We sing thy pure love-breathing words — 
 Great heart that lived and loved and knew 
 
 Each passion's throe and kindling joy, 
 Sleep on, O brother of the true, 
 
 Serenely reft of Fate's annoy! 
 
 II 
 
 No more for thee the lintwhistle's lay 
 
 Swells from the banks o' bonny Doon 
 No ling'ring stay of less'ning ray 
 
 Recalls thy Mary's death too soon — 
 Along the Lugar now no more 
 
 The happy love-tryst do ye meet — 
 Nor steal by Ayr's embowered shore, 
 
 Mid the implicit thraldom sweet! 
 
 Ill 
 
 Thy ploughshare turns no mousie out 
 
 To face the winter's biting frost, — 
 Oft like oursel's on poor tithes' route 
 
 With all but ardent spirit lost; 
 Where Tarn with ale turned noddle rode, 
 
 With rev'rent awe we wond'ring tread 
 And learn thy mirthful moral code — 
 
 How pleasures are like poppies spread! 
 
 IV. 
 Rest on, great singer of the heart, 
 
 Within thy native Scotland sleep — 
 Thy life was the Apostle's part 
 
 Of misery on which we weep — 
 But though through life thou wert denied 
 
 The weight of Fortune's golden crown, 
 In thee the breath alone hath died, 
 
 Leaving immortal thy renown. 
 73 
 
The Influence of Burns on Scotch 
 Theology 
 
 By Rev. Dr. J. L. Scott of Philadelphia 
 
 Read by one of the members of The Burns Club of St. Louis 
 
 January 26, 1914 
 
 Theology is indebted to poetry for its truest interpreta- 
 tion. 
 
 The poet does not create; he expresses. He is in the 
 possession of an insight, an intuitive discrimination denied 
 the average mind. 
 
 Milton had quite as much to do in shaping Theology 
 as had Calvin himself. 
 
 Calvin systematized doctrine; but Milton was the biog- 
 rapher of evil, and gave the world its proper conception of 
 the Prince of Darkness. I wish to speak of a greater poet 
 and review somewhat his influence on Theology. 
 
 They who fail to find Theology in Burns haven't read 
 him. Theology is a wide term. 
 
 The botanist who studies nothing but geraniums is not 
 liable to get very far in his profession; and the moralist who 
 finds no Theology outside his confession is a botanist of a 
 single flower. Dean Stanley said: "That anything which 
 omitted the influence of Burns was unworthy the name of 
 Scotch ecclesiastical history," and Prof. Blaikie declared that 
 Burns was the father of that particular school of Presby- 
 terianism to which he belonged. As to his genius there can 
 be but one opinion. He is next to Shakespeare, the universal 
 poet — the one wandering minstrel, the music of whose harp 
 is alike welcome at every door. 
 
 This is the miracle of modern times. On January 25th, 
 1759, in a clay biggin at Ayr, a peasant father saw one more 
 added to his already poverty-stricken household. 
 
 God let loose this freshly created spirit upon the storm. 
 One hundred years from that night, in a thousand cities and 
 hamlets, princes and peasants met to celebrate the event. 
 The anniversary of no man's birth in eighteen hundred 
 years was ever so generally marked as his. What did this 
 man do? He wrote poetry. To know any man one must be 
 re-born himself and live when he lived. We are all created 
 out of the dust of our birth places, all with the exception of 
 Genius. This is ever a contradiction to its age. 
 
 74 
 
When Burns was created Genius had little else to do; 
 God hadn't made a poet for many years. This species of 
 creation He reserves for Himself. 
 
 There had come and gone a line of versifiers, to whom 
 poetry was the euphony of the final word. From Johnson 
 to Burns were ten laureate poets, not one of whom with the 
 exception of Dryden is worthy a place in the Presbyterian 
 Hymnal. 
 
