^ 
 
PR 4331 
 .C3 
 1892 
 Copy 1 
 
 No. lO.^iCo./^ V 
 
 i^ 
 
 
 maynard's 
 English-Classic-Series 
 
 
 I— i-i-i 
 
 
 wnESSAYon 
 
 BURNS 
 
 BY 
 
 L 
 
 Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 33 
 
 
 I— I-I-I 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 Maynard^ Merrill 6c Co. 
 
 43,45 d: 47 East lOIiJ St. 
 
 %j r j wj w jw^ m r ^j i ^.wuj n. 
 
 ^^ r^ r^r^'^^ r^ ^^ »-^%>^ym^-m:%^»:x- wv"^Nr^v 
 
 ^la 
 
ENGLISH CLASSIC SERIES, 
 
 roR 
 
 Classes in English Literature, Beading, Grammar, etc. 
 
 EDITED BY EMINENT ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCHOLARS, 
 
 Volume contains a Sketch of the Author^s Life^ Prefatory and 
 Explanatory Notes, etc., etc. 
 
 1 Byron's Prophecy of Dante. 
 
 (Cantos I. and II.) 
 
 2 Milton's L.' Allegro, and II Pen- 
 
 seroso. 
 
 3 Lord Bacon's £ssays. Civil and 
 
 Moral. (Selected.) 
 
 4 Byron's Prisoner of Chillon. 
 
 5 Moore's Fire "Worshippers. 
 
 (Lalla Kookh. Selected.) 
 
 6 Goldsmith's Deserted Village. 
 
 7 Scott's Marinion. (Selections 
 
 from Canto VI.) 
 
 8 Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. 
 
 (Introduction and Canto I.) 
 
 9 Burns'sCotter'sSaturdayNight, 
 
 and other Poems 
 
 10 Crabbe's The Village. 
 
 11 Campbell^s Pleasures of Hope. 
 
 (Abridgment of Parti.) 
 13 Macaulay's Essay on Bunyan's 
 Pilgrim's Progress. 
 
 13 Macaulay's Armada* and other 
 
 Poems. 
 
 14 Shakespeare's Merchant of Ve- 
 
 nice. (Selections from Acts I., 
 III., and IV.) 
 
 15 Goldsmith's Traveller. 
 
 16 Hogg's Queen's Wake, andKil- 
 
 meny. 
 
 17 Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. 
 
 18 Addison's Sir Roger de Cover- 
 
 ley. 
 
 19 Gray's Elegy in a Country 
 
 Churchyard. 
 
 30 Scott'sLady ofthe Lake. (Canto 
 
 I.) 
 
 31 Shakespeare's As You Like It, 
 
 etc. (Selections.) 
 
 33 Shakespeare's King John, and 
 
 Richard II. (Selections.) 
 23 Shakespeare's Henry IV., Hen- 
 ry v., Henry VI. (Selections.) 
 
 34 Shakespeare's Henry VIII., and 
 
 Julius Caesar. (Selections.) 
 
 35 Wordsworth's Excursion. (Bk.I.) 
 
 36 Pope's Essay on Criticism. 
 
 37 Spenser'sFaerieQueene. (Cantos 
 
 I. and n.) 
 
 38 Cowper's Task. (Book I.) 
 
 39 Milton's Comus. 
 
 30 Tennyson's Enoch Arden, The 
 Lotus Eaters, Ulysses, and 
 Tithonus. 
 
 31 Irving's Sketch Book. (Selec- 
 tions.) 
 
 33 Dickens's Christmas Carol. 
 (Condensed.) 
 
 33 Carlyle's Hero as a Prophet. 
 
 34 Macaulay's Warren Hastings. 
 
 (Condensed.) 
 
 35 Goldsmith's Vicar of Wake- 
 
 field. (Condensed.) 
 
 36 Tennyson's The Two Voices, 
 
 and A Dream of Fair Women. 
 
 37 Memory Quotations. 
 
 38 Cavalier Poets. 
 
 39 Dryden's Alexander's Feast, 
 
 and MacFlecknoe. 
 
 40 Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes. 
 
 41 Irving.'s Legend of Sleepy Hol- 
 
 low. 
 43 Lamb's Tales from Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 43 Le Row's How to Teach Read- 
 
 ing. 
 
 44 Webster's Bunker Hill Ora- 
 
 tions. 
 
 45 The Academy Orthoiipist. A 
 
 Manual of Pronunciation. 
 
 46 Milton's Lycidas, and Hymn 
 
 on the Nativity. 
 
 47 Bryant's Thanatopsis, and other 
 
 Poems. 
 
 48 Ruskin's Modern Painters. 
 
 (Selections.) 
 
 49 The Shakespeare Speaker. 
 
 50 Thackeray's Roundabout Pa- 
 
 pers. 
 
 51 Webster's Oration on Adams 
 
 and Jefferson. 
 53 Brown's Rah and his Friends. 
 
 53 Morris's Life and Death of 
 
 Jason. 
 
 54 Burke's Speech OD American 
 
 Taxation. 
 
 55 Pope's Rape of the Lock. 
 
 56 Tennyson's Elaine. 
 
 57 Tennyson's In Memoriam. 
 
 58 Church's Story of the .^n eld. 
 
 59 Church's Story of the Iliad. 
 
 60 Swift's Gulliver's Voyage to 
 
 Lilliput. 
 
 61 Macaulay's Essay on Lord Ba- 
 
 con. (Condensed.) 
 63 The Alcestis of Euripides. Eng- 
 lish Version by Rev. R. Potter.M. A. 
 
 (Additional numbers on next page.) 
 
ENGLISH CLASSIC SERIES-No. 70. 
 
 An Essay on Burns. 
 
 BY 
 
 THOMAS CARLYILE. J 
 
 \s. 
 
 /^^'^ 
 
 'J' 
 
 Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 WS^ix^ an Knttolruction anir Kotes 
 By J. W. Abeenethy, Ph.D., 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGUSH LITERATURE IN THE ADELPHI ACADEMY, BROOKLYN. 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 
 Maynard, Merrill, & Co., Publishers, 
 43, 45, AND 47 East Tenth Street. 
 
 New Series, No. 81. October 10, 1892. Pulilislied Semi-weekly. Subscription Price $10. 
 Eutered at Post Office, New York, as Second-class Matter. 
 
t^ 
 
 
 A Complete Course in^the Study of English. 
 
 spelling. Language, Grammar, Composition, Literature. 
 
 Reed's Word Lessons— A Complete Speller. 
 Reed's Introductory Language Work. 
 
 Reed & Kellogg's Graded Lessons in English. 
 Reed & Kellogg's Higher Lessons in English. 
 
 Reed & Kellogg's One-Book Course in English. 
 Kellogg & Reed's Word Building. 
 
 Kellogg & Reed's The Engjish Language. 
 Kellogg's Text-Book on Rhetoric. 
 Kellogg's Illustrations of Style. 
 
 Kellogg's Text-Book on English Literature. 
 
 In the preparation of this series the authors have had one object 
 clearly in view — to so develop the study of the 'English language as 
 to present a complete, progressive course, from the Spelling-Bpbk to 
 the study, of English Literature. The trouble«ortie contradictions 
 which arise in using books arranged "by different authors on these 
 subjects, and which require much time for explanation in- thie ^^'ool- 
 room, will be avoided by the use of the above " Complete Coutse." 
 
 Teachers are earnestly invited to examine these books. 
 
 MaynARD, Merrill, & Ca, Publishers, • 
 
 43, 45, and 47 East Tenth St., New York. 
 
 Copyright, 18S9, by Effingham Maynard & Co. 
 P. 
 
 ^.W.BduimuUer 
 t,F'03 
 
Introduction}'. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle, the " Seer of Chelsea " and the " Censor of 
 the Age," was born at Ecclefechau, near Annan, Scotland, in 
 1795. His father was a stone-mason and small farmer ; his mother 
 learned late in life to use a pen, that she might write to her son 
 Thomas. His genius, like that of Burns, of whom he wrote with 
 such sympathetic insight, sprang directly from the cold Scotch 
 soil. At fourteen he entered the University of Edinburgh, but 
 left after completing the ordinary course without taking a degree, 
 owing to the University nothing, as he said bitterly, except the 
 opportunity afforded by its library for multifarious reading. He 
 distinguished himself, however, in the higher mathematics, and 
 one of his first published works w^as a translation of " Legendre's 
 Geometry." He engaged in teaching, but soon came to "the 
 grim conclusion that school-mastering must end, whatever 
 pleased to follow." He next studied divinity for a time, as it 
 was the wish of his parents that he should enter the ministry; 
 but finally declared boldly for literature as his profession, and 
 began his career as an author, in 1824, with a " Life of Schiller" 
 and an admirable translation of Goethe's " WilhelmMeister." 
 
 In 1826 Carlyle married Jane Welsh, a lineal descendant from 
 John Knox, and soon after went to reside upon her small estate 
 of Craigenputtock, near Dumfries. Here in this " loneliest nook 
 in Britain," as he described it, " in a wilderness of heath and 
 rock," these wedded students— for his wife's intellectual gifts 
 were comparable with his own— spent about six years, like 
 Wordsworth and his sister, in " plain living and high thinking." 
 Here he wrote the best of his critical essays, and also the remark- 
 able work, " Sartor Resartus," a kind of spiritual biography of 
 himself, presenting the main features of his subsequent teaching, 
 which first appeared in book f orni in America, in 1836, with an 
 Introduction by Emerson. He removed to London in 1834, 
 and fixed his final home in Chelsea. His masterpiece, the 
 "French Revolution," was published in 1837. " Chartism," a 
 
4: INTKODUCTIOiq". 
 
 criticism upou the social conditiou of England, appeared in 1839; 
 "Heroes and Hero- Worship," in 1841 ; " Past and Present," in 
 1843; "Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches," in 1845 ; and 
 "Latter-Day Pamphlets," in 1850, a series of violent diatribes 
 upon social questions, which at the time brought the author more 
 credit for madness than for wisdom. The charming " Life of 
 John Sterling" appeared in 1851, followed by his most elabo- 
 rate historical work, the "Life of Frederick the Great," from 
 1858 to 1865. In 1866 he was elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh 
 University, and his Installation Address was attended by the 
 most enthusiastic public manifestations of approval and honor. 
 His last work was the " Early Kings of Norway," published in 
 1875. He died February 5, 1881. 
 
 Carlyle's personal character was remarkable for its inflexible 
 integrity and lofty independence. " No praise can be deemed too 
 high for the resolute devotion with which, through evil report 
 and good report, through poverty and riches, through obscurity 
 and fame, he remained constantly honest to his convictions ; re- 
 solved to write on no subject which he had not studied to the 
 bottom, and determined to speak out what he believed to be the 
 truth, however unpalatable it might be to the world."/! He was 
 a profound thinker, but not a clear reasoner ; he had too much 
 of the fire of the poet to engage in dull analysis and matter-of- 
 fact reasoning. '\He felt deeply, but not calmly; the activity of 
 his nature, moral and intellectual, was tumultuous. He was a 
 moralist rather than a philosopher. His ethical creed was a 
 stern, uncompromising insistence upon the performance of duty 
 as the chief end of life. /) Men must not labor in hope of reward, 
 but must recognize that they deserve nothing. The theory of 
 life that makes happiness an end is false and contemptible. 
 " Would in this world of ours is as mere zero to should.'^' Of 
 specific duties, the first and greatest is work. "Do thy "little 
 stroke of work ; this is Nature's voice, and the sum of all the 
 commandments, to each luan." " Produce ! Produce ! Were 
 it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce 
 it in God's name." The " Captains of Industry" are the only 
 true aristocrats. Two men are to be honored, and no third, 
 •'the toil-worn Craftsman who conquers the earth, and he who 
 is seen toiling for the spiritually indispensable." The second 
 great duty is that of obedience. "Obedience is our universal 
 duty and destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break." 
 The third great duty is veracity, or sincerity, as opposed to all 
 
IKTRODUCTION". 5 
 
 cant, puffery, quackery, and sliam. The greatest evils in life 
 to be battled against are idleness, imposture-, and unveracity. 
 "Quack-ridden; in that one word lies all misery whatsoever. 
 Speciosit}'- in all departments usurps the place of reality." This 
 is a literary duty also. A chief merit of Burns, he says, is his 
 " indisputable air of reality." 
 
 ** Carlyle's essays," says Professor Nicoll, "are among the 
 most valuable of his writings. He was the first to make the 
 great writers of Germany known in England ; and his writings 
 on the more illustrious figures of the epoch of the French Revolu- 
 tion — Voltaire, Diderot, IVIirabeau — are models of insight into 
 character, profound and discriminating estimates of men who had 
 proved stumbling-blocks to British critics. The essays on Burns 
 and Johnson may be said to have struck the keynote of all suc- 
 ceeding Avritings on these men; while his criticism of Scott, 
 which has provoked a good deal of hostility, is more and more 
 coming to be generally recognized as substantially correct. 
 The ' Life of Schiller,' though warmly praised by Goethe, who 
 added a preface to the German translation of it, is not a first-rate 
 performance. But the ' Life of Sterling' is a perfect triumph 
 of literary art, far and away the best biography of its size in the 
 language." 
 
 Of his literary qualities James Russell Lowell says: " The great 
 merit of the essays lay in a criticism based on wide and various 
 study, which, careless of tradition, applied its standard to the 
 real and not the contemporary worth of the literary or other per- 
 formance to be judged, and in an unerring eye for that fleeting 
 expression of the moral features of character, a perception of 
 which alone makes the drawing of a coherent likeness possible. 
 Their defect was a tendency, gaining strength with years, to con- 
 found the moral with the aesthetic standard, and to make the 
 value of an author's work dependent on the general force of his 
 nature rather than on its special fitness for a given task. But, 
 with all deductions, he remains the profoundest critic and the 
 most dramatic imagination of modern times. His manner is not 
 so well suited to the historian as to the essayist. He is always 
 great in single figures and striking episodes, but there is neither 
 gradation nor continuity. He sees history, as it were, by flashes 
 of lightning. He makes us acquainted with the isolated spot 
 where we happen to be when the flash comes, as if by actual eye- 
 sight, but there is no possibility of a comprehensive view. No 
 other writer compares with him for vividness. With the gift of 
 
^ 
 
 6 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 song, Carlyle would have been the greatest of epic poets since 
 Homer. " 
 
 Of the influence of Carlyle's writings Mr. Lowell says: 
 *' Though not the safest of guides in politics or practical phi- 
 losophy, his value as an inspirer and awaken er cannot be over- 
 estimated.'. It is a power which belongs only to the highest order 
 of minds, for it is none but a divine fire that can so kindle and 
 irradiate. The debt due him from those who listened to the 
 teachings of his prime for revealing to them what sublime re- 
 serves of power even the humblest may find in manliness, sin- 
 cerity, and self-reliance, can be paid with nothing short of rever- 
 ential gratitude. As a purifier of the sources whence our intel- 
 lectual irjspiration is drawn, his influence has been second only 
 to th*^t of Wordsworth, if even to his." 
 
BURNS. 
 
 In the modern arrangements of society, it is no uncommon 
 thing that a man of genius must, like Butler,^ " ask for bread 
 and receive a stone ;" for, in spite of our grand maxim of sup- 
 ply and demand, it is by no means the highest excellence that 
 men are most forward to recognize. The inventor of a spin- 
 ning-jenny'^ is pretty sure of his reward in his own day ; but the 
 writer of a true poem, like the apostle of a true religion, is 
 nearly as sure of the contrary. We do not know whether it is 
 not an aggravation of the injustice, that there is generally a 
 posthumous retributionx Robert Burns, in the course of Na- 
 ture, might yet have been living ; but his short life was spent 
 in toil and penury ; and he died, in the prime of his manhood,^ 
 miserable and neglected : and yet already a brave mausoleum* 
 shines over his dust, and more than one splendid monument 
 has been reared in other places to his fame ; the street where 
 he languished in poverty is called by his name ; the highest 
 personages in our literature have been proud to appear as his 
 commentators and admirers ; and here is the sixth narrative 
 of his Life that has been given to the world ! 
 
 1. Samuel Butler (1612-1680): The author of "Hudibras," a witty satire 
 upon the Puritans. Praised for a time by Charles and his courtiers, he was 
 permitted to die in poverty and neglect. He was '* the glory and the scandal 
 of the age," says Oldham. 
 
 2. Spinning-jenuy: A machine for spinning wool or cotton, invented in 
 1767 by James Hargreaves, an illiterate weaver of Lancashire. 
 
 3. Prime of his Manhood: Burns died at Dumfries, July 21, 1796, in his 
 thii'ty-seventh year. 
 
 4. Brave Mau.soleiim : This " huge, cumbrous, unsightly mausoleum," 
 as Prof. Shairp describes it, is in the comer of St. Michael's churchyard, 
 Dumfries. It literally " shines," with its absurd tin-covered dome. The 
 Burns Monument at Edinburgh is one of the most conspicuous objects in the 
 city. Another " splendid monument " now stands near the poet's birthplace 
 at Ayr, by the side of the " Auld Brig o' Doon." 
 
 7 
 
8 BURNS. 
 
 Mr. Loekhart^ thinks it necessary to apologize for this new 
 attempt on such a subject : but his readers, we believe, will 
 readily acquit him ; or, at worst, will censure only the perform- 
 ance of his task, not the choice of it. The character of Burns, 
 indeed, is a theme that cannot easily become either trite or ex- 
 hausted ; and will probably gain rather than lose in its dimen- 
 sions by the distance to which it is removed by Time. No 
 man, it has been said, is a hero to his valet ; and this is prob- 
 ably true ; but the fault is at least as likely to be the valet's as 
 the hero's. \\ For it is certain, that to the vulgar eye few things 
 are wonderful that are not distant.\^ It is difficult for men to 
 believe that the man, the mere man whom they see, nay per- 
 haps painfully feel, toiling at their side through the poor jost- 
 lings of existence, can be made of finer clay than themselvesij/ 
 Suppose that some dining acquaintance of Sir Thomas Lucy's^ 
 and neighbor of John-a-Combe's,'' had snatched an hour or 
 two from the preservation of his game, and written us a Life 
 of Shakspeare ! What dissertations should we not have had, 
 — not on Hamlet and The Tempest, but on the wool- trade, and 
 deer-stealing, and the libel and vagrant laws ; and how the 
 Poacher became a Player ; and how Sir Thomas and Mr. John 
 had Christian bowels, and did not push him to extremities ! 
 In like manner, we believe, with respect to Burns, that till the 
 companions of his pilgrimage, the Honorable Excise Commis- 
 sioners, and the Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt,^ and the 
 Dumfries Aristocracy, and all the Squires and Earls, equally 
 with the Ayr Writers, and the New and Old Light Clergy,^ 
 
 5. Joliii Gibson Lockliart : The son-in-law and biographer of V^alter 
 Seott. Carlyle's essay first appeared in the Edinburgh Eevieiv, in 1828, as a 
 review of Lockhart's "Life of Robert Burns." 
 
 6. Sir Thomas Lucy : The proprietor of Charleeote Hall, near Stratford- 
 on-Avon, in whose deer-parl^:, according to the legend, Shakspeare was 
 caught poaching. Having been arraigned before Sir Thomas, the young 
 poacher, it is said, avenged himself by composing a satirical ballad upon the 
 knight, and then fled to London to escape further prosecution. 
 
 7. Jolin-a-Combe: A distinguished citizen of Stratford, the supposed 
 subject of some satirical verses attributed to Shakspeai'e. His handsome 
 tomb is near Shakspeare's grave, in Stratford Church. 
 
 8. Caledonian Hunt: An association composed of the chiefs of the 
 northern aristocracy. Bums dedicated the first Edinburgh edition of his 
 poems " To the noblemen and gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt." 
 
 9. New and Old Light Clergy: The church was divided into two hostile 
 theological parties, the " New Lights," holding liberal or rationalistic views, 
 ft»d the *' Auld Lights," the strict Calvinists. Burns engaged heartily in the 
 
BURNS. 9 
 
 whom he had to do with, shall have become invisible in the 
 darkness of the Past, or visible only by light borrowed from 
 Ms juxtaposition, it will be difficult to measure him by any 
 true standard, or to estimate what he really was and did, in 
 the eighteenth century, for his country and the world. It will 
 be difficult, we say ; but still a fair problem for literary his- 
 torians ; and repeated attempts will give us repeated approxi- 
 mations. 
 
 His former Biographers have done something, no doubt, 
 but by no means a great deal, to assist us. Dr. Currie'" and 
 Mr. Walker," the principal of these writers, have both, we 
 think, mistaken one essentially important thing: Their own and ' J4 
 the world's true relation to their author, and the style in which ^<y\, 
 it became such men to think and to speak of such a man. Dr. ^^"/^ 
 Currie loved the poet truly ; more perhaps than he avowed to " -■ 
 his readers, or even to himself ; yet he everywhere introduces 
 him with a certain patronizing, apologetic air ; as if the polite 
 public might think it strange and half unwarrantable that he, 
 a man of science, a scholar and gentleman, should do such 
 honor to a rustic. In all this, however, we readily admit that 
 his fault was not want of love, but weakness of faith ; and re- 
 gret that the first and kindest of all our poet's biographers 
 should not have seen farther, or believed more boldly what he 
 saw. Mr. Walker oifends more deeply in the same kind : and 
 both err alike in presenting us with a detached catalogue of 
 his several supposed attributes, virtues and vices, instead of a 
 delineation of the resulting character as a living unity. This, 
 however, is not painting a portrait ; but gauging the length 
 and breadth of the several features, and jotting down their 
 dimensions in arithmetical ciphers. Nay it is not so much as 
 that : for we are yet to learn by what arts or instruments the 
 mind could be so measured and gauged. 
 
 fight, on the liberal side, satirizing the Auld Lights in the *'Twa Herds," 
 " Holy Willie's Prayer." and the " Holy Fair." 
 
 10. James Currie: A Scotch physician, best known for his valuable edi- 
 tion of Burns's Works, which he undertook for the benefit of the poet's widow 
 and children, published in 1800. 
 
 11. Mr. Walker: Josiah Walker, whose memoir of Bums was prefixed to 
 a collection of his poems published in 1811. 
 
10 BURKS. 
 
 Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided both these 
 errors. He uniformly treats Burns as the high and remarkable 
 man the public voice has now pronounced him to be : and in 
 delineating him, he has avoided the method of separate gener- 
 alities, and rather sought for characteristic incidents, habits, 
 actions, sayings ; in a word, for aspects which exhibit the 
 whole man, as he looked and lived among his fellows. The 
 book accordingly, with all its deficiencies, gives more insight, 
 we think, into the true character of Burns, than any prior bi- 
 ography : though, being written on the very popular and con- 
 densed scheme of an article for Constable's Miscellany^ '^ it has 
 less depth than we could have wished and expected from a 
 writer of such power ; and contains rather more, and more 
 multifarious, quotations than belong of right to an original 
 production. Indeed, Mr. Lockhart's own writing is generally 
 so good, so clear, direct and nervous, ;that we seldom wish to 
 see it making place for another man's. However, the spirit 
 of the work is throughout candid, tolerant and anxiously con- 
 ciliating ; compliments and praises are liberally distributed, 
 on all hands, to great and small ; and, as Mr. Morris Birk- 
 beck'' observes of the society in the backwoods of America, 
 " the courtesies of polite life are never lost sight of for a mo- 
 ment." But there are better things than these in the] volume ; 
 and we can safely testify, not only that it is easily and pleas- 
 antly read a first time, but may even be without difficulty read 
 again. 
 
 Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the problem of 
 Burns's Biography has yet been adequately solved. We do not 
 allude so much to deficiency of facts or documents, — though 
 of these we are still every day receiving some fresh accession, 
 — as to the limited and imperfect application of them to the 
 great end of Biography. Our notions upon this subject may 
 perhaps appear extravagant ; but if an individual is really of 
 consequence enough to have his life and character recorded for 
 
 12. Constable's Miscellany: A series of popular works issued by Con- 
 stable, the famous Edinburgh publisher who involved Scott in financial ruin. 
 
 13. Mr. Morris liirkbeck: The author of " Notes on a Journey in Amer- 
 ica," published in 1818. 
 
BURIES. 11 
 
 public remembrance, we have always been of opinion that 
 the public ought to be made acquainted with all the inward 
 springs and relations of his character. ; How did the world 
 and man's life, from his particular position, represent them- 
 selves to his mind ? How did coexisting circumstances modify 
 him from without ; how did he modify these from within ? 
 With what endeavors and what efficacy rule over them ; with 
 what resistance and what suffering sink under them ? In one 
 word, what and how produced was the effect of society on 
 him ; what and how produced was his effect on society ? He 
 who should answer these questions, in regard to any individ- 
 ual, would, as we believe, furnish a model of perfection in 
 Biography. Few individuals, indeed, can deserve such a 
 study ; and many lives will be written, and, for the gratifica- 
 tion of innocent curiosity, ought to be written, and read and 
 forgotten, which are not in this sense biographies. But 
 Burns, if we mistake not, is one of these few individuals ; and 
 such a study, at least with such a result, he has not yet ob- 
 tained. Our own contributions to it, we are aware, can be but 
 scanty and feeble ; but we offer them with good- will, and 
 trust they may meet with acceptance from those they are in- 
 tended for. ' 
 
 Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy ; and was, in 
 that character, entertained by it, in the usual fashion, with 
 loud, vague, tumultuous wonder, speedily subsiding into cen- 
 sure and neglect ; till his early and most mournful death again 
 awakened an enthusiasm for him, which, especially as there 
 was now nothing to be done, and much to be spoken, has pro- 
 longed itself even to our own time. It is true, the "nine 
 days " ^* have long since elapsed ; and the very_ continuance of 
 this clamor proves that Burns was no Vulgar wonder. Ac- 
 cordingly, even in sober judgments, where, as years passed by, 
 he has come to rest more and more exclusively on his own in- 
 trinsic merits, and may now be Avell-nigh shorn of that casual 
 
 14. Nine <la.vs: An allusion to the popular phrase " nine days' wonder," 
 wh''ch is thought to have originated in srnue reference to the nine days dur- 
 ing which Lady Jane Grey was Queen of England. 
 
12 BUKKS. 
 
 radiance, he appears not only as a true British poet, but as 
 one of the most considerable British meii of the eighteenth 
 cgiitoiry. Let it not be objected that he did little.J He did 
 much, if we consider where and how. If the work performed 
 was small, we must remember that he had his very materials to 
 discover ; for the metal he worked in lay hid under the desert 
 moor, where no eye but his had guessed its existence ; and we 
 may almost say, that with his own hand he had to construct 
 the tools for fashioning it. For he found himself in deepest 
 obscurity, without help, without instruction, without model ; 
 or with models only of the meanest sort, j An educated man 
 stands, as it were, in the midst of a boundless arsenal and 
 magazine, filled with all the weapons and engines which man's 
 skill has been able to devise from the earliest time ; and he 
 works, accordingly, with a strength borrowed from all past 
 ages. How different is his state who stands on the outside of 
 that storehouse, and feels that its gates must be stormed, or 
 remain forever shut against him ! His means are the com- 
 monest and rudest ; the mere work done is no measure of his 
 strength. A dwarf behind his steam-engine may remove 
 mountains ; but no dwarf will hew them down with a pickaxe; 
 and he must be a Titan' ^ that hurls them abroad with his 
 arms. 
 
 It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself. Born 
 in an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, and in a com- 
 dition the most disadvantageous, where his mind, if it accom- 
 plished aught, must accomplish it under the pressure of con- 
 tinual bodily toil, nay of penury and desponding apprehension 
 of the worst evils, and with no furtherance but such knowl- 
 edge as dwells in a poor man's hut, and the rhymes of a Fer- 
 guson'^ or Kamsay'^ for his standard of beauty, he sinks not 
 
 15. Titan: The Titans were fabled giants, sons and daughters of Uranus 
 (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth) During their rebellion against Zeus they piled 
 Mount Ossa upon Moimt Pelion,in order to scale the walls of heaven. 
 
 16 Robert Ferguson (1750-1774): A Scottish poet whom Burns greatly- 
 admired, and called his " elder brother in the muses." The monument over 
 his grave in Edinburgh was' erected by Burns. 
 
 17 Allan Kamsay (1GN5-1758): A Scottish poet, "at whose lamp Burns 
 lighted his brilliant torch," says Scott. He reawakened in Scotland an mter- 
 est in the native poetry. 
 
BURNS. 13 
 
 under all these impediments : through the fogs and darkness 
 of that obscure region, his lynx eye discerns the true relations, 
 of the world and human life ; he grows into intellectual 
 strength, and trains himself into intellectual expertness. Im- 
 pelled by the expansive movement of his own irrepressible 
 soul, he struggles forward into the general view; and with 
 haughty modesty lays down before us, as the fruit of his la- 
 bor, a gift, which Time has now pronounced imperishable. 
 Add to all this, that his darksome drudging childhood and 
 youth was by far the kindliest era of his whole life; and that 
 he died in his thirty-seventh year: and then ask, If it be 
 strange that his poems are imperfect, and of small extent, or 
 that his genius attained no mastery in its art ? /' Alas, his Sun 
 shone as through a tropical tornado; and the pale Shadow of 
 Death eclipsed it at noon ! ' Shrouded in such baleful vapors, 
 the genius of Burns was never seen, in clear azure splendor, 
 enlightening the world: but some beams from it did, by fits, 
 pierce through; and it tinted those clouds with rainbow and 
 orient colors, into a glory and stern grandeur, which men 
 silently gazed on with wonder and tears ! 
 vL^We are anxious not to exaggerate; for it is exposition rather 
 'than admiration that our readers require of us here; and yet 
 to avoid some tendency to that side is no easy matter. We 
 love Burns, and we pity him; and love and pity are prone to 
 magnify. " Criticism, it is sometimes thought, should be a cold 
 business; we are not so sure of this; but, at all events, our 
 concern with Burns is not exclusively that of critics. True 
 and genial as his poetry must appear, it is not chiefly as a poet, 
 but as a man, that he interests and affects us. He was often 
 advised to write a tragedy: time and means were not lent him 
 for this; but through life he enacted a tragedy, and one of the 
 deepest. We question whether the world has since witnessed 
 so utterly sad a scene; whether Napoleon himself, left to brawl 
 with Sir Hudson Lowe'^ and perish on his rock, "amid the 
 melancholy main," presented to the reflecting mind such a 
 
 18. Sir Hudson L.owe: A British g:eneral, made governor of the island of 
 St. Helena, when Napoleon was sent there as an exile in 1815. He was much 
 censured for his harsh treatment of the distinguished captive. 
 
14 BURKS. 
 
 "spectacle of pity and fear" as did this intrinsically nobler, 
 gentler and perhaps greater soul, wasting itself away in a 
 hopeless struggle with base entanglements, which coiled closer 
 and closer round him, till only death opened him an outlet. 
 Conquerors are a class of men with whom, formostj mrt, th e 
 world~c ould well disp ense; nor"can the hard intellect, the un- 
 sympathizing loftiness and high but selfish enthusiasm of such 
 persons inspire us in general with any affection; at best it 
 may excite amazement; and their fall, like that of a pyramid, 
 will be beheld with a certain sadness and awe. \ But a true 
 Poet, a man in whose heart resides some effluence of Wisdom, 
 some tone of the "Eternal Melodies," is the most precious gilt 
 that can be bestowed on a generation :|' we see in him a freer, 
 purer development of whatever is noblest in ourselves; his life 
 is a rich lesson to us; and we mourn his death as that of a 
 benefactor who loved and taught us. 
 
 Such a gift had Nature, in her bounty, bestowed on us in 
 Kobert Burns; but with queenlike indifference she cast it from 
 her hand, like a thing of no moment; and it was defaced and 
 torn asunder, as an idle bauble, before we recognized it. To 
 the ill-starred Burns was given the power of making man's 
 life more venerable, but] that of wisely guiding his own life 
 was not given. \ Destiny, — for so in our ignorance we must 
 speak, — his faults, the faults of others, proved too hard for 
 him; and that spirit, which might have soared could it but 
 have walked, soon sank to the dust, its glorious faculties trod- 
 den under foot in the blossom; and died, we may almost say, 
 without ever having lived. And so kind and warm a soul; so 
 full of inborn riches, of love to all living and lifeless things ! 
 How his heart flows out in sympathy over universal Nature; 
 and in her bleakest provinces discerns a beauty and a meaning! 
 The "Daisy" falls not unheeded under his plowshare; nor 
 the ruined nest of that " wee, cowering, timorous beastie," cast 
 forth, after all its provident pains, to "thole the sleety dribble 
 and cranreuch cauld. " '^ The ' ' hoar visage " of winter delights 
 him; he dwells with a sad and oft-returning fondness in these 
 
 19. " To endure the sleety drizzle and hoarfrost cold." From " To a Mouse," 
 
^ 
 
 BURNS. 15 
 
 scenes of solemn desolation; but the voice of the tempest be- 
 comes an anthem to his ears; he loves to walk in the sound- 
 ing woods, for ' ' it raises his thoughts to Him that walketh 
 on the wings of the wind. '//A true Poet-soul, for it needs but 
 to be struck, and the sound it yields will be music \jj But ob- 
 serve him chiefly as he mingles with his brother men. What 
 warm, all-comprehending fellow-feeling ; what trustful, bound- 
 less love; what generous exaggeration of the object loved ! 
 His rustic friend, his nut-brown maiden, are no longer mean 
 and homely, but a hero and a queen, whom he prizes as the 
 paragons of Earth. The rough scenes of Scottish life, not 
 seen by him in any Arcadian illusion,''" but in the rude contra- 
 diction, in the smoke and soil of a too harsh reality, are still 
 lovely to him: Poverty is indeed his companion, but Love also, 
 and Courage; the simple feelings, the worth, the nobleness, 
 that dwell under the straw roof, are dear and venerable to his 
 heart: and thus over the lowest provinces of man's existence 
 he pours the glory of his own soul; and they rise, in shadow 
 and sunshine, softened and brightened into a beauty which 
 other eyes discern not in the highest. He has a just self-con- 
 sciousness, which too often degenerates into pride; yet it is a 
 noble pride, for defense, not for offense; no cold suspicious 
 feeling, but a frank and social one. The Peasant Poet bears 
 himself, we might say, like a King in exile: he is cast among 
 the low, and feels himself equal to the highest; yet he claims 
 no rank, that none may be disputed to him. The forward he 
 can repel, the supercilious he can subdue; pretensions of 
 wealth or ancestry are of no avail with him; there is a fire in 
 that dark eye, under which the " insolence of condescension '' 
 cannot thrive. In his abasement, in his extreme need, he for- 
 gets not for a moment the majesty of Poetry and Manhood, 
 And yet, far as he feels himself above common men, he waur 
 ders not apart from them, but mixes warmly in their interests; 
 nay throws himself into their arms, and, as it were, entreats 
 them to lo^z-e him. It is moving to see how, in his darkest 
 
 20. Arcadian illusion: Arcadia, in the center of the Peloponnesus, has 
 been made by the Poets the ideal home of pastoral simplicity, peace, an^ 
 bappiness, ... - 
 
16 BURN^S. 
 
 despondency, this proud being still seeks relief from friend- 
 ship;; unbosoms himself, often to the unworthy ;\and, amid 
 tears, strains to his glowing heart a heart that knows only the 
 name of friendship. And yet he was "quick to learn;" a man 
 of keen vision, before whom common disguises afforded no 
 concealment. His understanding saw through the hoUowness 
 even of accomplished deceivers; but there was a generous 
 credulity in his heart. And so did our Peasant show himself 
 among us; "a soul like an ^olian harp,"^^ in whose strings the 
 vulgar wind, as it passed through them, changed itself into 
 articulate melody." And this was he for whom the world 
 found no fitter business than quarrelling with smugglers and 
 vintners, computing excise-dues upon tallow, and gauging ale- 
 barrels ! In such toils was that mighty Spirit sorrowfully 
 wasted: and a hundred years may pass on, before another 
 such is given us to waste. 
 
 All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has left, seem to 
 US, as "we hinted above, no more than a poor mutilated frac- 
 tion of what was in him; brief, broken glimpses of a genius 
 that could never show itself complete; that wanted all things 
 for completeness : culture, leisure, true effort, nay even length 
 of life. His poems are, with scarcely any exception, mere oc- 
 casional effusions ; poured forth with little premeditation; ex- 
 pressing, by such means as offered, the passion, opinion, or 
 humor of the hour. Never in one instance was it permitted 
 him to grapple with any subject with the full collection of his 
 strength, to fuse and mold it in the concentrated fire of his 
 genius. To try by the strict rules of Art such imperfect frag- 
 ments, would be at once unprofitable and unfair. Neverthe- 
 less, there is something in these poems, marred and defective 
 as they are, which forbids the most fastidious student of poe- 
 try to pass them by. Some sort of enduring quality they must 
 have : for after fifty years of the wildest vicissitudes in poetic 
 taste, they still continue to be read ; nay, are read more and 
 
 21. ^olian harp: The wind harp ; from iEolus, the god of the winds. 
 Usually an open box with strings stretched across It, whi<?h, placed in 9 
 draught of wind, produces very sweet tones. 
 
BURNS. 17 
 
 more eagerly, more and more extensively ; and this not only 
 by literary virtuosos, and that class upon whom transitory 
 causes operate most strongly, but by all classes, down to the 
 most hard, unlettered and truly natural class, who read little, 
 and especially no poetry, except because they find pleasure in 
 it. The grounds of so singular and wide a popularity, which 
 extends, in a literal sense, from the palace to the hut, and 
 over all regions where the English tongue is spoken, are well 
 worth inquiring into. After every just deduction, it seems to 
 imply some rare excellence in these works. What is that ex- 
 cellence ? 
 