 Poetry is more than the tape line of written speech; it 
 is the human heart beating through the words and passion 
 of a single man. In the last century that man was Burns. 
 He was not only a poet but also a Presbyterian. Poverty and 
 Presbyterianism met him upon the threshold of life. They 
 often go together. 
 
 And further, he loved the Church as every patriotic 
 Scotchman must. 
 
 The thistle of Scotland and the burning bush of the Kirk 
 grew side by side. Their history was one. 
 
 At the death of Elizabeth England had a crown, but no 
 head to put it on. In Scotland the reverse was true; she 
 possessed a head, but crowns were scarce. 
 
 An exchange was made, Scotland furnished the brains 
 and England the titles. 
 
 The scheme was successful in the State, and why should 
 it not be equally so in the Church? An ecclesiastical union 
 was proposed. It was the same old basis over again. 
 
 Presbyterian brains on one side and Episcopal titles on 
 the other. History repeats itself. Episcopacy is and has 
 always been in favor of union. The conditions are modest; 
 give her the keystone and you may take all the rest of the 
 bridge. This Scotland saw and said no! So the two nations 
 went out to resume the discussions of Dromclog and Both- 
 well. No one could well know his country's history better 
 than did Burns. It was one of the few subjects accessible 
 to his young soul. There is a popular mistake concerning 
 the poet's reverence for things holy. The church has been 
 slow to gather the many flowers that grew in the desert 
 of his life. He was a creature of the most extreme passions. 
 All great poets are, but irreverence is to them an impossible 
 thing. The song birds always fly toward heaven. When he 
 heard one speaking lightly of the Solemn League and Cov- 
 enant it aroused the Scotch ire of his blood. 
 
 The Solemn League and Covenant 
 
 Cost Scotland blood, cost Scotland tears! 
 * But it seal'd Freedom's sacred cause — 
 If thou'rt a slave, indulge thy sneers. 
 
 75 
 
But did not Burns say harsh things about the Church of 
 Scotland? Oh, yes, but not half so harsh as the Church, 
 through its factions, said about itself. His attitude toward 
 the Church was but the outgrowth of the man and his age. 
 Presbyterians have never been averse to war. It is said 
 that once there was no war in Israel for the space of three 
 years, but no historian ever recorded that of the Presbyte- 
 rian Church. It was an age of schism. A living dog was 
 better than a dead lion. Everyone girded his sword on his 
 thigh and he who had no sword, sold his coat and bought 
 one. No one can read the ecclesiastical record of that day 
 without a sense of pain. There was no issue outside of 
 patronage. So it drifted into a personal wrangle, and became 
 a war of Ephraim against Judah. The old lights and the 
 new lights were personal parties, neither of which seem to 
 have known what all this commotion was about. It was an 
 age of spies and suspects. Secret traps were placed before 
 every pulpit door in which to catch the mouse of heresy. 
 Accusations of heresy and immoralities flew like stones from 
 a sling. The battlefield was in the vicinity of Ayr, and 
 Burns, exercising the right of every Scotchman, became a 
 Theological critic. The Scotch ministry at that time was a 
 protest against nature. It was forced into a rigidity which it 
 didn't feel. The tabernacle of God had ceased to dwell with 
 men, and the rent veil had been sewed together, in order 
 that once more the priesthood might be separated from the 
 people. As for the eldership, it had swollen into the propor- 
 tions of a mountain. They were the kind that John saw 
 when he declared that the four-footed beasts and elders 
 formed an indiscriminate congregation about the throne. 
 There was a contest between the sunshine and the rock upon 
 which it fell. Where the poet was to be found one can 
 easily imagine. His friends were on trial for heresy, and his 
 old father, the Cotter priest, was among those suspected of 
 liberal sympathies. Burns became a new light, a sort of 
 David in this factional Israel. 
 