 To answer this question will not lead us far. The excellence 
 of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether in poetry or 
 prose ; but, at the same time, it is plain and easily recognized : 
 hi^Si7iceriti/, his indisputable air of Truth. Here are no 
 fabulous woes or joys ; no hollow fantastic sentimentalities ; no 
 wiredrawn reflnings, either in thought or feeling : the passion 
 that is traced before us has glowed in a living heart ; the 
 opinion he utters has risen in his own understanding, and 
 been a light to his own steps. He does not write from hear- 
 say, but from sight and experience ; it is the scenes that he 
 has lived and labored amidst, that he describes: those scenes, 
 rude and humble as they are, have kindled beautiful emotions 
 in his soul, noble thoughts, and definite resolves ; and he 
 speaks forth what is in him, not from any outward call of 
 vanity or interest, but because his heart is too full to be silent. 
 He speaks it with such melody and modulation as he can ; " in 
 homely rustic jingle ;" but it is his own, and genuine. This 
 is the grand secret for finding readers and retaining them : let 
 him who would move and convince others, be first moved and 
 convinced himself. Horace's rule, Si vis me flere,'^'^ is apjjli- 
 cable in a wider sense than the literal one. To every poet, to 
 every writer, we might say : Be true, if you would be believed. 
 Let a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the 
 thought, the emotion, the actual condition of his own heart ; 
 and other men, so strangely are we all knit together by the tie 
 
 22. " Si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi"— If you wish me to 
 weep, you must mourn first yourself .—^?-s Foetica, 102, 
 
18 BURKS. 
 
 of sympathy, must and will give heed to him. In culture, in 
 extent of view, we may stand above the speaker, or below 
 him ; but in either case, his words, if they are earnest and 
 sincere, will find some response within us ; for in spite of all 
 casual varieties in outward rank or inward, as face answers to 
 face, so does the heart of man to man. 
 
 This may appear a very simple principle, and one which 
 Burns had little merit in discovering. True, the discovery is 
 easy enough : but the practical appliance is not easy ; is in- 
 deed the fundamental difficulty which all poets have to strive 
 with, and which scarcely one in the hundred ever fairly sur- 
 mounts. A head too dull to discriminate the true from the 
 false ; a heart too dull to love the one at all risks, and to hate 
 the other in spite of all temptations, are alike fatal to a writer. 
 With either, or as more commonly happens, with both of these 
 deficiencies combine a love of distinction, a wish to be origi-' 
 nal, which is seldom wanting, and we have Affectation, the 
 bane of literature, as Cant, its elder brother, is of morals. 
 How often does the one and the other front us, in poetry, as 
 in life ! Great poets themselves are not always free of this 
 vice ; nay, it is precisely on a certain sort and degree of great- 
 ness that it is most commonly ingrafted. A strong effort after 
 excellence will sometimes solace itself with a mere shadow of 
 success ; he who has much to unfold, will sometimes unfold 
 it imperfectly. Byron, ^* for instance, was no common man : 
 yet if we examine his poetry with this view, we shall find it 
 far enough from faultless. Generally speaking, we should say 
 that it is not true. He refreshes us, not with the divine foun- 
 tain, but too often with vulgar strong waters, stimulating in- 
 deed to the taste, but soon ending in dislike, or even nausea. 
 Are his Harolds and Giaours, we would ask, real men ; we 
 mean, poetically consistent and conceivable men? Do not 
 
 23. I.ord Byron (1788-1824V. The famous poet, whom Matthew Arnold 
 couples with Wordsworth as " first and pre-eminent in actual performance, 
 a glorious pair, among the English poets of this century." The allusions 
 here are to the poems " Childe Harold." "The Giaour," and "Don Juan." 
 "In these poems," says Prof. Beers, "there is a single figure— the figure of 
 Byron under various masks— and one perv^ading mood, a restless and sar- 
 donic gloom, a weariness of life, a love of solitude, and a melancholy exal- 
 tation in the presence of the wilderness and the sea." 
 
BURNS. 19 
 
 these characters, does not the character of their author, which 
 more or less shines through them all, rather appear a thing 
 put on for the occasion ; no natural or possible mode of being, 
 but something intended to look much grander than nature ? 
 Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, 
 superhuman contempt and moody desperation, with so much 
 scowling, and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous humor, is 
 more like the brawling of a player in some paltry tragedy, 
 which is to last three hours, than the bearing of a man in the 
 business of life, which is to last threescore and ten years. To 
 our minds there is a taint of this sort, something which we 
 should call theatrical, false, affected,^'* in every one of these 
 otherwise so powerful pieces. Perhaps Don Juan, especially 
 the latter parts of it, is the only thing approaching to a sincere 
 work, he ever wrote ; the only work where he showed himself, 
 in any measure, as he was ; and seemed so intent on his sub- 
 ject as, for moments, to forget himself. Yet Byron hated this 
 vice ; we believe, heartily detested it : nay he had declared 
 formal war against it in words. So difficult is it even for the 
 strongest to make this primary attainment, which might seem 
 the simplest of all : to read its own consciousness without 
 mistakes, without errors involuntary or willful ! We recollect 
 no poet of Burns's susceptibility who comes before us from the 
 first, and abides with us to the last, with such a total want of 
 affectation. He is an honest man, and an honest writer. In 
 his successes and his failures, in his greatness and his little- 
 ness, he is ever clear, simple, true, and glitters with no luster 
 but his own. We reckon this to be a great virtue ; to be, in 
 fact, the root of most other virtues, literary as well as moral. 
 Here, however, let us say, it is to the Poetry of Burns that 
 we now allude ; to those writings which he had time to medi- 
 tate, and where no special reason existed to warp his critical 
 feeling, or obstruct his endeavor to fullfil it. Certain of his 
 
 24. Affected : Says Mr. Arnold. " Even of his passionate admirers, how 
 many never got beyond the theatrical Byron, from whom they caught the 
 fashion of deranging their hair, or of knotting their neck-handkerchief, or of 
 leaving their shirt collar unbuttonod; how few profoundly felt his vital in- 
 fluence, the influence of his splendid and imperishable "excellence of sin- 
 cerity ana strengiu." 
 
20 BURKS. 
 
 Letters, and other fractions of prose composition, by no means 
 deserve this praise. Here, doubtless, there is not the same 
 natural truth of style ; but on the contrary, something not 
 only stiff, but strained and twisted ; a certain high-flown in- 
 flated tone ; the stilting emphasis of which contrasts ill with 
 the firmness and rugged simplicity of even his poorest verses. 
 Thus no man, it would appear, is altogether unaffected. Does 
 not Shakspeare himself sometimes premeditate the sheerest 
 bombast ! But even with regard to these Letters of Burns, it 
 is but fair to state that he had two excuses. The first was his 
 comparative deficiency in language. Burns, though for most 
 part he writes with singular force and even gracefulness, is not 
 master of English prose, as he is of Scottish verse ; not master 
 of it, we mean, in proportion to the depth and vehemence of 
 his matter. These Letters strike us as the effort of a man to 
 express something which he has no organ fit for expressing. 
 But a second and weightier excuse is to be found in the pecu- 
 liarity of Burns's social rank. His correspondents are often 
 men whose relation to him he has never accurately ascer- 
 tained ; whom therefore he is either forearming himself 
 against, or else unconsciously flattering, by adopting the style 
 he thinks will please them. At all events, we should remem- 
 ber that these faults, even in his Letters, are not the rule, but 
 the exception. Whenever he writes, as one would ever wish 
 to do, to trusted friends and on real interests, his style be- 
 comes simple, vigorous, expressive, sometimes even beautiful. 
 His letters to Mrs. Dunlop" are uniformly excellent. 
 
 But we return to his Poetry. In addition to its Sincerity, 
 it has another peculiar merit, which indeed is but a mode, or 
 perhaps a means, of the foregoing : this displays itself in his 
 choice of subjects ; or rather in his indifference as to subjects, 
 and the power he has of making all subjects interesting. The 
 ordinary poet, like the ordinary man, is forever seeking in ex- 
 ternal circumstances the help which can be found only in him- 
 
 25. Mrs. Diinlop : His most valued friend and accomplished correspond- 
 ent. Happening upon a copy of the first edition of his poems, she was 
 charmed with the " Cotter's Saturday Night" and immediately sent an ex- 
 press to Burns, fifteen miles away, with a letter of praise and an order for 
 several copies of the poems. 
 
/t^ 
 
 BURKS. 21 
 
 self. In what is familiar and near at hand, he discerns no 
 form or comeliness : home is not poetical but prosaic ; it is in 
 some past, distant, conventional heroic world, that poetry re- 
 sides ; were he there and not here, were he thus and not so, it 
 would be well with him. Hence our innumerable host of rose- 
 colored Novels and iron -mailed Epics, ^^ with their locality not 
 on the Earth, but somewhere nearer to the Moon. Hence our 
 Virgins of the Sun, and our Knights of the Cross, malicious 
 Saracens in turbans, and copper-colored Chiefs in wampum, 
 and so many other truculent figures from the heroic times or 
 the heroic climates, who on all hands swarm in our poetry. 
 Peace be with them ! But yet, as a great moralist proposed 
 preaching to the men of this century, so would we fain preach 
 to the poets, "a sermon on the duty of staying at home." Let 
 them be sure that heroic ages and heroic climates can do little 
 for them. That form of life has attraction for us, less be- 
 cause it is better or nobler than our own, than simply because 
 it is different ; and even this attraction must be of the most 
 transient, sort. For will not our own age, one day be an 
 ancient one ; and have as quaint a costume as the rest; not 
 contrasted with the rest, therefore, but ranked along with 
 them, in respect of quaintness ? Does Homer interest us now, 
 because he wrote of what passed beyond his native Greece, and 
 two centuries before he was born ; or because he wrote w^hat 
 passed in God's world, and in the heart of man, which is the 
 same after thirty centuries ? Let our poets look to this : is 
 their feeling really finer, truer, and their vision deeper than 
 that of other men,— they have nothing to fear, even from the 
 humblest subject ; is it not so,— they have nothing to hope, 
 but an ephemeral favor, even from the highest. 
 V.The poet, we imagine, can never have far to seek for a 
 ^tibject : the elements of his art are in him, and around him 
 on every hand ; for him the Ideal world is not remote from 
 the Actual, but under it and within it: nay, he is a poet, pre- 
 
 20. Iron-mailed Epics, Virgins of the Sun, etc.: The prose and 
 poetical romances of Scott, Byron. Moore, Southey, and other imaginative 
 writers of the period were filled with the romanticism which Carlyle con- 
 demns. The world was searched for sensations. 
 
22 J^UKKS. 
 
 cisely because he can discern it there. Wherever there is a 
 sky above him, and a world around him, the poet is in his 
 place ; for here too is man's existence, with its infinite long- 
 ings and small acquirings ; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed en- 
 deavors ; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and hopes that 
 wander through Eternity ; and all the mystery of brightness 
 and of gloom that it was ever made of, in any age or climate, 
 since man first began to live. Is there not the fifth act of a 
 Tragedy in every death-bed, though it were a peasant's, and a 
 bed of heath ? And are wooings and weddings obsolete, that 
 there can be Comedy no longer ? Or are men suddenly grown 
 wise, that Laughter must no longer shake his sides, but be 
 cheated of his Farce ? Man's life and nature is, as it was, and 
 as it will ever be. But the poet must have an eye to read these 
 things, and a heart to understand them ; or they come and 
 pass away before him in vain. He is a vates^'^'' a seer ; a gift 
 of vision has been given him. Has life no meanings for him, 
 which another cannot equally decipher ; then he is no poet, 
 and Delphi ^^ itself will not make him one. 
 
 In this respect, Burns, though not perhaps absolutely a 
 great poet, better manifests his capability, better proves the 
 truth of his genius, than if he had by his own strength kept 
 the whole Minerva Press ^^ going, to the end of his literary 
 course. He shows himself at least a poet of Nature's own 
 making ; and Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in 
 making poets. We often hear of this and the other external 
 condition being requisite for the existence of a poet. Some- 
 times it is a certain sort of training ; he must have studied 
 certain things, studied for instance "the elder dramatists," and 
 so learned a poetic language ; as if poetry lay in the tongue, 
 not in the heart. At other times we are told he must be bred 
 in a certain rank, and must be on a confidential footing with 
 the higher classes ; because, above all things, he must see the 
 
 27. Vates: The Latin word for poet; literally, a foreteller, soothsayer. 
 
 28. Delphi: The seat of the famous oracle of Apollo, the god of music and 
 poetry, situated at the foot of Mount Parnassus, the home of the Muses. 
 
 29. Minerva Press: A printing establishment famous in London about a 
 century ago for its trashy, ultra-sentimental, '* rose-colored " novels, with 
 absurd plots laid " somewhere near the moon." 
 
BURNS. 23 
 
 world. As to seeing the world, we apprehend this will cause 
 him little difficulty, if he have but eyesight to see it with. 
 Without eyesight, indeed, the task might be hard. The blind 
 or the purblind man "travels from Dan to Beersheba^" and 
 finds it all barren." But happily every poet is born m the 
 world ; and sees it, with or against his will, every day and 
 every hour he lives. The mysterious workmanship of man's 
 heart, the true light and the inscrutable darkness of man's 
 destiny, reveal themselves not only in capital cities and 
 crowded saloons, but in every hut and hamlet where men have 
 their abode. Nay, do not the elements of all human virtues 
 and all human vices ; the passions at once of a Borgia^^ and 
 of a Luther, ^^ lie written, in stronger or fainter lines, in the 
 consciousness of every individual bosom, that has practiced 
 honest self-examination ? Truly, this same world may be seen 
 in MossgieP^ and Tarbolton,^* if we look well, as clearly as it 
 ever came to light in Crockford's,^^ or the Tuileries itself.^® 
 
 But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on the poor 
 aspirant to poetry ; for it is hinted that he should have heen 
 horn two centuries ago ; inasmuch as poetry, about that date, 
 vanished from the earth, and became no longer attainable by 
 men ! Such cobweb speculations have, now and then, over- 
 hung the field of literature ; but they obstruct not the growth 
 of any plant there : the Shakspeare or the Burns, uncon- 
 sciously and merely as he walks onward, silently brushes them 
 away. Is not every genius an impossibility till he appear? 
 
 30. Dan to Beersheba: Dan was the most northern and Beersheba the 
 most southern city of the Holy Land. Hence the meaning, from one end of 
 the kingdom to the other; everywhere. Like this is the English phrase 
 " From John o' Groat's to Land's End." 
 
 31. liorgia: An ItaUan famUy of the fifteenth century, celebrated for its 
 monstrous crimes. 
 
 32. Martin Lutber (1483-1546): The great leader of the German Reforma- 
 tion. His nature was passionate and violent, and his righteous wrath often 
 discharged itself in thunder and lightning against the abuses of Rome. 
 
 .33. Mossgiel: The farm where Burns made his first disastrous experiment 
 in farming, and where he wrote much of his iinest poetry. 
 
 34. Tarbolton: A town of Ayrshire where Burns lived, on the farm of 
 Lochlea, from his seventeenth to his twenty-fourth year. 
 
 35. Crockfoi'd's: A famous gaming club-house m London, so called from 
 the proprietor, opened in 1849. It was for a time the center of fashionable 
 gambling, and numbered the Duke of Wellington among its original members. 
 
 3G. Tuileries: A royal palace in Paris, begun in 1564 by Catharine de' 
 Medici diU^ finished by Liouis XLY, It was burned by the Communists in 1871. 
 
24 BURNS. 
 
 Why do we call him new and original, if we saw where his 
 marble was lying, and what fabric he could rear from it ? It 
 is not the material but the workman that is wanting. It is 
 not the dark place that hinders, but the dim eye. A Scottish 
 peasant's life was the meanest and rudest of all lives, till 
 Burns became a poet in it, and a poet of it ; found it a mail's 
 life, and therefore significant to men. A thousand battle- 
 fields remain unsung ; but the Woimded Hare has not perished 
 without its memorial ; a balm of mercy yet breathes on us 
 from its dumb agonies, because a poet was there. Our Hal- 
 loween had passed and repassed, in rude awe and laughter, 
 since the era of the Druids ;" but no Theocritus,'^ till Burns, 
 discerned in it the materials of a Scottish Idyl : neither was 
 the Holy Fair any Council of Trent ^^ or Roman Jubilee; *" but 
 nevertheless, Superstition and Hypocrisy and Fun having 
 been propitious to him, in this man's hand it became a poem, 
 instinct with satire and genuine comic life. Let but the true 
 poet be given us, we repeat it, place him where and how you 
 will, and true poetry will not be wanting. 
 
 Independently of the essential gift of poetic feeling, as we 
 have now attempted to describe it, a certain rugged sterling 
 worth pervades whatever Burns has written ; a virtue, as of 
 green fields and mountain breezes, dwells in his poetry ; it is 
 redolent of natural life and hardy natural men. There is a 
 decisive strength in him, and yet a sweet native gracefulness : 
 he is tender, he is vehement, yet without constraint or too 
 visible effort ; he melts the heart, or inflames it, with a power 
 which seems habitual and familiar to him. We see that in 
 this man there was the gentleness, the trembling pity of a 
 woman, with the deep earnestness, the force and passionate 
 
 37. Druids: The religious order of the ancient Britons ; they exercised the 
 functions of judge, bard, prophet, and priest. 
 
 38. Theocritus: A Greek poet of Syracuse, flourished about 270 B.C., dis- 
 tinguished as the father of pastoral poetry, especially of that form known as 
 the " Idyl." 
 
 39. Council of Trent: A celebrated council of the Catholic Church, opened 
 in 1545, for the purpose of reconciliation between Protestants and Pope. 
 Under the influence of the Jesuits the Creed of the Church was made more 
 rigid, and the hope of reconciliation removed forever. 
 
 40. Roman Jubilee: A church celebration at Rome, every twenty-fifth 
 year, when extraordinary indulgences are granted to the faithful, 
 
BUKKS. 25 
 
 ardor of a hero. Tears lie in him, and consuming fire ; as 
 lightning lurks in the drops of the summer cloud. He has a 
 resonance in his bosom for every note of human feeling ; the 
 high and the low, the sad, the ludicrous, the joyful, are wel- 
 come in their turns to his "lightly-moved and all-conceiving 
 spirit." And observe with what a fierce prompt force he 
 grasps his subject, be it what it may ! How he fixes, as it 
 were, the full image of the matter in his eye ; full and clear 
 in every lineament ; and catches the real type and essence of 
 it, amid a thousand accidents and superficial circumstances, 
 no one of which misleads him ! Is it of reason ; some truth 
 to be discovered? , No sophistry, no vain surface-logic detains 
 him ; quick, resolute, unerring, he pierces through into tlie 
 marrow of the question ; and speaks his verdict with an em- 
 phasis that cannot be forgotten. Is it of description ; some 
 visual object to be represented ? No poet of any age or nation 
 is more graphic than Burns : the characteristic features dis- 
 close themselves to him at a glance ; three lines from his hand, 
 and we have a likeness. And, in that rough dialect, in that 
 rude, often awkward meter, so clear and definite a likeness ! 
 It seems a draughtsman working with a burnt stick.; and yet 
 the burin of a Retzsch** is not more expressive or exact. 
 
 Of this last excellence, the plainest and most comprehensive 
 of all, being indeed the root and foundation of every sort of 
 talent, poetical or intellectual, we could produce innumerable 
 instances from the writings of Burns. Take these glimpses of 
 a snow-storm from his Winter Night (the italics are ours) ; 
 
 When biting Boreas,^^ feU and doure, 
 
 Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r, 
 
 And Phoebus gies a short-liv'd gloivr 
 Far south the lift, 
 
 Dim darkening thro'' the flaky shower 
 Or whirling drift: 
 
 'Ae night the storm the steeples rock'd, 
 Poor labor sweet in sleep was lock'd, 
 
 41. Moritz Retzscli flTTQ-lSST): A German painter and designer, famous 
 for his etchings illustrating Goethe's " Faust." 
 
 42. Boreas: The north wind; doure, stubborn; Phoebus, Apollo, the sim- 
 god; gies, etc., gives us a short-lived stare; lift, the sky; ae night, one night; 
 burns, etc., streams with snowy wreaths choked up; backed, vomited. 
 
26 BURNS. 
 
 While burns, wi' snawy tvreeths upcholc'd. 
 