 Dr. Hetherington, the Free Church historian, evidently 
 loved Burns, but hated his friends. In this controversy he 
 says: "Every person of irreligious or immoral character 
 espoused the Socinian cause. And what they wanted in argu- 
 ment they endeavored to supply by ridicule, slander and 
 profane mockery. In an evil hour for his country and him- 
 self, the new light party induced Robert Burns to join them 
 and to prostitute his poetical genius in a cause so worth- 
 less as the defence of such unprincipled and depraved men. 
 (He is now writing of those ministers who made up the mod- 
 
 76 
 
erate party of the Scotch Church.) Nay, they initiated him 
 in depths of iniquity to which until then he had been a 
 stranger; nay, more, destroyed the natural devotion of his 
 temperament and impelled him to aim the shafts of his satire 
 against his Church. The future dark career and melancholy 
 end of this unhappy son of genius is mainly to be ascribed 
 to the fatal taint which he received from his intercourse with 
 the moderate Socinian new light ministers of Ayrshire and 
 their adherents. Those guilty men have been already named 
 and their misled victim's poems, when rightly understood, 
 will inflict upon them the retributive justice of branding their 
 unhonored memory with the impress of perpetual infamy." 
 Let brotherly love continue. Literature will be searched in 
 vain for a spirit more vindictive than this conservative Theo- 
 logian betrays against the new school element of his church 
 and he was but an echo of the spiteful thunder that spent 
 its force in the age of , Burns. Out of this black soul of 
 church war grew the "Twa Herds," the ministers that came 
 to blows. "Holy Willie's Prayer," an old light elder, who 
 reproved him, then stole the Church's money. "The Kirk's 
 Alarm," the Rev. Mr. McGill, of Ayr, had written an essay 
 on the Atonement and was on trial for heresy. Though, says 
 the poet, one of the worthiest and ablest of the whole priest- 
 hood of the Kirk, yet is in danger of being thrown out with 
 his family upon this very December day and left to the mercy 
 of the winter's storm. These poems and others like them are 
 limited by their localities. They were so many arrows shot 
 like those of Jonathan in behalf of friends in trouble. Read 
 them in the lamplight of that age and they reflect alike honor 
 upon his genius and his manhood. 
 
 I have thus attempted to give you a whiff of the atmos- 
 phere in which he lived, for without this no one can estimate 
 correctly either the man or his influence. His satire naturally 
 aroused public indignation, but the ultimate effect was good. 
 It discriminated between religion and its formal substitute. 
 
 For the sacred flame of true devotion he had the most 
 profound respect, and for the strange fire of pretense an 
 equal hatred. 
 
 "All hail religion! Maid divine! 
 Pardon a muse sae mean as mine, 
 Who in her rough, imperfect line, 
 
 Thus daurs to name thee, 
 To stigmatize false friends o' thine 
 Can ne'er defame thee." 
 77 
 
By the chords of poetic satire he scourged those who sold 
 the truth and drove them from the temple of God. The 
 Church realized there was "a chiel among them taking notes, 
 and faith, he would print it," and from motives high or low 
 awoke to something better. His theology was broader than 
 that of his day. The Confession of Faith was intended for the 
 book-shelf, and not for the market places, but the Scotch 
 Clergy sought to make it a text-book of practical life. 
 
 They endeavored to unfold the subtleties of election and 
 absolute sovereignty. The two wings of theology flapped 
 themselves in each other's faces, but no logic could stand 
 against the satire of the poet. 
 
 His side ultimately won, but long after he was in his 
 grave. The invocation of Holy Willie's prayer, says the 
 Rev. Mr. Paul, was but the metrical version of every prayer 
 offered up by those who called themselves the pure reformed 
 Church of Scotland. 
 
 "Oh, Thou wha in the heavens dost dwell, 
 Wha as it pleases best Thysel', 
 Sends one to heaven and ten to hell 
 
 A' for Thy glory 
 And no for ony good or ill 
 They've done afore Thee." 
 
 That parody on the Gospel is dead. It may linger about 
 the bogs of Ireland or the swamps of the South, but as an 
 influence has ceased to be, and with its departure came in a 
 broader conception of man. 
 
 Burns was the poet of humanity. He saw the mills of 
 oppression grinding out their grist of misery and dared to 
 take his place among the poor. 
 
 "Is there, for honest poverty, 
 
 That hangs his head, and a' that? 
 The coward-slave, we pass him by, 
 We dare be poor for a' that! 
 For a' that, and a' that, 
 
 It's coming yet for a' that, 
 
 That man to man, the warld o'er, 
 
 Shall brothers be for a' that." 
 
 "I've just been reading to the Queen," wrote Norman 
 McLeod, "her two favorites from Burns, 'John Anderson My 
 Jo, John,' and 'A Man's a' Man for a' That.' " Who is my 
 neighbor? Twice has that question been answered, once by 
 a parable and once by a poem. 
 
The element of mercy was sadly lacking in Scotch theol- 
 ogy. Our Confession, like Napoleon, was born in the trenches 
 of war. This was natural. Men who had fought for their 
 lives were not liable to be over-sentimental. I don't wish to 
 be misunderstood. The Westminster symbol is to me the 
 master compendium of all Theology. Burns respected it. 
 He didn't suggest revision or even a simpler creed; he only 
 unclasped the covers and let in additional rays of the Father's 
 sunlight. 
 
 "Who made the heart, 'tis He alone 
 
 Decidedly can try us; 
 He knows each chord — its various. tone, 
 
 Each spring — its various bias; 
 Then at the balance let's be mute, 
 
 We never can adjust it; 
 What's done we partly may compute, 
 
 But know not what's resisted." 
 
 His craving for mercy went down and touched the lowest 
 of God's creatures. He felt for all that could feel. Any 
 man who can wound a hare, or cause pain to a little mouse, 
 may learn Theology from Burns. 
 
 "Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie, 
 O, what a panic's in thy breastie! 
 I'm truly sorry man's dominion 
 Has broken nature's social union, 
 An' justifies that ill opinion, 
 
 Which makes thee startle 
 At me, thy poor earth-born companion, 
 
 An' fellow-mortal!" 
 
 He would forgive the little mouse its sins. There was 
 room enough for both in the same cruel, grasping world. 
 
 "I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve; 
 What then? poor beastie, thou maun live! 
 A daimen-icker in a thrave 
 
 'S a sma' request; 
 I'll get a blessing wi' the lave, 
 
 An' never miss't!" 
 
 Systems of Theology are but the externals, the outside 
 alabaster that holds the Samaritan oil of God. 
 
 Burns also improved the teaching of his day. Whoever 
 does this is worthy of all praise. Youth had no recognition 
 in the Scotch Church of one hundred years ago. It was an 
 
 79 
 
age of doctrine. Birds were dumb, and olive branches thorny. 
 There were two covenants: The solemn league and covenant, 
 and the covenant of grace. The one of works had no con- 
 sideration whatever. 
 
 After so long a drought this must have come like the 
 music of the latter rain: 
 
 "I lang hae thought, my youthfu' friend, 
 A something to have sent you, 
 Tho' it should serve nae other end 
 
 Than just a kind memento! 
 Yet ne'er with wits profane to range, 
 
 Be complaisance extended; 
 An atheist's laugh's a poor exchange 
 
 For Deity offended! 
 But when on life we're tempest-driv'n, 
 
 A conscience but a canker — 
 A correspondence fix'd wi' heav'n — 
 Is sure a noble anchor!" 
 
 To this preaching the young men listened and some of 
 the clergy were wise enough to ask what for. The beauties 
 of nature found a place in the New Testament, but are from 
 necessity excluded from all Theology. The Rose of Sharon 
 takes no root in dogmatic dust, but Burns planted a daisy 
 before every church door in Scotland and wrote a Theology 
 upon its leaves that has saved many a young life. Ecclesi- 
 astical discipline he hated. To him it was an adjourned ses- 
 sion of Pilate's court, in too many instances sadly true. 
 
 There are questions that arise to the surface of all poetry 
 which no Theology can answer. "Man was made to Mourn," 
 is the dirge of creation. 
 