 Wild-eddying swirl. 
 Or thro' the mining outlet bock'd 
 
 Down headlong hurl. 
 
 Are there not " descriptive touches" here ? The describer saw 
 this thing ; the essential feature and true likeness of every 
 circumstance in it ; saw, and not with the eye only. "Poor 
 labor locked in sweet sleep ;" the dead stillness of man, un- 
 conscious, vanquished, yet not unprotected, while such strife 
 of the material elements rages, and seems to reign supreme 
 in loneliness : this is of the heart as well as of the eye ! — Look 
 also at his image of a thaw, and prophesied fall of the AuM 
 Brig:*' 
 
 When heavy, dark, continued, a'-day rains 
 Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains; 
 When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil, 
 Or stately Lugar's mossy fountains boil, 
 Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course, 
 Or haimted Garpal** draws his feeble source, 
 Arous'd by blust'ring winds and spotting thowes, 
 In mony a torrent down his snaio-broo roives ; 
 WJiile crashing ice, borne on the roaring sjiate, 
 Stveeps dams and mills and brigs a' to the gate; 
 And from Glenbuck down to the Rattonkey, 
 Auld Ayr is just one lengthen'd tumbling sea; 
 Then down ye'U hurl, Deil nor ye never rise 1 
 And dash the gumlle jaups up to the pouring skies. 
 
 The last line is in itself a Poussin-picture*^ of that Deluge ! 
 The welkin has, as it were, bent down with its weight ; the 
 "gumlie jaups" and the "pouring skies" are mingled to- 
 gether ; it is a world of rain and ruin. — In respect of mere 
 clearness and minute fidelity, the Farmer's commendation of 
 his Atild Mare, in plow or in cart, may vie with Homer's 
 Smithy of the Cyclops, or yoking of Priam's Chariot." Nor 
 
 43. Two bridges cross the Ayr, in the town of Ayr. The erection of the 
 New Brig is celebrated in the poem " The Brigs of Ayr." The Auld Brig is still 
 used by foot-passengers. 
 
 44. Thowes, thaM's; snaw-broo rowes, melted snow rolls; spate, flood; 
 Glenbuck, the source of the river Ayr; Ratton-key, a small landing-place 
 near the town; aumlie jaups, muddy splashes. 
 
 45. Poussin-pictiire: Nicolas Poussin (1.594-166.5) was a celebrated French 
 painter, called the "Raphael of France," and regarded by Ruskin as "the 
 principal master of the classical landscape." 
 
 46. See Homer's Odyssey, Bk. IX., and Iliad, Bk. XXIV. 
 
BURKS. 27 
 
 have we forgotten stout Burn-tlie-wind and his brawny cus- 
 tomers, inspired by Scotch Brink : but it is needless to multi 
 ply examples. One other trait of a much finer sort we select 
 from multitudes of such among his Sonys. It gives, in a single 
 line, to the saddest feeling the saddest environment and local 
 habitation : 
 
 Ttie pale Moon is setting beyond the ivhite wave. 
 And Time is setting toV me, O ; 
 Farewell, false friends ! false lover, farewell ! 
 I'll nae mair trouble them nor thee, O. 
 
 This clearness of sight^we have_called the foundation of all 
 talent; for in fact, unless we see our object, how shall we 
 know how to place or prize it, in our understanding, our im- 
 agination, our affections ? Yet it is not in itself, perhaps, a 
 very high excellence; but capable of being united indifferently 
 with the strongest, or with ordinary power. Homer surpasses 
 all men in this quality : but strangely enough, at no great dis- 
 tance below him are Richardson^'' and Defoe.** It belongs, in 
 truth, to what is called a lively mind ; and gives no sure indi- 
 cation of the higher endowments that may exist along with it. 
 In all the three cases we have mentioned, it is combined with 
 great garrulity; their descriptions are detailed, ample and lov- 
 ingly exact; Homer's fire bursts through, from time to time, 
 as if by accident ; but Defoe and Richardson have no fire. 
 Burns, again, is not more distinguished by the clearness than 
 by the impetuous force of his conceptions. Of the strength, 
 the piercing emphasis with which he thought, his emphasis of 
 expression may give a humble but the readiest proof. Who 
 ever uttered sharper sayings than his ; words more memorable, 
 now by their burning vehemence, now by their cool vigor and 
 laconic pith ? A single phrase depicts a whole subject, a whole 
 scene. We hear of " a gentleman that derived his patent of 
 nobility direct from Almighty God." Our Scottish forefathers 
 in the battle-field struggled forward '■'■ red-wat-sliod i''* in this 
 
 47. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761): The first great English novelist, au- 
 thor of ■' Pamela," " Clarissa Harlowe," and " Sir Charles Grandisou." 
 
 48. Daniel Defoe (1661-1731): The celebrated author of " Robinson Cru- 
 soe," " History of the London Plague," aud some two hundred other works. 
 
28 BURNS. 
 
 one word, a full vision of horror and carnage, perhaps too 
 frightfully accurate for Art ! 
 
 In fact, one of the leading features in the mind of Burns is 
 this vigor of his strictly intellectual perceptions. A resolute 
 force is ever visible in his judgments, and in his feelings and 
 volitions. Professor Stewart *^ says of him, with some sur- 
 prise : "All the faculties of Burns's mind were, as far as I could 
 judge, equally vigorous; and his predilection for poetry was 
 rather the result of his own enthusiastic and impassioned 
 temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted to that species 
 of composition. From his conversation I should have pro- 
 nounced him to be fitted to excel in whatever walk of ambi- 
 tion he had chosen to exert his abilities." But this, if we 
 mistake not, is at all times the very essence of a truly poetical 
 endowment. ' Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats," 
 ■where the whole consists in a weak-eyed maudlin sensibility, 
 and a certain vague random tunefulness of nature, is no sepa- 
 rate faculty, no organ which can be superadded to the rest, or 
 disjoined from them; but rather the result of their general 
 harmony and completion. The feelings, the gifts that exist in 
 the Poet are those that exist, with more or less development, 
 in every human soul : the imagination, which shudders at the 
 Hell of Dante, ^^ is the same faculty, weaker in degree, 
 w^hich called that picture into being. How does the Poet 
 speak to men, with power, but by being still more a man than 
 they ? Shakspeare, it has been well observed, in the planning 
 and completing of his tragedies, has shown an Understanding, 
 were it nothing more, which might have governed states, or 
 
 49. Dugald Stewart (1753-182S): The eminent Professor of Moral Philos- 
 ophy in the University of Edinburgh. 
 
 50. Jolin Keats (1795-1821): Author of "Hyperion," "Lamia," and 
 " Eve of St. Agnes." This unappreciative criticism suggests Carlyle's char- 
 acterization of Shelley as " a kind of ghastly object, colorless, pallid, without 
 health, or warmth, or vigor." For Carlyle there could be no beauty with- 
 out force. 
 
 51. Hell of Dante: Dante's great poem, the " Divina Commedia" (Divine 
 Comedy), is divided into three parts, " Inferno " (Hell), '' Purgatorio" (Purga- 
 tory), and 'Paradiso" (Paradise). The poet depicts a vision, in which he is 
 conducted by Virgil thi'ough the ten circles of Hell, where he witnesses " all 
 the woe of all the universe;" then thi'ough Purgatory, and then, by Beatrice, 
 through Paradise. 
 
BURN'S. 29 
 
 indited a N'ovum Organum. ^"^ What Burns's force of under- 
 standing may have been, we have less means of judging: it 
 had to dwell among the humblest objects ; never saw Philoso- 
 phy; never rose, except by natural effort and for short in- 
 tervals, into the region of great ideas. Nevertheless, sufficient 
 indication, if no proof sufficient, remains for us in his works: 
 we discern the brawny movements of a gigantic though untu- 
 tored strength ; and can understand how, in conversation, his 
 quick sure 'insight into men and things may, as much as 
 aught else about him, have amazed the best thinkers of his 
 time and country. 
 
 But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of Burns is fine 
 as well as strong. The more delicate relations of things could 
 not well have escaped his eye, for they were intimately pres- 
 ent to his heart. The logic of the senate and the forum is in- 
 dispensable, but not all-sufficient ; nay, perhaps the highest 
 Truth is that which will the most certainly elude it. For this 
 logic works by words, and "the highest," it has been said, 
 " cannot be expressed in words." We are not without tokens 
 of an openness for this higher truth also, of a keen though un- 
 cultivated sense for it, having existed in Burns. Mr. Stewart, 
 it will be remembered, "wonders," in the passage above 
 quoted, that Burns had formed some distinct conception of the 
 " doctrine of association." We rather think that far subtler 
 things than the doctrine of association had from of old been 
 familiar to him. Here for instance : 
 
 " We know nothing," thus writes he, "or next to nothing, 
 of the structure of our souls, so we cannot account for those 
 seeming caprices in them, that one should be particularly 
 pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which, on minds 
 of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I have 
 some favorite flowers in spring, among which are the moun- 
 tain-daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the wild-brier rose, the 
 budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I Tiew and hang 
 over with particular delight. I never hear the loud solitary 
 
 52. Novum Organum: Bacon's g:reat philosophical work; the "new 
 method," by which human knowledge should be increased. 
 
30 BUKTS-S. 
 
 whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing 
 cadence of a troop of gray plover in an autumnal morning, 
 without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of de- 
 votion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this 
 be owing ? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the 
 ^olian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing ac- 
 cident ; or do these workings argue something within us above 
 the trodden clod ? I own myself partial to such proofs of those 
 awful and important realities : a God that made all things, 
 man's immaterial and immortal nature, and a world of weal 
 or woe beyond death aiid the grave." 
 
 Force and fineness of understanding are often spoken of as 
 something different from general force and fineness of nature, 
 as something partly independent of them. The necessities of 
 language so require it ; but in truth these qualities are not dis- 
 tinct and independent : except in special cases, and from spe- 
 cial causes, they ever go together. A man of strong under- 
 standing is generally a man of strong character ; neither is 
 delicacy in the one kind often divided from delicacy in the 
 other, i No one, at all events, is ignorant that in the Poetry of 
 Burns keenness of insight keeps pace with keenness of feeling ; 
 that his light is not more pervading than his warmth. He is 
 a man of the most impassioned temper ; with passions not 
 strong only, but noble, and of the sort in which great virtues 
 and great poems take their rise. It is reverence, it is love to- 
 wards all Nature that inspires him, that opens his eyes to its 
 beauty, and makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise. 
 There is a true old saying, that*." Love furthers knowledge:" 
 but above all, it is the living essence of that knowledge which 
 makes poets ; the first principle of its existence, increase, ac- 
 tivity. Of Burns's fervid affection, his generous all-embracing 
 Love, we ha.ve spoken already, as of the grand distinction of 
 his nature, seen equally in word and deed, in his Life and in 
 his Writings. It were easy to multiply examples. B Not man 
 only, but all that environs man in the material and moral uni- 
 verse, is lovely in his sight ': ' ' the hoary hav»'thorn, " the ' ' troop 
 of gray plover," the "solitary curlew," all are dear to him ; all 
 live in this. Earth along with him, and to all he is knit as in 
 
BURKS. 31 
 
 mysterious brotherhood. How touching is it, for instance, that, 
 amidst the gloom" of personal misery, brooding over the wintry 
 desolation without him and within him, he thinks of the 
 *' ourie cattle" and " silly sheep," and their sufferings in the 
 pitiless storm ! 
 
 I thought me on the ourie cattle, ^^ 
 Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 
 
 O' wintiy war, 
 Or tho' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle. 
 
 Beneath a scar. 
 Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing. 
 That in the merry months o' spring 
 Delighted me to hear thee sing, 
 
 What comes o' thee? 
 Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, 
 And close thy e'e? 
 
 The tenant of the mean hut, with its ' ' ragged roof and 
 chinky wall," has a heart to pity even these ! This is worth 
 several homilies on Mercy ; for it is the voice of Mercy herself. 
 Burns, indeed, lives in sympathy ; his soul rushes forth into 
 all realms of being ; nothing that has existence can be indiffer- 
 ent to him. The very Devil he cannot hate with right ortho- 
 doxy : 
 
 But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben ; 
 
 O, wad^^* ye tak a thought and men' 1 
 
 Ye aiblins might,— I dinna ken, — 
 Still hae a stake ; 
 
 I'm wae to think upo' yon den. 
 
 Even for your sake ! 
 
 " ^e is the father of curses and lies," said Dr. Slop ; " and is 
 cursed and damned already." — "I am sorry for it," quoth my 
 uncle Toby ! ^* — a Poet without Love were a physical and meta- 
 physical impossibility. 
 
 But has it not been said, in contradiction to this principle, 
 that " Indignation makes verses"?^® It had been so said, and 
 
 53. Ourie cattle: Shivering cattle ; ivha bide, etc., who endvu-e this race; 
 deep-lairing, sprattle, deep-wading, struggle; scar, barren bank, or mountain 
 side; ilk happing, each hopping; chittering, trembling with cold. 
 
 54. Wad: would; men\ mend; aiblins, perhaps; dinna ken, do not know; 
 ivae, sorrowful. 
 
 55. Dr. Slop and Uncle Toby: Characters in Sterne's " Tristram Shandy." 
 
 56. Indignation maizes verses: From Juvenal; "Faqit Indigna^iQ 
 versus." 
 
32 BURNS. 
 
 is true enough : but the contradiction is apparent, not real. 
 Tlie Indignation which makes verses is, properly speaking, an 
 inverted Love ; the love of some right, some worth, some good- 
 ness, belonging to ourselves or others, which has been injured, 
 and which this tempestuous feeling issues forth to defend and 
 avenge. No selfish fury of heart, existing there as a primary 
 feeling, and without its opposite, ever produced much Poetry : 
 otherwise, we suppose, the Tiger were the most musical of all 
 our choristers. Johnson" said, he loved a good hater ; by 
 which he must have meant, not so much one that hated vio- 
 lently, as one that hated wisely ; hated baseness from love of 
 nobleness. However, in spite of Johnson's paradox, tolerable 
 enough for once in speech, but which need not have been so 
 often adopted in print since then, we rather believe that good 
 men deal sparingly in hatred, either wise or unwise : nay that 
 a "good "hater is still a desideratum in this world. The 
 Devil, at least, who passes for the chief and best of that .class, 
 is said to be nowise an amiable character. 
 
 Of the verses which Indignation makes, Burns has also given 
 us specimens : and among the best that were ever given. Who 
 will forget his '"'' Dweller in yon Dungeon dark;'''' a piece that 
 might have been chanted by the Furies of ^schylus ? ^^ The 
 secrets of the infernal Pit are laid bare ; a boundless baleful 
 " darkness visible ;" ^^ and streaks of hell-fire quivering madly 
 in its black haggard bosom ! 
 
 Dweller in yon Dungeon dark, 
 Hangman of Creation, mark ! 
 Who in widow's weeds appears, 
 Laden with imhonored years, 
 Noosing with care a bursting purse, 
 Baited with many a deadly curse ! 
 
 Why should we speak of Scots wha liae wV Wallace hied ; 
 since all know of it, from the king to the meanest of his sub- 
 jects ? This dithyrambic was composed on horseback ; in rid- 
 
 57. Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784): Author of the famous "Diction- 
 ary." the " Rambler." and " Rasselas." His words were, " Sir, I like a good 
 hater." See BosweU's " Life of Johnson." 
 
 58. Furies of ^scliylus : The Furies were the goddesses of vengeance. 
 The allusion is to the chorus of Furies in the " Eumenides," one of the trage- 
 dies of ^schylus, the greatest Greek dramatic poet. 
 
 59. Milton's Paradise Lost, Bk, I. 6g. 
 
BURNS. 33 
 
 ing in the middle of tempests, over the wildest Galloway moor, 
 in company with a Mr. Syme, who, observing the poet's looks, 
 forbore to speak, — judiciously enough, for a man composing 
 Bruce^s Address might be unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless this 
 stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul 
 of Burns : but to the external ear, it should be sung with the 
 throat of the whirlwind. So long as there is warm blood in the 
 heart of Scotchman or man, it will move in fierce thrills under 
 this war-ode ; the best, we believe, that was ever written by 
 any pen. 
 
 Another wild stormf ul Song, that dwells in our ear and mind 
 with a strange tenacity, is Macpher soil's Farewell.^^ Perhaps 
 there is something in the tradition itself that co-operates. For 
 was not this grim Celt, this shaggy Northland Cacus," that 
 "lived a life of sturt^^ and strife, and died by treacherie," — 
 was not he too one of the Nimrods" and Napoleons of the 
 earth, in the arena of his own remote misty glens, for want of 
 a clearer and wider one ? Nay, was there not a touch of grace 
 given him ? A fiber of love and softness, of poetry itself, must 
 have lived in his savage heart : for he composed that air the 
 night before his execution ; on the wings of that poor melody 
 his better soul would soar away above oblivion, pain and all 
 the ignominy and despair, which, like an avalanche, was hurl- 
 ing him to the abyss ! Here, also, as at Thebes," and in Pe- 
 lops' line,^^ was -material Fate^^ matched against man's Free- 
 
 60. Macpherson's Farewell : Macpherson was a Highland freebooter, of 
 ereat strength and musical taste. While lying in prison he composed his 
 ''Farewell," words and air, and when brought to the gallows played it, and 
 then broke his violin across his knee. Burns's chorus, "Sae rantingjy, sae 
 wantonly, etc.," is an adaptation of Macpherson's words. 
 
 61 Cacn-s : A mighty robber giant who lived in a cave on Mount Aventine 
 in Italy. He stole some oxen from Hercules and dragged them into his cave 
 by their tails, to deceive the hero by the tracks as to the direction taken; but, 
 being discovered by the bellowing of the cattle, he was strangled by the en- 
 raged hero. 
 
 62. Stmt: Disturbance, or molestation 
 
 63. Niinrod : The mighty hunter. See Qen. x. 8-11, and 1 Chr. i. 10. 
 
 64. Thebes : The capital of Boeotia, the scene of some of the great Greek 
 tragedies, the " Seven against Thebes" of ^schylus. the " CEdipusTyrannus" 
 of Sophocles, and others. 
 
 6.5. Felops' line : An allusion to the tragedies of ^schyluson the subject 
 of the murder of Agamemnon, a descendant of Pelops, King of Pisa in 
 EUs, who gave his name to Peloponnesus. Cotnpare Milton's lines in '* IlPen- 
 seroso" on " gorgeous Tragedy," " presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line." 
 
 66. Material Fate : The fundamental idea in the Greek tragedies is 
 fate, destiny, or Nemesis. 
 
34 BUEN^S. 
 
 will ; matched in bitterest though obscure duel ; and the ethe- 
 real soul sank not, even in its blindness, without a cry which 
 has survived it. But who, except Burns, could have given 
 words to such a soul ; words that we never listen to without 
 a strange half -barbarous, half-poetic fellow-feeling ? 
 
 Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, 
 
 Sae dauntingly gaed he ;' 
 He play''d a spring, and danced it round, 
 
 Below the gallows-tree. 
 
 Under a lighter disguise, the same principle of Love, which 
 we have recognized as the great characteristic of Burns, and of 
 all true poets; occasionally manifests itself in the shape of Hu- 
 mor. Everywhere, indeed, in his sunny moods, a full buoyant 
 flood of mirth rolls through the mind of Burns ; he rises t6 the 
 high, and stoops to the low, and is brother and playmate to all 
 Nature. We speak not of his bold and often irresistible faculty 
 of caricature ; for this is Drollery rather than Humor : but a 
 much tenderer sportfulness dwells in him ; and comes forth 
 here and there, in evanescent and beautiful touches ; as in his 
 Address to the Mouse, or the Farmer's Ma7'e, or in his Elegy 
 on poor Mailie, which last may be reckoned his happiest ef- 
 fort of this kind. In these pieces there are traits of a Humor 
 as fine as that of Sterne f yet altogether different, original, 
 peculiar, the Humor of Burns. 
 
 Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many other kin- 
 dred qualities of Burns's Poetry, much more might be said ; but 
 now, with these poor outlines of a sketch, we must prepare to 
 quit this part of our subject. To speak of his individual Writ- 
 ings, adequately and with any detail, would lead us far beyond 
 our limits. As already hinted, we can look on but few of these 
 pieces as, in strict critical language, deserving the name of 
 Poems : they are rhymed eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed 
 sense ; yet seldom essentially melodious, aerial, poetical. Tarn 
 o' Shanter itself, which enjoys so high a favor, does not appear 
 
 67. I^aurence Sterne (1713-1708): Author of the famotis novels " Tris- 
 tram Shandy" and " The Sentimental Journey " Carlyle elsewhere speaks 
 of him as " our best specimen of humor, with all his faults ; our finest, if not 
 pur strongest." 
 
BURN'S. 35 
 
 to us at all decisivel}' to come under this last category. It is not 
 so much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric ; the heart and 
 body of the story still lies hard and dead. He has not gone 
 back, much less carried us back, into that dark, earnest, won- 
 dering age, when the tradition was believed, and when it took 
 its rise ; he does not attempt, by any new-modeling of his super- 
 natural ware, to strike anew that deep mysterious chord of hu- 
 man nature, which once responded to such things ; and which 
 lives in us too, and will forever live, though silent now, or vi- 
 brating with far other notes, and to far different issues. Our 
 German readers will understand us, when we say, that he is not 
 the Tieck^^ but the Musaus^' of this tale. Externally it is all 
 green and living ; yet look closer, it is no firm growth, but 
 only ivy on a rock. The piece does not properly cohere : the 
 strange chasm which yawns in our incredulous imaginations 
 between the Ayr public-house and the gate of Tophet,^" is no- 
 where bridged over, nay the idea of such a bridge is laughed 
 at ; and thus the Tragedy of the adventure becomes a mere 
 drunken phantasmagoria, or many-colored spectrum painted 
 on ale-vapors, and the Farce alone has any reality. We do 
 not say that Burns should have made much more of this tradi- 
 tion ; we rather think that, for strictly poetical purposes, not 
 much was to be made of it. Neither are we blind to the deep, 
 varied, genial power displayed in what he has actually ac- 
 complished ; but we find far more " Shakspearean" qualities, 
 as these of Tarn o' Shanter have been fondly named, in many 
 of his other pieces ; nay we incline to believe that this latter 
 might have been written, all but quite as well, by a man who, 
 in place of genius, had only possessed talent. 
 
 Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most strictly poet- 
 ical of all his "poems" is one which does not appear in Cur- 
 rie's Edition ; but has been often printed before and since, un- 
 
 68. Liidwig Tieck il7?3-18C3): A German poet and novelist, especially 
 famous foi' his fantastic tales, and his translation of Shakspeare. 
 
 69 Karl August Musaus (1735-1787 n A German writer of humorous and 
 satirical v.orks, author of "Popular Legends of Germany" and 'Friend 
 Hein's Apparitions, in Holbein's Manner." 
 
 70. Topliet : Originally a place near Jerusalem in the valley of Gehenna, 
 where fire was kept perpetually burning to destroy the dead bodies, bones, 
 and filth deposited there ; hence the derived meaning, hell. 
 
36 BURKS. 
 
 der the humble title of The Jolly Beggars. The subject truly 
 is among the lowest in I^ature ; but it only the more shows 
 our Poet's gift in raising it into the domain of Art. To our 
 minds, this piece seems thoroughly compacted ; melted to- 
 gether, refined ; and poured forth in one flood of true liquid 
 harmony. It is light, airy, soft of movement ; yet sharp and 
 precise in its details ; every face is a portrait : that rawile 
 oarlin^''^ that wee Apollo, that 8on of Mars, are Scottish, yet 
 ideal ; the scene is at once a dream, and the very Rag- 
 castle of "Poosie Nansie.'' Farther, it seems in a considera- 
 ble degree complete, a real self-supporting Whole, which is the 
 highest merit in a poem. The blanket of the Night is drawn 
 asunder for a moment ; in full, ruddy, flaming light, these 
 rough tatterdemalions are seen in their boisterous revel ; for 
 the strong pulse of Life vindicates its right to gladness even 
 here ; and when the curtain closes, we prolong the action, 
 without effort ; the next day as the last, our Caird and our 
 Balladmonger ave singing and soldiering; their ''brats and 
 callets " are hawking, begging, cheating ; and some other 
 night, in new combinations, they will wring from Fate another 
 hour of wassail and good cheer. Apart from the universal 
 sympathy with man which this again bespeaks in Burns, a gen- 
 uine inspiration and no inconsiderable technical talent are 
 manifested here. There is the fidelity, humor, warm life and 
 accurate painting and grouping of some Teniers,'^ for whom 
 hostlers and carousing peasants are not without significance. 
 It would be strange, doubtless, to call this the best of Burns's 
 writings : we mean to say only, that it seems to us the most 
 perfect of its kind, as a piece of poetical composition, stric^tly 
 so called. In the Beggars'" Opera,''^ in the Beggars'' Bush,''* 
 as other critics have already remarked, there is nothing which, 
 
 71. Raucle carlin : A fearless old woman. The scene of the poem is laid 
 at the ale-house of Poosie-Nansie. 
 
 72. David Teniers (158^-1649) : A famous Flemish painter. His subjects 
 were mainly from tavern scenes and low life. His son was a still greater 
 painter. 
 
 73. Beggars' Opera: The first English ballad opera, written by John 
 Gay, and first acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, in 1727. 
 
 74. Beggars' iiush : A comedy by Francis Beaimiont, written in 1661. 
 
L 
 
 BURNS. 
 
 in real poetic vigor, equals this Cantata;''^ nothing, as we 
 think, which comes within many degrees of it. 
 
 But by far the most finished, complete and truly inspired 
 pieces of Burns are, without dispute, to be found among his 
 Songs. It is here that, although through a small aperture, his 
 light shines with least obstruction ; in its. highest beauty and 
 pure sunny clearness. The reason may be, that Song is a brief 
 simple species of composition ; and requires nothing so much 
 for its perfection as genuine poetic feeling, genuine music of 
 heart. Yet the Song has its rules equally with the Tragedy ; 
 rules which in most cases are poorly fulfilled, in many cases are 
 not so much as felt. We might write a long essay on the Songs 
 of Burns ; which we reckon by far the best that Britain has yet 
 produced: for indeed, since the era of Queen Elizabeth, we know 
 not that, by any other hand, aught truly worth attention has 
 been accomplished in this department.i True, we have songs 
 enough " by persons of quality;" we have tawdry, hollow, wine- 
 bred madrigals ; many a rhymed speech ' ' in the flowing and 
 watery vein of Osorius the Portugal Bishop," " rich in sonorous 
 words, and, for moral, dashed perhaps with some tint of a sen- 
 timental sensuality ; all which many persons cease not from en- 
 deavoring to sing ; though for most part, we fear, the music is 
 but from the throat outwards, or at best from some region far 
 enough short of the Soul; not in which, but in a certain inane 
 Limbo" *bf the Fancy, or even in some vaporous debatable- 
 land on the outskirts of the Nervous System, most of such 
 madrigals and rhymed speeches seem to have originated. 
 
 With the Songs of Burns we must not name these things. 
 Independently of the clear, manly, heartfelt sentiment that ever 
 
 75. Cantata : A musical composition composed of solos and choruses, 
 dramatically arranged. 
 
 76 Osorius: A learned Portuguese bishop, called the "Cicero of Portu- 
 gal," for the purity of his Latin style. Among his famous works is an " Ad- 
 dress to Queen Elizabeth, on the True Faith." Bacon said, " his vein was 
 weak and waterish." 
 
 77. Limbo : According to mediaeval theology, a place on the confines of 
 Paradise, for those who cannot be admitted into Paradise, either because they 
 have never heard the gospel or have never been baptized. Milton (Paradise 
 Lost, Bk. III. 448) makes it the "Fools' Paradise," a place for idiots, mad- 
 men, and others not responsible for their sins. 
 
38 BURN'S. 
 
 pervades his poetry, his Songs are honest in another point of 
 view : in form, as well as in spirit. They do not affect to be 
 set to music, but they actually and in themselves are music ; 
 they have received their life, and fashioned themselves to- 
 gether, in the medium of Harmony, as Venus rose from the 
 bosom of the sea.'^ The story, the feeling, is not detailed, but 
 suggested ; not said, or spouted, in rhetorical completeness 
 and coherence ; but sung, in fitful gushes, in glowing hints, in 
 fantastic breaks, in ivarhlings not of the voice only, but of the 
 whole mind. We consider this to be the essence of a song ; 
 and that no songs since the little careless catches, and as it 
 were drops of song, which Shakspeare has here and there 
 sprinkled over his Plaj^s, fulfill this condition in nearly the 
 same degree as most of Burns's do. Such grace and truth of 
 external movement, too, presupposes in general a correspond- 
 ing force and truth of sentiment and inward meaning. The 
 Songs of Burns are not more perfect in the former quality than 
 in the latter. With what tenderness he sings, yet with what 
 vehemence and entireness ! There is a piercing wail in his 
 sorrow, the purest rapture in his joy ; he burns with the stern- 
 est ire, or laughs with the loudest or sliest mirth ; and yet he 
 is sweet and soft, " sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, 
 and soft as their parting tear." If/we farther take into ac- 
 count the immense variety of his" subjects ; how, from the 
 loud flowing revel in Willie hrew^d a Peck o' Maut, to the still, 
 rapt enthusiasm of sadness for Ma7'y in Heaven; from the 
 glad kind greeting of Aidd Lang syne, or the comic archness 
 of Duncan Gray, to the fire-eyed fury of Scots wha hae wV 
 Wallace hied, he has found a tone and words for every mood of 
 man's heart, — it will seem a small praise if we rank him as the 
 first of all our Song-writers ; for we know not where to find one 
 worthy of being second to him. 
 
 It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns's chief influence 
 as an author will ultimately be found to depend : nor, if our 
 Fletcher's aphorism" is true, shall we account this a small 
 
 78. In Greek mytholoery, Venus (Aphrodite) is represented as having sprung 
 from the foam of the sea 
 
 79. Fletcher's aphorism: Andrew Fletcher, a Scottish orator, in a letter 
 
BURNS. 39 
 
 influence. "Let me make the songs of a people," said he, 
 "and you shall make its laws." Surely, if ever any Poet 
 might have equaled himself with Legislators on this ground, 
 it was Burns. His Songs are already part of the mother- 
 tongue, not of Scotland only but of Britain, and of the millions 
 that in all ends of the earth speak a British language. In hut 
 and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in many-colored Joy and 
 woe of existence, the name, the voice of that joy and that woe, 
 is the name and voice which Burns has given them. Strictly 
 speaking, perhaps no British man has so deeply affected the 
 thoughts and feelings of so many men, as this solitary and 
 altogether private individual, with means apparently the 
 humblest. 
 
 In another point of view, moreover, we incline to think that 
 Burns's influence may have been considerable : we mean, as 
 exerted specially on the Literature of his country, at least on 
 the Literature of Scotland, Among the great changes which 
 British, particularly Scottish literature, has undergone since 
 that period, one of the greatest will be found to consist in its 
 remarkable increase of nationality. Even the English writers, 
 most popular in Burns's time, were little distinguished for 
 their literary patriotism, in this its best sense. A certain at- 
 tenuated cosmopolitanism had, in good measure, taken place 
 of the old insular home-feeling ; literature was, as it were, 
 without any local environment ; was not nourished by the af- 
 fections which spring from a native soil. Our Grays and 
 Glovers'*" seemed to write almost as if in vacuo ; ^' the thing 
 written bears no mark of place ; it is not written so much for 
 Englishmen, as for men ; or rather, which is the inevitable 
 result of this, for certain Generalizations which philosophy 
 termed men. Goldsmith®^ is an exception : not so Johnson ; 
 
 to the Marquis of Montrose. " I knew a very wise man that believed that, if 
 a man were permitted to make all the ballads, be need not care who should 
 make the laws of a nation." 
 
 80. Grays and Glovers : Thomas Gray (1716-1771), author of the " Ele^ 
 written in a Country Churchyard." Richard Glover (1712-178.5), author of 
 '• Leonidas." Both poets were distinguished for classical scholarship. 
 
 X 81. In vacuo : In empty space. 
 
 *-5i.82. Oliver Gold.smitli (172S-1774): Goldsmith, in his "Traveller" and 
 " Deserted Village,''' was one of the first to break away from the classical af- 
 fectation of Pope's school, and introduce nature and humanity into poetry ^v, 
 
40 BURNS. 
 
 the scene of his Rambler ^^ is little more English than that of 
 his Rasselas. 
 
 But if such was, in some degree, the case with England, it 
 was, in the highest degree, the case with Scotland. In fact, 
 our Scottish literature had, at that period, a very singular 
 aspect ; unexampled, so far as we know, except perhaps at 
 Geneva, where the same state of matters appears still to con- 
 tinue. For a long period after Scotland became British, we 
 had no literature : at the date when Addison and Steele^* were 
 writing their Spectators, our good Thomas Boston^* was writ- 
 ing, with the noblest intent, but alike in defiance of grammar 
 and philosophy, his Fourfold State of Man. Then came the 
 schisms in our National Church, and the fiercer schisms in our 
 Body Politic : Theologic ink, and Jacobite blood, ^^ with gall 
 enough in both cases, seemed to have blotted out the intellect 
 of the country : however, it was only obscured, not obliterated^ 
 Lord Kames" made nearly the first attempt at writing Eng- 
 lish ; and ere long, Hume,^^ Kobertson,^^ Smith, ^" and a whole 
 host of followers, attracted hither the eyes of all Europe. 
 And yet in this brilliantjesuscitation of our "fervid genius," 
 there was nothing truly Scottish, nothing indigenous ; except, 
 perhaps, the natural impetuosity of intellect, which we some- 
 times claim, and are sometimes upbraided with, as a charac- 
 teristic of our nation. It is curious to remark that Scotland, 
 so full of writers, had no Scottish culture, nor indeed any 
 
 83. Ivanibler : A series of periodical essays in the form of Addison's 
 "Spectator." "Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia" is a prose romance; the 
 thought is English, but the scenery is oriental. 
 
 84. Joseph Addison (1672-1719), Ricliard Steele (1671-1729): This cele- 
 brated literary partnership began in 1709 with the " Tatler," issued three 
 times a week, which was foJlow^ed in 1711 by the " Spectator," issued daily. 
 
 85 Thomas Boston (lti76-1732): A Scottish Calvinistic divine, published 
 his " Human Nature in its Fourfold State" in 1720. 
 
 86. Jacobite blood : The adherents of the dethroned James II. and his 
 descendants were called Jacobites; Lat. Jacobus, James. They were power- 
 ful in Scotland, and twice rose in unsuccessful revolt. 
 
 87. Liord Kames : Henry Home (1696-1782), a Scottish judge. His chief 
 work, " Elements of Criticism," received the praise of Dr. Johnson, who 
 hated Scotchmen on principle. 
 
 88. David Hume (1711-1776): Author of the celebrated "History of Eng- 
 land " and of important philosophical essays. 
 
 89. William Robertson (1721-1793 : An eminent historian, author of the 
 " History of Scotland," and the " History of the Emperor Charles V." 
 
 90. Adam Smith (1723-1790): Philosopher and political economist, author 
 of "Theory of Moral Sentiments" and "The Wealth of Nations." Some- 
 times called the " father of political economy." 
 
BURKS. 
 
 41 
 
 Enc^lish ; our culture was almost exclusively French. It was 
 by "studying Racine- and Voltaire/^ Batteux" and Boileau,^* 
 that Karnes had trained himself to be a critic and philosopher ; 
 it was the light of Montesquieu^^ and Mably^« that guided 
 Robertson in his political speculations ; Quesnay's" lamp that 
 kindled the lamp of Adam Smith. Hume was too rich a man 
 to borrow ; and perhaps he reacted on the French more than 
 he was acted on by them : but neither had he aught to do 
 with Scotland ; Edinburgh, equally with La Fleche,«« was but 
 the lodging and laboratory, in which he not so much morally 
 lived, as metaphysically investigated. Never, perhaps, was 
 there a class of writers so clear and well ordered, yet so totally 
 destitute, to all appearance, of any patriotic affection, nay of 
 any human affection whatever. H The French wits of the period 
 were as unpatriotic : but their general deficiency m moral 
 principles, not to say their avowed sensuality and unbelief m 
 all virtue, strictly so called, render this accountable enough.] f 
 We hope, there is a patriotism founded on something better 
 than prejudice ; that our country may be dear to us, without 
 injury to our philosophy ; that in loving and justly prizing all 
 other lands, we may prize justly, and yet love before all others 
 our own stern Motherland, and the venerable Structure of 
 social and moral Life, which Mind has through long ages been 
 building up for us there. Surely there is nourishment for 
 
 Q1 T«.!in -Racine (1639-1699): A French dramatic poet, whom Hallam 
 thought to b^'next to Shakspeare among all the modems," and -second 
 
 P 9^ NicoVarBoUeau (1636-1711): A French Poet and satins and highest 
 
 states of America^" ,i694-l774V A French physician and political 
 
 economS%\Tf e^^onenYoHht doc^ine of L«..fJ«n-e (Let things take 
 ^^m irF?^che : A town on the Loire, where Hu ne lived whUe writing his 
 " Treatise on Human Nature." 
 
42 ' ^ ' BURKS. 
 
 the better part of man's heart in all this : surely the roots, 
 that have fixed themselves in the very core of man's being, 
 may be so cultivated as to grow up not into briers, but into 
 roses, in the field of his life ! Our Scottish sages have no 
 such propensities: the field of their life shows neither briers 
 nor roses; but only a flat, continuous thrashing-floor for 
 Logic, whereon all questions, from the "Doctrine of Rent" to 
 the "Natural History of Religion," are thrashed and sifted 
 with the same mechanical impartiality ! 
 >s With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our literature, it can- 
 ' not be denied that much of this evil is past, or rapidly passing 
 away : our chief literary men, whatever other faults they may 
 have, no longer Hve among us like a French Colony, or some 
 knot'of Propaganda'' Missionaries ; but like natural-born sub- 
 jects of the soil, partaking and sympathizing in all our at- 
 tachments, humors and habits. Our literature no longer 
 grows in water but in mould, and with the true racy virtues 
 of the soil and climate. How much of this change may be due 
 to Burns, or to any other individual, it might be difficult to 
 estimate. Direct literary imitation of Burns was not to be 
 looked for. But his example, in the fearless adoption of do- 
 mestic subjects, could not but operate from afar ; and cer- 
 tainly in no heart did the love of country ever burn with a 
 warmer glow than in that of Burns: "a tide of Scottish 
 prejudice," as he modestly calls this deep and generous feel- 
 ing, "had been poured along his veins ; and he felt that it 
 would boil there till the flood-gates shut in eternal rest." It 
 seemed to him, as if 7ie could do so little for his country, and 
 yet would so gladly have done all. One small province stood 
 open for him,— that of Scottish Song ; and how eagerly he en- 
 tered on it, how devotedly he labored there ! In his toilsome 
 journeyings, this object never quits him ; it is the little happy- 
 valley of his careworn heart. In the gloom of his own afflic- 
 tion, he eagerly searches after some lonely brother of the 
 muse, and rejoices to snatch one other name from the oblivion 
 
 99 Propaganda: A r .ciety established at Rome for the management of 
 the Roman Catholic missions (Societas de Propaganda Fide). 
 