 "If I'm designed yon lordling's slave — 
 By Nature's law designed — 
 Why was an independent wish 
 E'er planted in my mind?" 
 
 That is the theory, but a contradictory reality confronts it. 
 
 "If not, why am I subject to 
 His cruelty or scorn? 
 Or why has man the will and power 
 To make his fellow mourn?" 
 
 But the old Kirk had not taught him in vain. 
 
 "The poor, oppressed, honest man, 
 Had never, sure, been born, 
 Had there not been some recompense 
 To comfort those that mourn!" 
 80 
 
His pitiful life created a sympathy which, apart from all 
 else, made his countrymen better. 
 
 Highland Mary became the Jcptha's daughter of Scot- 
 land and whether one be sad or happy, there is a string in 
 his harp that vibrates to every touch. As to his unfortunate 
 career I am purposely silent. There are those who can see 
 nothing in the parable of Dives and Lazarus but the dog at 
 the gate. Let them throw stones upon his grave. He has 
 been called the prodigal son of the Church, but moral dis- 
 tances are not measured by feet. The elder son out in the 
 field may be further away from the house than his younger 
 brother. His career was for himself a failure, but for others a 
 triumph. He died and the Church came to his funeral. Some 
 are late getting there but they are on the way. He put 
 a new song in the dumb lips of Scotland and taught her how 
 to sing. He did more; he took her rough, rugged Theology, 
 the best in the world, and made it better by the magic touch 
 of his genius. 
 
 Words O' Cheer 
 
 Manuscript Poem Attributed to Burns, Presented by Joseph Welsh 
 
 of Pasadena, through A. W. Douglas, to the 
 
 Burns Club of St. Louis. 
 
 Let Calvin, Knox and Luther cry 
 "I hae the thruth, and I and I." 
 
 Puir sinners, if ye gang agley, 
 The Deil will hae ye, 
 
 And then the Lord will stand abcigh 
 And wunna save ye. 
 
 But Hoolic! Hoolic! Nac sac fast 
 
 When Gabriel shall blaw his blast 
 
 And Heaven and Earth awa hae past, 
 The Lang Syne saints 
 
 Shall find baith Deil and Hell at last 
 Mere pious feints. 
 
 The upright, honest-hearted man, 
 Who strives to do the best ha can 
 
 Need never fear the Kirk's auld ban 
 Or Hell's damnation; 
 
 For God, He need nae special plan 
 For oor salvation. 
 81 
 
The anc wha feels our deepest needs 
 
 Recks little how man counts his beads, 
 
 For righteousness is not in creeds 
 Nor solemn faces; 
 
 But rather lies in kindly deeds 
 And Christian graces. 
 
 Then never fear, wae purpose leal, 
 A head to think, a heart to feel 
 
 For human wae or human weal, 
 Nae preaching loon 
 
 Your sacred birthright e'er can steal 
 To Heaven abune. 
 
 Take tent o' truth and heed it well; 
 
 The man wha sins mak's his ain Hell, 
 There's nae worse Deil than himself; 
 
 But God is strongest, 
 And when puir human hearts rebel 
 
 He holds out longest. 
 
 82 
 
The Burns Club 
 
 of 
 
 St. Louis 
 
 W. K. Bixby W. F. Carter 
 
 Scott. H. Blewett J. W. Dick 
 
 Hanford Crawford A. W. Douglas 
 
 Franklin Ferriss David R. Francis 
 
 Alex. S. Greig George S. Johns 
 
 Robert Johnston Frederick W. Lehmann 
 
 John L. Lowes J. W. Maclvor 
 
 William M. Portcous, William Marion Reedy 
 
 George J. Tanscy Walter B. Stevens 
 
 M. N. Sale George M. Wright 
 
 David R. Calhoun Melville L. Wilkinson 
 
 3n 90emoriam 
 
 Joseph A. Graham Henry King 
 
 Ben Blewett 
 
 83 
 
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