BURKS. 43 
 
 that was covering it ! These were early feelings, and they 
 abode with him to the end : 
 
 ... A wish (I mind its power), 
 A wish, that to my latest hour 
 Will strongly heave my breast,— 
 That I, for poor axild Scotland's sake, 
 Some useful plan or book could make, 
 Or sing a sang at least. 
 
 The rough bur Thistle spreading wide 
 
 Amang the bearded bear, 
 I turn'd my weeding-clips aside. 
 
 And spared the symbol dear.^o" 
 
 But to leave the mere literary character of Burns, which has 
 already detained us too long. Far more interesting than any 
 of his written works, as it appears to us, are his acted ones : 
 the Life he willed and was fated to lead among his fellow-men. 
 These Poems are but like little rhymed fragments scattered 
 here and there in the grand unrhymed Romance of his earthly 
 existence ; and it is only when intercalated ^"^ in this at their 
 proper places, that they attain their full measure of signifi- 
 cance. And this, too, alas, was but a fragment ! The plan 
 of a mighty edifice had been sketched ; some columns, porticos, 
 firm masses of building, stand completed ; the rest more or 
 less clearly indicated ; with many a far-stretching tendency, 
 which only studious and friendly eyes can now trace towards 
 the purposed termination. For the work is broken oif in the 
 middle, almost in the beginning ; and rises among us, beautiful 
 and sad, at once unfinished and a ruin ! If charitable judg- 
 ment was necessary in estimating his Poems, and justice re- 
 quired that the aim and the manifest power to fulfill it must 
 often be accepted for the fulfillment ; much more is this the 
 case in regard to his Life, the sum and result of all his en- 
 deavors, where his difiiculties came upon him not in detail 
 only, but in mass ; and so much has been left unaccomplished, 
 nay was mistaken, and altogether marred. 
 
 Properly speaking, there is but one era in the life of Burns, 
 and that the earliest. We have not youth and manhood, but 
 ^^j: 
 
 100. Symbol dear : The thistle is the national emblem of Scotland. 
 
 101. Intercalated : Inserted ; Lat. inter, between, and calare, to call. 
 
44 BURiTS. 
 
 only youth : for, to the end, we discern no decisive change in 
 the complexion of his character ; in his thirty-seventh year, 
 he is still, as it were, in youth. With all that resoluteness of 
 judgment, that penetrating insight, and singular maturity of 
 intellectual power, exhibited in his writings, he never attains 
 to any clearness regarding himself ; to the last, he never ascer- 
 tains his peculiar aim, even with such distinctness as is com- 
 mon among ordinary men ;| and therefore never can pursue it 
 with that singleness of will, 'which insures success and some 
 contentment to such men: To the last, he wavers between 
 two purposes : glorying in his talent, like a true poet, he yet 
 can not consent to make this his chief and sole glory^ and to 
 follow it as the one thing needful, through poverty or riches, 
 through good or evil report. Another far meaner ambition 
 still cleaves to him ; he must dream and struggle about a cer- 
 tain " Kock of Independence;" which, natural and even ad- 
 mirable as it might be^ was still but a warring with the world, 
 on the comparatively insignificant ground of his being more 
 completely or less completely supplied with money than others; 
 of his standing at a higher or at a lower altitude in general esti- 
 mation than others. For the world still appears to him, as to 
 the young, in borrowed colors : he expects from it what it can- 
 not give to any man ; I'seeks for contentment, not within him- 
 self, in action and wise effort, but from without, in the kind- 
 ness of circumstances, in love, friendship, honor, pecuniary 
 ease.l) He would be happy, not actively and in himself, but 
 passively and from some ideal cornucopia of Enjoyments, not / 
 earned by his own labor, but showered on him by the benefi- 
 cence of Destiny. Thus, like a young man, he cannot gird 
 himself up for any worthy well-calculated goal, but swerves 
 to and fro, between passionate hope and remorseful disap- 
 pointment :'' rushing onwards with a deep tempestuous force, 
 he surmounts or breaks asunder many a barrier ; travels, nay 
 advances far, but advancing only under uncertain guidance, 
 is ever and anon turned from his path ; and to the last canno t 
 reach the ^nly^ true happiness of a man, that of clear deoideH 
 Activity in the sphere for which, by nature and circumstances, 
 he has been fitted and appointed. 
 
buk:n^s. 45 
 
 We do not say these things in dispraise of Burns ; nay, per- 
 haps, they but interest us the more in his favor. This bless- 
 ing is not given soonest to the best ; but rather, it is often the 
 greatest minds that are latest in obtaining it ; for where most 
 is to be developed, most time may be required to develop it. 
 A complex condition had been assigned him from without ; as 
 complex a condition from within: no " preestablished har- 
 mony" existed between the clay soil of Mossgiel and the em- 
 pyrean soul of Robert Burns ; it was not wonderful that the 
 adjustment between them should have been long postponed, 
 and his arm long cumbered, and his sight confused, in so vast 
 and discordant an economy as he had been appointed steward 
 over. Byron was, at his death, but a year younger than 
 Burns ; and through life, as it might have appeared, far more 
 simply situated : yet in him too we can trace no such adjust- 
 ment, no such moral manhood ; but at best, and only a little 
 before his end, the beginning of what seemed such. 
 ) By much the most striking incident in Burns's Life is his 
 'journey to Edinburgh ; but perhaps a still more important one 
 is his residence at Irvine, so early as in his twenty-third year. 
 Hitherto his life had been poor and toilworn ; but otherwise 
 not ungenial, and, with all its distresses, by no means unhap- 
 py. In his parentage, deducting outward circumstances, he 
 had every reason to reckon himself fortunate. His father was 
 a man of thoughtful, intense, earnest character, as the best of 
 our peasants are ; valuing knowledge, possessing some, and, 
 what is far better and rarer, openminded for more : a man 
 with a keen insight and devout heart ; reverent towards God, 
 friendly therefore at once, and fearless towards all that God 
 has made : in one word, though but a hard-handed peasant, a 
 complete and fully unfolded Man. Such a father is seldom 
 found in any rank in society ; and was worth descending far 
 in society to seek. Unfortunately, he was very poor ; had he 
 been even a little richer, almost never so little, the whole 
 might have issued far otherwise. Mighty events turn on a 
 straw ; the crossing of a brook decides the conquest of the 
 world. Had this William Burns's small seven acres of nurs- 
 ery-ground anywise prospered, the boy Robert had been sent 
 
i 
 
 46 BURNS. 
 
 to school ; had struggled forward, as so many weaker men do. 
 to some university ; come forth not as a rustic wonder, but as 
 a regular well-trained intellectual workman, and changed the 
 whole course of British Literature, — for it lay in him to have 
 done this ! But the nursery did not prosper ; poverty sank 
 his whole family below the help of even our cheap school- 
 system : Burns remained a hard -worked plow boy, and Brit- 
 ish literature took its own course. Nevertheless, even in this 
 rugged scene there is much to nourish him. If he drudges, 
 it is with his brother, and for his father and mother, whom 
 he loves, and would fain shield from want. Wisdom is not 
 banished from their poor hearth, nor the balm of natural feel- 
 ing : the solemn words. Let us worship God, are heard there 
 from a "priest-like father ;" "^ if threatenings of unjust men 
 throw mother and children into tears, these are tears not of 
 grief only, but of holiest affection ; every heart in that humble 
 group feels itself the closer knit to every other ; in their hard 
 warfare they are there together, a " little band of brethren." 
 Neither are such tears, and the deep beauty that dwells in 
 them, their only portion. Light visits the hearts as it does the 
 eyes of all living : there is a force, too, in this youth, that en- 
 ables him to trample on misfortune ; nay to bind it under his 
 feet to make him sport. J For a bold, warm, buoyant humor of 
 character has been given nim ; and so the thick- coming shapes 
 of evil are w-elcomed with a gay, friendly irony, and in their 
 closest pressure he bates no jot of heart or hope. Vague 
 yearnings of ambition fail not, as he grows up ; dreamy fan- 
 cies hang like cloud-cities around him ; the curtain of Exist- 
 ence is slow^ly rising, in many colored splendor and gloom : 
 and the auroral light of first love is gilding his horizon, and 
 the music of song is on his path ; and so he walks 
 
 in erlory and in joy. 
 
 Behind his plow, upon the mountain side. 
 
 U We ourselves know, from the best evidence, that up to this 
 
 102. See "The Cotter's Saturday Night," stanzas 12-14. 
 
BURNS. 47 
 
 date Burns was happy ; nay that he was the gayest, brightest, 
 most fantastic, fascinating being to be found in the world ; 
 more so even than he ever afterwards appeared. But now, at 
 this early age, he quits the paternal roof ; goes forth into looser, 
 louder, more exciting society ; and becomes initiated in those 
 dissipations, those vices, which a certain class of philosophers 
 have asserted to be a natural preparative for entering on active 
 life ; a kind of mud-bath, in which the youth is, as it were, 
 necessitated to steep, and, we suppose, cleanse himself, before 
 the real toga of Manhood can be laid on him. We shall not 
 dispute much with this class of philosophers ; we hope they 
 are mistaken : for Sin and Remorse so easily beset us at all 
 stages of life, and are always such indifferent company, that it 
 seems hard we should, at any stage, be forced and fated not 
 only to meet but to yield to them, and even serve for a term 
 in their leprous armada. We hope it is not so. Clear we are, 
 at all events, it cannot be the training one receives in this 
 Devil's-service, but only our determining to desert from it, 
 that fits us for true manly Action. We become men, not 
 after we have been dissipated, and disappointed in the chas^ 
 of false pleasure ; but after we have ascertained, in any way, 
 what impassable barriers hem us in through this life ; how 
 mad it is to hope for contentment to our infinite soul from 
 the gifts of this extremely finite world ; that a man must be 
 sufficient for himself ; and that for suffering and enduring 
 there is no remedy but striving and doings \ Manhood begins 
 when we have in any way made truce with Necessity ; begins 
 even when we have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part 
 only do ; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have 
 reconciled ourselves to Necessity ; and thus, in reality, tri- 
 umphed over it, and felt that in Necessity we are free. Sure- 
 ly, such lessons as this last, which, in one shape or other, is 
 the grand lesson for every mortal man, are better learned from 
 the lips of a devout mother, in the looks and actions of a de- 
 vout father, while the heart is yet soft and pliant, than in col- 
 lision with the sharp adamant of Fate, attracting us to ship- 
 wreck us, when the heart is grown hard, and may be broken 
 before it will become contrite. Had Burns continued to learn 
 
48 BURNS. 
 
 this, as he was already learning it, in his father's cottage, he 
 would have learned it fully, which he never did ; and been 
 saved many a lasting aberration, many a bitter hour and year 
 of remorseful sorrow. 
 
 It seems to us another circumstance of fatal import in 
 Burns's history, that at this time too he became involved in the 
 religious quarrels of his district ; that he was enlisted and 
 feasted, as the fighting man of the New-Light Priesthood, in 
 their highly unprofitable warfare. At the tables of these free- 
 minded clergy he learned much more than was needful for 
 him. Such liberal ridicule of fanaticism awakened in his mind 
 scruples about Religion itself ; and a whole world of Doubts, 
 which it required quite another set of conjurors than these 
 men to exorcise. We do not say that such an intellect as his 
 could have escaped similar doubts at some period of his history ; 
 or even that he could, at a later period, have come through 
 them altogether victorious and unharmed : but it seems pecu- 
 liarly unfortunate that this time, above all others, should 
 have been fixed for the encounter. For now, with principles 
 assailed by evil example from without, by "passions raging 
 like demons" from within, he had little need of skeptical mis- 
 givings to whisper treason in the heat of the battle, or to cut 
 off his retreat if he were already defeated. He loses his feel- 
 ing of innocence ; his mind is at variance with itself ; the old 
 divinity no longer presides there ; but wild Desires and wild 
 Repentance alternately oppress him. Ere long, too, he has 
 committed himself before the world ; his character for 
 sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant as few corrupted world- 
 lings can even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men ; and 
 his only refuge consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, 
 and is but a refuge of lies. The blackest desperation now 
 gathers over him, broken only by red lightnings of remorse. 
 The whole fabric of his life is blasted asunder ; for now not 
 only his character, but his personal liberty, is to be lost ; men 
 and Fortune are leagued for his hurt ; "hungry Ruin has him 
 in the wind." He sees no escape but the saddest of all : exile 
 from his loved country, to a country in every sense inhospi- 
 table and abhorrent to him. While the "gloomy night is 
 
BUKKS. 49 
 
 gathering fast," in mental storm and solitude, as well as in 
 physical, lie sings his wild farewell to Scotland i^"' 
 
 Farewell, my friends ; farewell, my foes I 
 My peace with these, my love with those : 
 The bursting tears my heart declare ; 
 Adieu, my native banks of Ayr ! 
 
 Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods ; but still a false 
 transitory light, and no real sunshine. He is invited to Edin- 
 burgh ; hastens thither with anticipating heart ; is welcomed 
 as in a triumph, and with universal blandishment and accla- 
 mation ; whatever is wisest, whatever is greatest or loveliest 
 there, gathers round him, to gaze on his face, to show him 
 honor, sympathy, affection. Burns's appearance among the 
 sages and nobles of Edinburgh must be regarded as one of the 
 most singular phenomena in modern Literature ; almost like 
 the appearance of some Napoleon among the crowned sover- 
 eigns of modem Politics. For it is nowise as " a mockery 
 king," set there by favor, transiently and for a purpose, that 
 he will let himself be treated ; still less is he a mad Kienzi,^"* 
 whose- sudden elevation turns his too weak head : but he 
 stands there on his own basis ; cool, unastonished, holding his 
 equal rank from Nature herself ; putting forth no claim 
 which there is not strength in him, as well as about him, to 
 vindicate. Mr. Lockhart has some forcible observations on 
 this point : 
 
 " It needs no effort of imagination," says he, "to conceive 
 what the sensations of an isolated set of scholars (almost all 
 either clergymen or professors) must have been in the pres- 
 ence of this big-boned, black-browed, brawny stranger, with his 
 great flashing eyes, who, having forced his way among them 
 from the plow-tail at a single stride, manifested in the whole 
 
 103. Burns had decided*^o emigrate to America. He says: "I had taken 
 the last farewell of my few friends; my chest was on the road to Greenock; 
 and I had composed the last song I should ever measure in Caledonia,—" The 
 gloomy night is gathering fast,"— when a letter from Dr. Blacklock to a friend 
 of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening new prospects to my poetic 
 ambition." Dr. Thomas Blacklock was a divine and poet in Edinburgh, to 
 whom a copy of Burns's poems had been sent. 
 
 104. Rienzi: An eloquent Homan tribune, who, becoming intoxicated with 
 power, " degenerated," says Gibbon, " into the vices of a king," and was 
 driven from the city by the people, and finally assassinated in 1354. 
 
mL\) 
 
 J BURKS. 
 
 ■(}}■■ ■ 
 
 strain of his bearing and conversation a most ttiorougli con- 
 viction, that in the society of the most eminent men of his 
 nation he was exactly where he was entitled to be ; hardly 
 deigned to flatter them by exhibiting even an occasional symp- 
 tom of being flattered by their notice ; by turns calmly meas- 
 ured himself against the most cultivated understandings of 
 his time in discussion ; overpowered the hon-mots of the 
 most celebrated convivialists by broad floods of merriment, 
 impregnated with all the burning life of genius ; astounded 
 bosoms habitually enveloped in the thrice-piled folds of social 
 reserve, by compelling them to tremble— nay, to tremble visi- 
 bly— beneath the fearless touch of natural pathos ; and all 
 this without indicating the smallest wiFiingness to be ranked 
 among those professional ministers of excitement, who are 
 content to be paid in money and smiles for doing what the 
 spectators and auditors would be ashamed of doing in their 
 own persons, even if they had the power of doing it ; and last, 
 and probably worst of all, who was known to be in the habit 
 of enlivening societies which they would have scorned to ap- 
 proach, still more frequently than their own, with eloquence 
 no less magnificent ; with wit, in all likelihood still more dar- 
 ing ; often enough, as the superiors whom he fronted without 
 alarm might have guessed from the beginning, and had ere 
 long no occasion to guess, with wit pointed at themselves." 
 I The farther we remove from this scene, the more singular 
 '^will it seem to us : details of the exterior aspect of it are al- 
 ready full of interest. Most readers recollect Mr. Walker's 
 personal interviews with Burns as among the best passages of 
 his Narrative : a time will come when this reminiscence of Sir 
 Walter Scott's, slight though it is, will also be precious : 
 
 "As for Burns," writes Sir Walter, " I may truly say, Vir- 
 gilium mdi tantum.^"" I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-7, when 
 he came first to Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling enough 
 to be much interested in his poetry, and would have given the 
 world to know him : but I had very little acquaintance with 
 any hterary people, and still less with the gentry of the west 
 
 105. Virgiliamviditantum: I have almost seen Virgil, 
 
BURN'S. 51 
 
 country, the two sets that he most frequented. Mr. Thomas 
 Grierson was at that time a clerk of my father's. He knew 
 Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings to dinner ; but 
 had no opportunity to keep his word ; otherwise I might have 
 seen more of this distinguished man. As it was, I saw him 
 one day at the late venerable Professor Ferguson's, where 
 there were several gentlemen of literary reputation, among 
 whom I remember the celebrated Mr. Dugald Stewart. Of 
 course, we youngsters sat silent, looked and listened. The 
 only thing I remember which was remarkable in Burns's man- 
 ner, was the effect produced upon him by a print of Bunbury's, 
 representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting 
 in misery on one side,— on the other, his widow, with a child 
 in her arms. These lines were written beneath : 
 
 " ' Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, 
 Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain ; 
 Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew. 
 The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, 
 Gave the sad roresage of his future years, 
 The child of misery baptized in tears.' 
 
 " Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather by the 
 ideas which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed tears. 
 He asked whose the lines were ; and it chanced that nobody 
 but myself remembered that they occur in a half -forgotten 
 poem of Langhorne's'"' called by the unpromising title of 
 " The Justice of Peace." I whispered my information to a 
 friend present ; he mentioned it to Burns, who rewarded me 
 with a look and a word, which, though of mere civility, I then 
 received and still recollect with very great pleasure. 
 
 " His person was strong and robust ; his manners rustic, not 
 clownish ; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which 
 received part of its effect perhaps from one's knowledge of his 
 extraordinary talents. His features are represented in Mr. 
 Nasmyth's picture :'" but to me it conveys the idea that they 
 are diminished, as if seen in perspective. I think his counte- 
 
 106. John I^anghorne (1735-1779): A forgotten English poet, chiefly known 
 for his translation of Plutarch s Lives. , , ^,_ 
 
 107. Mr. Nasmyth's picture: This portrait, pamted when the poet was 
 about twenty-six years old, is the only authentic likeness of Burns. 
 
52 BURETS. 
 
 nance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. 
 I should have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, 
 for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school, 
 i.e., none of your modern agriculturists who keep laborers for 
 their drudgery, but the doitce gudeman"'^ who held his own 
 plow. There was a strong expression of sense and shrewd- 
 ness in all his lineaments ; the eye alone, I think, indicated 
 the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and 
 of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally glowed) when he 
 spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye 
 in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished 
 men of my time. His conversation expressed perfect self-con- 
 fidence, without the slightest presumption. Among the men 
 who were the most learned of their time and country, he ex- 
 pressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least 
 intrusive forwardness; and 'when he differed in opinion, he 
 did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time with 
 modesty. , I do not remember any part of his conversation 
 distinctly enough to be quoted ; nor did I ever see him again, 
 except in the street, where he did not recognize me, as I could 
 not expect he should. He was much caressed in Edinburgh : 
 but (considering what literary emoluments have been since his 
 day) the efforts made for his relief were extremely trifling. 
 
 " I remember, on this occasion I mention, I thought Burns's 
 acquaintance with English poetry was rather limited ; and also 
 that, having twenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and 
 of Ferguson, he talked of them with too much humility as his 
 models : there was doubtless national predilection in his esti- 
 mate. 
 
 "This is' all I can tell you about Burns. I have only to 
 add, that his dress corresponded with his manner. He was 
 like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the laird. I do 
 not speak in malam parieiii,'"^ when I say, I never saw a man 
 in company with his superiors in station or information more 
 perfectly free from either the reality or the affectation of em- 
 barrassment. I was told, but did not observe it, that his ad- 
 
 108. Douce g^udeman: Sober goodman. 
 
 109. In malam partem : In bad part, disparagingly. 
 
BURKS. 53 
 
 dress to females was extremely deferential, and always with a 
 turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their 
 attention particularly. I have heard the late Duchess of Gor- 
 don remark this.— I do not know anything I can add to these 
 recollections of forty years since." 
 
 The conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze of favor; 
 the calm, unaffected, manly manner in which he not only bore 
 it, but estimated its value, has justly been regarded as the best 
 proof that could be given of his real vigor and integrity of 
 mind. A little natural vanity, some touches of hypocritical 
 modesty, some glimmerings of affectation, at least some fear 
 of being thought affected, we could have pardoned in almost 
 any man ; but no such indication is to be traced here. In his 
 unexampled situation the young peasant is not a moment per- 
 plexed ; so many strange lights do not confuse him, do not 
 lead him astray. Nevertheless, we cannot but perceive that 
 this winter did him great and lasting injury. A somewhat 
 clearer knowledge of men's affairs, scarcely of their characters, 
 it did afford him ; but a sharper feeling of Fortune's unequal 
 arrangements in their social destiny it also left with him. He 
 had seen the gay and gorgeous arena, in which the powerful 
 are born to play their parts ; nay had himself stood in the 
 midst of it ; and he felt more bitterly than ever, that here he 
 was but a looker-on, and had no part or lot in that splendid 
 game. From this time a jealous indignant fear of social deg- 
 radation takes possession of him ; and perverts, so far as 
 aught could pervert, his private contentment, and his feelings 
 towards his richer fellows. It was clear to Burns that he had 
 talent enough to make a fortune, or a hundred fortunes, could 
 he but have rightly willed this; it was clear also that he willed 
 something far different, and therefore could not make one. 
 Unhappy it was that he had not power to choose the one, and 
 reject the other ; but must halt forever between two opinions, 
 two objects ; making hampered advancement towards either. 
 But so is it with many men : we " long for the merchandise, 
 yet would fain keep the price ;" and so stand chaffering with 
 Fate, in vexatious altercation, till the night come, and our 
 fair is over ! 
 
54 BURNS. 
 
 The Edinburgh Learned of that period were in general more 
 noted for clearness of head than for warmth of heart : with 
 the exception of the good old Blacklock, whose help was too 
 ineffectual, scarcely one among them seems to have looked at 
 Burns with any true sympathy, or indeed much otherwise than 
 as at a highly curious thing. By the great also he is treated 
 in the customary fashion; entertained at their tables and dis- 
 missed: certain modica of pudding and praise are, from time, 
 to time, gladly exchanged for the fascination of his presence ;. 
 which exchange once effected, the bargain is finished, and 
 each party goes his several way. At the end of this strange 
 season, Burns gloomily sums up his gains and losses, and med- 
 itates on the chaotic future. In money he is somewhat rich- 
 er ; in fame and the show of happiness, infinitely richer ;, 
 but in the substance of it, as poor as ever. Nay poorer ; 
 for his heart is now maddened still more with the fever of 
 worldly Ambition ; and through long years the disease will 
 rack him with unprofitable sufferings, and weaken his strength 
 for all true and nobler aims. 
 
 What Burns was next to do or to avoid; how a man so cir- 
 cumstanced was now to guide himself towards his true advan- 
 tage, might at this point of time have been a question for the^ 
 wisest. It was a question too, which apparently he was left, 
 altogether to answer for himself: of his learned or rich patrons 
 it had not struck any individual to turn a thought on this so 
 trivial matter. "Without claiming for Burns the praise of per- 
 fect sagacity, we must say, that his Excise and Farm scheme'^" 
 does not seem to us a very unreasonable one ; that we should 
 be at a loss, even now, to suggest one decidedly better. Cer- 
 tain of his admirers have felt scandalized at his ever resolving 
 to gauge; and would have had him lie at the pool, till the 
 spirit of Patronage stirred the waters,"' that so, with one 
 friendly plunge, all his sorrows might be healed. Unwise 
 counselors ! They know not the manner of this spirit ; and 
 
 110. Burns now rented the farm of EUisland. about five miles from Dum- 
 fries, but depended more confidently upon his appointment as an Exc.re 
 
 111 kitherto it had been the custom for literary men to obtam assistance 
 or pairuiuige uom some wealthy or influential person, to whom theii' pubh- 
 
BURNS. 55 
 
 how, in the lap of most golden dreams, a man might have hap- 
 piness, were it not that in the interim he must die of hunger ! 
 It reflects credit on the manliness and sound sense of Burns, 
 that he felt so early on what ground he was standing ; and 
 preferred self-help, on the humblest scale, to dependence and 
 inaction, though with hope of far more splendid possibilities. 
 But even these possibilities were not rejected in his scheme : 
 he might expect, if it chanced that he had any friend, to rise, 
 in no long period, into something even like opulence and leis- 
 ure ; while again, if it chanced that he had no friend, he could 
 still live in security ; and for the rest, he ' ' did not intend to 
 borrow honor from any profession." We reckon that his plan 
 was honest and well-calculated: all turned on the execution of 
 it. Doubtless it failed; yet not, we believe, from any vice in- 
 herent in itself. Nay, after all, it was no failure of external 
 means, but of internal, that overtook Burns. His was no 
 bankruptcy of the purse, but of the soul ; to his last day, he 
 owed no man anything. 
 
 Meanwhile he begins well : with two good and wise actions. 
 His donation to his mother, munificent from a man whose in- 
 come had lately been seven pounds a j^ear, was worthy of him, 
 and not more than worthy. Generous also, and worthy of him, 
 was the treatment of the woman whose life's welfare now de- 
 pended on his pleasure. A friendly observer might have 
 hoped serene days for him : his mind is on the true road to 
 peace with itself : what clearness he still wants will be given 
 as he proceeds; for the best teacher of duties, that still lie dim 
 to us, is the Practice of those we see and have at hand. Had 
 the "patrons of genius," who could give him nothing, but 
 taken nothing from him, at least nothing more ! The wounds 
 of his heart would have healed, vulgar ambition would have 
 died away. Toil and Frugality would have been welcome, 
 since Virtue dwelt with them; and Poetry would have shone 
 
 cations would be dedicated. Burns scorned this method of gain. While in- 
 scribing His " Cotter's Satui'day Night " to Robert Aiken, he says: 
 "No mercenary bard his homage pays; 
 
 With honest pride, 1 scorn each selfish end; 
 My dearest meed, a friend's esteem and praise." 
 
56 BUKiq"s. 
 
 through them as of old : and in her clear ethereal light, which 
 was his own by birthright, he might have looked down on his 
 earthly destiny, and all its obstructions, not with patience 
 only, but with love. 
 
 But the patrons of genius would not have it so. Picturesque 
 tourists,"^ all manner of fashionable danglers after literature, 
 and, far worse, all manner of convivial Maecenases,"^ hovered 
 round him in his retreat ; and his good as well as his weak 
 qualities secured them influence over him. He was flattered 
 by their notice; and his warm social nature made it impossible 
 for him to shake them off, and hold on his way apart from 
 them. These men, as we believe, were proximately the means 
 of his ruin. Not that they meant him any ill ; they only 
 meant themselves a little good ; if he suffered harm, let him 
 look to it ! But they wasted his precious time and his pre- 
 cious talent; they disturbed his composure, broke down his 
 returning habits of temperance and assiduous contented ex- 
 ertion. Their pampering was baneful to him; their cruelty, 
 which soon followed, was equally baneful. The old grudge 
 against Fortune's inequality awoke with new bitterness in 
 their neighborhood; and Burns had no retreat but to "the 
 Rock of Independence," which is but an air-castle after all, 
 that looks well at a distance, but will screen no one from real 
 wind and wet. Flushed with irregular excitement, exasper- 
 ated alternately by contempt of others, and contempt of him- 
 self, Burns was no longer regaining his peace of mind, but 
 
 112. Picturesque tourists : To these words Carlyle appends this note: 
 " There is one Uttle sketch by certain ' EngUsh gentlemen ' of this class, 
 which, though adopted in Currie's Narrative, and since then repeated in 
 most others, we have all along felt an invincible disposition to regard as 
 imaginary: 'On a rock that projected into the stream, they saw a man 
 employed in angling, of a singular appearance. He had a cap made of 
 fox-skin on his head, a loose gi-eatcoat fixed round him by a belt, from 
 which depended an enormous Highland broad-sword. It was Burns.' 
 Now, we rather think, it was not Burns. For, to say nothing of the fox- 
 skin cap, the loose and quite Hibernian watchcoat with the belt, what are 
 we to make of this 'enormous Highland broad-sword' depending from' 
 him? More especially, as there is no word of parish constables on the out- 
 look to see whether, as Denrus phrases it, he had an eye to his own midriff or 
 that of the pubhc! Burns, or all men, had the least need, and the least ten- 
 dency, to seek for distinction, either in his own eyes, or those of others, by 
 such poor mummeries." 
 
 113. Maecenas: A wealthy Roman nobleman, and patron of Virgil. Hor- 
 ace, and other men of genius. His name has become proverbial for a liberal 
 patron of letters. 
 
BURNS. 57 
 
 fast losing it forever. There was a hollowness at the heart of 
 his life, for his conscience did not now approve what he was 
 doing. 
 
 Amid the vapors of unwise enjoyment, of bootless remorse, 
 and angry discontent with Fate, his true loadstar, a life of 
 Poetry, with Poverty, nay with Famine if it must be so, was 
 too often altogether hidden from his eyes. And yet he sailed 
 a sea, where without some such loadstar there was no right 
 steering. Meteors of French Politics rise before him, but 
 these Avere not his stars. An accident this, which hastened, 
 but did not originate, his worst distresses. In the mad con- 
 tentions of that time, he comes in collision with certain official 
 ^Superiors ;'^* is wounded by them; cruelly lacerated, we should 
 say, could a dead mechanical implement, in any case, be called 
 cruel : and shrinks, in indignant pain, into deeper self -seclu- 
 sion, into gloomier moodiness than ever. His life has now 
 lost its unity: it is a life of fragments ;Ued with little aim, be- 
 yond the melfincholy one of securing Its own continuance, — 
 in fits of wild false joy when such offered, and of black de- 
 spondency when they passed away. His character before the 
 world begins to suffer: calumny is busy with him; for a mis- 
 erable man makes more enemies than friends. Some faults 
 he has fallen into, and a thousand misfortunes ; but deep 
 criminality is what he stands accused of, and they that are 
 not without sin cast the first stone at him ! "^ For is he not a 
 well-wisher to the French Revolution, a Jacobin, "^ and there- 
 fore in that one act guilty of all ? These accusations, political 
 and moral, it has since appeared, were false enough : but the 
 world hesitated little to credit them. Nay his convivial Miecc- 
 nases themselves were not the last to do it. There is reason 
 to believe that, in his later years, the Dumfries aristocracy 
 had partly withdrawn themselves from Burns, as from a 
 tainted person, no longer worthy of their acquaintance. That 
 
 114. He warmly sympathized with the French revolutionists, and sent to 
 the French Convention a present of some guns, which he had taken from a 
 smuggling: brig, in the performance of his duties as Exciseman. This led the 
 Board of Excise to order an inquiry into his political conduct. 
 
 115. See Jolm viii. 7. 
 
 116. Jacobin: The most violent party among the French revolutionists; 
 so called from their place of meeting, the monastery of St. Jacques. 
 
58 BURN'S. 
 
 painful class, stationed, in all i^rovincial cities, behind the out- 
 most breastwork of Gentility, there to stand siege and do bat- 
 tle against the intrusions of Grocerdom and Grazierdom, had 
 actually seen dishonor in the society of Burns, and branded 
 him with their veto ; had, as we vulgarly say, cut him ! We 
 find one passage in this Work of Mr. Lockhart's, which will 
 not out of our thoughts 1^) 
 
 " A gentleman of that county, whose name I have already 
 more than once had occasion to refer to, has often told me 
 that he was seldom more grieved, than when riding into Dum- 
 fries one fine summer evening about this time to attend a 
 county ball, he saw Burns walking alone, on the shady side of 
 the principal street of the town, while the opposite side was 
 gay with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn 
 together for the festivities of the night, not one of whom ap- 
 peared willing to recognize him. The horseman dismounted, 
 and joined Burns, who on his proposing to cross the street 
 said : ' Nay, nay, my young friend, that's all over now ; ' and 
 quoted, after a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzel Baillie's 
 pathetic ballad : 
 
 " ' His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow, 
 
 His auld ane look'd better than mony ane's new ; 
 But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing, 
 And casts himsell dowie upon the corn-bing. 
 
 O, were we young as we ance hae been, 
 
 We sud hae been gallopping down on yon green, 
 
 And linking it ower the lily-white lea I 
 
 And iverena my heart light, Iioad die.'' 
 
 It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on certain 
 subjects escape in this fashion. He, immediately after reciting 
 these verses, assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing 
 manner ; and taking his young friend home with him, enter- 
 tained him very agreeably till the hour of the ball arrived." 
 
 Alas ! when we think that Burns now sleeps " where bitter 
 indignation can no longer lacerate his heart," "\and that most 
 of those fair dames and frizzled gentlemen already lie at his 
 
 117. The epitaph upon the grave of Dean Swift, Qomposed by himself-^ 
 Ubi seeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit," 
 
BUEN^S. 59 
 
 side, where the breastwork of gentility is quite thrown down, 
 — who would not sigh over the thin delusions and foolish toys 
 that divide heart from heart, and make man unmerciful to his 
 brother ! 
 
 It was not now to be hoped that the genius of Burns would 
 ever reach maturity, or accomplish aught worthy of itself. His 
 spirit was jarred in its melody ; not the soft breath of naturcd 
 feeling, but the rude hand of Fate, was now sweeping over 
 the strings. And yet what harmony was in him, what music- 
 even in his discords ! How the wild tones had a charm for 
 the simplest and the wisest ; and all men felt and knew that 
 here also was one of the Gifted ! " If he entered an inn at 
 midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the news of his 
 arrival circulated from the cellar to the garret ; and ere ten 
 minutes had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were 
 assembled !" Some brief pure moments of poetic life w^ere yet 
 appointed him, in the composition of his Songs. We can un- 
 derstand how he grasped at this employment ; and how too, 
 he spurned all other reward for it but what the labor itself 
 brought him. For the soul of Burns, though scathed and 
 marred, was yet living in its full moral strength, though 
 sharply conscious of its errors and abasement : and here, in 
 his destitution and degradation, was one act of seeming no- 
 bleness and self-devotedness left even for him to perform. 
 He felt too, that with all the "thoughtless follies" that had 
 "laid him low," the world was unjust and cruel to him ; and 
 he silently appealed to another and calmer time. Not as a 
 hired soldier, but as a patriot, would he strive for the glory of 
 his country : so he cast from him the poor sixpence a-day, 
 and served zealously as a volunteer. "^ Let us not grudge him 
 this last luxury of his existence ; let him not have appealed to 
 us in vain ! The money was not necessary to him ; he strug- 
 gled through without it : long since, these guineas would have 
 been gone, and now the high-mindedness of refusing them 
 will plead for him in all hearts forever. 
 
 118. Perhaps to atone somewhat ,' or his political offenses. Burns enlisted 
 in a corps of volunteers at Dumfries, and composed the spirited patriotic 
 song " Does haughty Gaul invasion threat ?"" which became at once popular. 
 
60 BURNS. 
 
 We are here arrived at the crisis of Burns's life ; for mat- 
 ters had now taken such a shape witli him as could not long 
 continue. If improvement was not to be looked for, Nature 
 could only for a limited time maintain this dark and madden- 
 ing warfare against the world and itself. We are not medi- 
 cally informed whether any continuance of years was, at this 
 period, probable for Burns ; whether his death is to be looked 
 on as in some sense an accidental event, or only as the natural 
 consequence of the long series of events that had preceded. 
 The latter seems to be the likelier opinion ; and yet it is by no 
 means a certain one. At all events, as we have said, some 
 change could not be very distant. Three gates of deliverance, 
 it seems to us, were open for Burns : clear poetical activity ; 
 madness ; or death. The first, with longer life, was still pos- 
 sible, though not probable ; for physical causes were beginning 
 to be concerned in it : and yet Burns had an iron resolution ; 
 could he but have seen and felt, that not only his highest 
 glory, but his first duty, and the true medicine for all his woes, 
 lay here. The second was still less probable ; for his mind 
 was ever among the clearest and firmest. So the milder third 
 gate was opened for him : and he passed, not softly yet 
 speedily, into that still country, where the hail-storms and. fire- 
 showers do not reach, and the heaviest-laden wayfarer at 
 length lays down his load ! 
 
 Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how he sank un- 
 aided by any real help, uncheered by any wise sympathy, gen- 
 erous minds have sometimes figured to themselves, with a 
 reproachful sorrow, that much might have been done for him; 
 that by counsel, true affection and friendly ministrations, he 
 might have been saved to himself and the world. We question 
 whether there is not more tenderness of heart than soundness 
 of judgment in these suggestions. It seems dubious to us 
 whether the richest, wisest, most benevolent individual could 
 have lent Burns any effectual help. ^^Counsel, which seldom 
 profits any one, he did not need ; in his understanding, he 
 knew the right from the wrong, as well perhaps as any man 
 ever did ; but the persuasion, which would have availed him, 
 
BURNS. 61 
 
 lies not so much in the head as in the heart, where no argu- 
 ment or expostulation could have assisted much to implant it. 
 As to money again, we do not believe that this was his essen- 
 tial want ; or well see how any private man could, even pre- 
 supposing Burns's consent, have bestowed on him an inde- 
 pendent fortune, with much prospect of decisive advantage. 
 It is a mortifying truth, that two men in any rank of society, 
 could hardly- be found virtuous enough to give money, and to 
 take it as a necessary gift, without injury to the moral entire- 
 ncss of one or both. But so stands tho fact : Friendship, in 
 the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists ; except in 
 the cases of kindred or other legal affinity, it is in reality no 
 longer expected, or recognized as a virtue among men. A 
 close observer of manners has pronounced "Patronage," that 
 is, pecuniary or other economic furtherance, to be "twice 
 cursed ; " cursing him that gives, and him that takes ! And 
 thus, in regard to outward matters also, it has become the 
 rule, as in regard to inward it always w^as and must be the 
 rule, that no one shall look for effectual help to another ; but 
 that each shall rest contented with what help he can afford 
 himself. Such, we say, is the principle of modern Honor ; 
 naturally enough growing out of that sentiment of Pride, 
 which we inculcate and encourage as the basis of our whole 
 social morahty. Many a poet has been poorer than Burns ; 
 but no one w^as ever prouder : we may question whether, with- 
 out great precautions, even a pension from Royalty would not 
 have galled and encumbered, more than actually assisted him. 
 Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with another 
 class of Burns's admirers, who accuse the higher ranks among 
 us of having ruined Burns by their selfish neglect of him. We 
 have already stated our doubts whether direct pecuniary help, 
 had it been offered, would have been accepted, or could have 
 proved very effectual. We shall readily admit, however, that 
 much was to be done for Burns ; that many a poisoned arrow 
 might have been warded from his bosom ; many an entangle- 
 ment in his path cut asunder by the hand of the powerful ; 
 and light and heat, shed on him from high places, would have 
 made his humble atmosphere more genial; and the softest 
 
63 BURNS. 
 
 heart then breathing might have hved and died with some 
 fewer pangs. Nay, we shall grant farther, and for Burns it 
 is granting much, that, with all his pride, he would have 
 thanked, even with exaggerated gratitude, any one who had 
 cordially befriended him : patronage, unless once cursed, 
 needed not to have been twice so. At all events, the poor 
 promotion he desired in his calling might have been granted : 
 it was his own scheme, therefore likelier than any other to be 
 of service. All this it might have been a luxury, nay it was 
 a duty, for our nobility to have done. No part of all this, 
 however, did any of them do ; or apparently attempt, or wish 
 to do : so much is granted against them. But what then is 
 the amount of their blame ? Simply that they were men of 
 the world, and walked by the principles of such men ; that 
 they treated Burns, as other nobles and other commoners had 
 done other poets ; as the English did Shakspeare ; as King 
 Charles and his Cavaliers did Butler, as King Philip and his 
 Grandees did Cervantes."'* Do men gather grapes of thorns ; 
 or shall we cut down our thorns for yielding only ^ fence and 
 haws? How, indeed, could the " nobility and gentry of his 
 native land " hold out any help to this " Scottish Bard, proud 
 of his name and country " ? Were the nobility and gentry so 
 much as able rightly to help themselves ? Had they not their 
 game to preserve ; their borough interests to strengthen ; din- 
 ners, therefore, of various kinds to eat and give ? Were their 
 means more than adequate to all this business, or less than 
 adequate ? Less than adequate, in general ; few of them in 
 reality were richer than Burns ; many of them were poorer ; 
 for sometimes they had to wring their supplies, as with thumb- 
 screws, from the hard hand ; and, in their need of guineas, to 
 forget their duty of mercy ; which Burns was never reduced 
 to do. Let us pity and forgive them. The game they preserved 
 and shot, the dinners they ate and gave, the borough interests 
 they strengthened, the little Babylons they severally builded 
 
 119 Cervantes (1547-161G) : A celebrated Spanish writer, author of " Don 
 Quixote " He was wounded in the battle of Lepanto, and later was seized by 
 an Algerine corsair and held for some years as a slave, and was several times 
 lodged in prison on civil prosecutions. 
 
BUKKS. 63 
 
 by the glory of their might, are all melted or melting back into 
 the primeval Chaos, as man's merely selfish endeavors are 
 fated to do : and here was an action, extending, in virtue of 
 its worldly influence, we may say, through all time ; in virtue 
 of its moral nature, beyond all time, being immortal as the 
 Spirit of Goodness itself ; this action was offered them to do, 
 and light was not given them to do ic. Let us pity and forgive 
 them. But better than pity, let us go and do otherivise. Human 
 suffering did not end with the life of Burns ; neither was the 
 solemn mandate, " Love one another, bear one another's bur- 
 dens," given to the rich only, but to all men. True, we shall 
 find no Burns to relieve, to assuage by our aid or our pity ; but 
 celestial natures, groaning under the fardels^'^" of a weary life, 
 we shall still find ; and that wretchedness which Fate has 
 rendered voiceless and tuneless is not the least wretched, but 
 the most. 
 
 Still, we do not think that the blame of Burns's failure lies 
 chiefly with the world. The world, it seems to us, treated him 
 with more rather than with less kindness than it usually shows 
 to such men. It has ever, we fear, shown but small favor to 
 its Teachers : hunger and nakedness, perils and revilings, the 
 prison, the cross, the poison-chalice have, in most times and 
 countries, been the market-price it has offered for Wisdom, the 
 welcome with which it has greeted those who have come to 
 enlighten and purify it. Homer and Socrates, ^^^ and the Chris- 
 tian Apostles, belong to old days ; but the world's Martyrology 
 was not completed with these. Roger Bacon^^^ and Galileo^^' 
 
 120. Fardels : Literally, bundles or packs. Compare Hamlet, III. 1 : 
 
 " Who would fardels bear, 
 To grunt and sweat under a weary life," 
 
 121. Socrates: The wisest philosopher of antiquity. He was condemned 
 to drink the fatal hemlock, on the charge that he disbelieved the gods of his 
 country and corrupted the Athenian youth with his teachings. 
 
 122. Roger Kacoii (1214?-1292 ?) : An Enghsh monk, regai'dedas the great- 
 est scholar of the 13th century. His " Opus Majus,"' an important contribu- 
 tion to science, was condemned by the church, and the author confined ten 
 years in prison. 
 
 123. Galileo (1564-1642) : The illustrious Italian philosopher, and inventor of 
 the telescope. For his advocacy of the Copernican theory of the earth's mo- 
 tion, he was summoned before "the Inquisition at Rome, made to abjure his 
 heresies, condemned to be imprisoned during the Pope's pleasure, and to re- 
 cite once a week for three years the sevea penitential psalms. 
 
64 BURNS. 
 
 languish in priestly dungeons ; Tasso^-* pines in the cell of a 
 mad-house ; Camoens^" dies begging on the streets of Lisbon. 
 So neglected, so "persecuted they the Prophets," ^^^ not in Ju- 
 dea only, but in all places where men have been. We reckon 
 that every poet of Burns's order is, or should be, a prophet and 
 teacher to his age ; that he has no right to expect great kind- 
 ness from it, but rather is bound to do it great kindness ; that 
 Burns, in particular, experienced fully the usual proportion of 
 the world's goodness ; and that the blame of his failure, as we 
 liave said, lies not chiefly with the world. 
 
 Where, then, does it lie ? We are forced to answer : With 
 himself ; it is his inward, not his outward misfortunes that 
 brhig him to the dust. Seldom, indeed, is it otherwise ; seldom 
 is a life morally wrecked but the grand cause lies in some in- 
 ternal mal-arrangement, some want less of good fortune than 
 of good guidance. Nature fashions no creature without im- 
 planting in it the strength needful for its action and duration ; 
 least of all does she so neglect her masterpiece and darling, 
 the poetic soul. Y Neither can we believe that it is in the power 
 of any external circumstances utterly to ruin the mind of a man; 
 nay if proper wisdom be given him, even so much as to affect 
 its essential health and beauty. ," i The sternest sum-total of all 
 worldly misfortunes is Death ; nothing more can lie in the cup 
 of human woe : yet many men, in all ages, have triumphed 
 over Death, and led it captive ; converting its physical victory 
 into a moral victory for themselves, into a seal and immortal 
 consecration for all that their past life had achievedJN^What has 
 been done, may be done again : nay, it is but the degree and 
 not the kind of such heroism that differs in different seasons ; 
 for without some portion of this spirit, not of boisterous daring, 
 but of silent fearlessness, of Self-denial in all its forms, no 
 good man, in any scene or time, has ever attained to be good. 
 
 124. Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) : A famous Italian epic poet, author of 
 "Jerusalem Delivered." He was imprisoned by Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, 
 and by his orders treated as a madman. The cause is involved in mystery. 
 
 125. Camoens (1524 ?-1579) : The most celebrated Portuguese poet, author 
 of •' TheLusiad." a heroic poem in which, says Mme. de Stael, " The national 
 glory of the Portuguese is illustrated under all the forms that imagination 
 can devise." 
 
 136. Matthew v. 12. 
 
BURNS. 65 
 
 We have already stated the error of Burns ; and mourned 
 over it, rather than blamed it. It was the want of unity in his 
 purposes, of consistency in his aims ; the hapless attempt to 
 mingle in friendly union the common spirit of the world with 
 the spirit of poetry, which is of a far different and altogether 
 irreconcilable nature. Burns was nothing wholly, and Burns 
 could be nothing, no man formed as he was can be anything, 
 by halves. The heart, not of a mere hot-blooded, popular 
 Versemonger, or poetical Restaurateur,^^'' but of a true Poet 
 and Singer, worthy of the old religious heroic times, had been 
 given him : and he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion,, 
 but of skepticism, selfishness and triviality, when true Nobleness. 
 was little understood, and its place supplied by a hollow, dis- 
 social, altogether barren and unfruitful principle of Pride. The 
 influences of that age, his open, kind, susceptible nature, to 
 say nothing of his highly untoward situation, made it more 
 than usually difficult for him to cast aside, or rightly subordi- 
 nate ; the better spirit that was within him ever sternly de- 
 manded its rights, its supremacy : he spent his life in endeav- 
 oring to reconcile these two ; and lost it, as he must lose it, 
 without reconciling them. 
 
 Burns was born poor ; and born also to continue poor, for 
 he would not endeavor to be otherwise : this it had been well 
 could he have once for all admitted, and considered as finally 
 settled. He was poor, truly ; but hundreds even of his own 
 class and order of minds have been poorer, yet have suffered 
 nothing deadly from it : nay, his own Father had a far sorer 
 battle with ungrateful destiny than his was ; and he did not 
 yield to it, but died courageously warring, and to all moral in- 
 tents prevailing, against it. True, Burns had little means, had 
 even little time for poetry, his only real pursuit and vocation ; 
 but so much the more precious was what little he had. In all 
 these external respects his case was hard ; but very far from 
 the hardest. Poverty, incessant drudgery and much worse evils, 
 it has often been the lot of Poets and wise men to strive with, 
 
 127. Restaurateur : One who refreshes or restores. The keeper of a plac© 
 of refreshment or amusement. 
 
66 BURNS. 
 
 and their glory to conquer. Locke''^^ was banished as a traitor ; 
 and wrote his Essay on the Human Understanding sheltering 
 himself in a Dutch garret. Was Milton rich or at his ease when 
 he composed Paradise Lost f Not only low, but fallen from a 
 height ; not only poor, but impoverished; in darkness and with 
 dangers compassed round, he sang his immortal song, and 
 found fit audience, though few. ^"^^ Did not Cervantes finish his 
 work, a maimed soldier and in prison ? Nay, was not the Arau- 
 cana,^^° which Spain acknowledges as its Epic, written with- 
 out even the aid of paper ; on scraps of leather, as the stout 
 fighter and voyager snatched any moment from that wild war- 
 fare ? 
 
 And what, then, had these men, which Burns wanted? Two 
 things ; both which, it seems to us, are indispensable for such 
 men. They had a true, religious principle of morals ; "and a 
 single, not a double aim in their activity. ' They were hot self- 
 seekers and self- worshipers ; but seekers and worshipers of 
 something far better than Self. 1 1 Not^personal enjoyment was 
 their object ; but a high, heroic idea of Keligion, of Patriotism, 
 of heavenly "Wisdom,, in one or the other form, ever hovered be- 
 fore them ; in which cause they neither shrank from suffering, 
 nor called on the earth to witness it as something wonderful ; 
 but patiently endured, counting it blessedness enough so to 
 spend and be spent. " Thus the ' ' golden-calf of Self-love, " how- 
 ever curiously carved, was not their Deity ; but the Invisible 
 Goodness, which alone is man's reasonable service. This feel- 
 ing was as a celestial fountain, whose streams refreshed into 
 gladness and beauty all the provinces of their otherwise too 
 desolate existence. In a word, they willed one thing, to which 
 
 128. John Locke (1632-1704) : A celebrated English philosopher. Beiu^ 
 intimately associated with Shaftesbury, the Lord Chancellor, who was 
 charged with hig:h treason, he fled to Holland for safety, but returned upon 
 the completion of the Revolution in 1689. 
 
 129. See Paradise Lost, Bk. vii. 26-31: 
 
 " On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues, 
 In darkneiss, and with dangers compassed round, 
 And solitude. . . . Still govern thou my song, 
 Urania, and fit audience find, though few." 
 
 130. Araiicana : An epic poem in thirty-seven cantos, by Alonso de Ercilla 
 (1530?-1C00?) . It recounts the poet's adventures while engaged in tlic Spanish 
 expedition against Arauco, in South America, and was written, he says, in 
 the wilderness, where he fought, on scraps of paper and skins. 
 
BURNS. 67 
 
 all other things were subordinated and made subservient ; and 
 therefore they accomplished it. The wedge will rend rocks ; 
 but its edge must be sharp and single : if it be double, the 
 wedge is bruised in pieces and will rend nothing. 
 
 Part of this superiority these men owed to their age ; in 
 which heroism and devotedness were still practiced, or at least 
 not yet disbelieved in : but much of it likewise they owed to 
 tliemselves. With Burns, again, it was different.' His morality, 
 in-tnost of its practical points, is that of a mere worldly man ; 
 enjoyment, in a finer or coarser shape, is the only thing he longs 
 and strives for. Ajioble instinct sometimes raises him above 
 this ; but an instinct only, and acting only for moments. He 
 has no Keligion ; in the shallow age, where his days were cast, 
 Religion was not discriminated from the New and Old Light 
 forms of Religion ; and was, with these, becoming obsolete in 
 the minds of men. His heart, indeed, is alive witti a trembling 
 adoration, but there is no temple in his understanding. He 
 lives in darkness and in the shadow of doubt. His religion, at 
 best, is an anxious wish; like that of Rabelais,''' "a great 
 Perhaps." 
 
 He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart ; could he but 
 have loved it purely, and with his whole undivided heart, it 
 had been well. For Poetry, as Burns could have followed it, 
 is but another form of Wisdom, of Religion ; is itself Wisdom 
 and Religion. But this also was denied him. His poetry is a 
 stray vagrant gleam, which will not be extinguished within 
 him, yet rises not to be the true light of his path, but is often 
 a wildfire that misleads him. It was not necessary for Burns 
 to be rich, to be, or to seem, " independent ;" but it w;a5 nec- 
 essary for him to be at one with his own heart ; to place what 
 was highest in his nature highest also in his life ; "to seek 
 within himself for that consistency and sequence, which ex- 
 ternal events would forever refuse him." He was born a poet ; 
 poetry was the celestial element of his being, and should have 
 been the soul of his whole endeavors. Lifted into that serene 
 
 131. Francois Rabelais (1490?-1553?) : A French satirist, whose Rreat 
 work. "Gargantua and Pantagruel." assails all classes of society, but espe- 
 cially the monks. Sometimes called the " comic Homer." 
 
G8 BURKS. 
 
 ether, whither he had wings given him to mount, he would 
 have needed no other elevation : poverty, neglect and all evil, 
 save the desecration of himself and his Art, were a small 
 matter to him ; the pride and the passions of the world lay far 
 beneath his feet ; and he looked down alike on noble and slave, 
 on prince and beggar, and all that wore the stamp of man, 
 with clear recognition, with brotherly affection, with sympa- 
 thy, with pity. \^ Nay, we question whether for his culture as 
 a Poet poverty and much suffering for a season were not ab 
 solutely advantageous.\\ Great men, in looking back over their 
 lives, have testified to that effect. U " I would not for much," 
 says Jean Paul, ^^^ " that I had been born richer." And yet 
 Paul's birth was poor enough ; for, in another place, he adds : 
 "The prisoner's allowance is bread and water; and I had 
 often only the latter." '• But the gold that is refined in the 
 hottest furnace comes out the purest ; or, as he has himself 
 expressed it, " the canary-bird sings sweeter the longer it has 
 been trained in a darkened cage. " j* 
 
 A man like Burns might have divided his hours between 
 poetry and virtuous industry ; industry which all true feeling 
 sanctions, nay prescribes, and which has a beauty, for that 
 cause, beyond the pomp of thrones : but to divide his hours 
 between poetry and rich men's banquets was an ill-starred 
 and inauspicious attempt. How could he be at ease at such 
 banquets ? What had he to do there, mingling his music with 
 the coarse roar of altogether earthly voices ; brightening the 
 thick smoke of intoxication with fire lent him from heaven ? 
 Was it his aim to enjoy life ? To-morrow he must go drudge 
 as an Exciseman ! We wonder not that Burns became moody, 
 indignant, and at times an offender against certain rules of 
 society ; but rather that he did not grow utterly frantic, and 
 run amuck against them all. How could a man, so falsely 
 placed, by his own or others' fault, ever know contentment 
 or peaceable diligence for an hour ? What he did, under such 
 
 132 Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825): A popular, witty, and 
 wise German writer, usually called simply Jean Paul : Carlyle first intro- 
 duced him to English readers in 1827, with an essay on his genius. Best 
 known in English by his '* Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces." 
 
BURNS. G9 
 
 perverse guidance, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us 
 with astonishment at the natural strength and worth of his 
 character. 
 
 Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness ; but 
 not in others ; only in himself ; least of all in simple increase 
 of wealth and worldly "respectability." We hope we have 
 now heard enough about the efficacy of wealth for poetry, and 
 to make poets happy. Nay have we not seen .another instance 
 of it in these very days ? Byron, a man of an endowment con- 
 siderably less ethereal than that of Burns, is born in the rank 
 not of a Scottish plowman, but of an English peer : the 
 highest worldly honors, the fairest worldly career, are his by 
 inheritance ; the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in an- 
 other province, by his own hand. And what does all this 
 avail him ? Is he happy, is he good, is he true ? Alas, he has 
 a poet's soul, and strives towards the Infinite and the Eternal ; 
 and soon feels that all this is but mounting to the house-top 
 to reach the stars ! Like Burns, he is only a proud man ; 
 might, like him, have " purchased a pocket-copy of Milton to 
 study the character of Satan ;" for Satan also is Byron's 
 grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, and the model appar- 
 ently of his conduct. As in Burns's case too, the celestial 
 element will not mingle with the clay of earth ; both poet and 
 man of the world he must not be ; vulgar Ambition will not 
 live kindly with poetic Adoration ; he cannot serve God and 
 Mammon. Byron, like Burns, is not happy ; nay he is the 
 most wretched of all men. His life is falsely arranged : the 
 fire that is in him is not a strong, still, central fire, warm- 
 ing into beauty the products of a world ; but it is the mad 
 fire of a volcano ; and now — we look sadly into the ashes of a 
 crater, which ere long will fill itself with snow ! 
 
 Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries to their 
 generation, to teach it a higher Doctrine, a purer Truth ; 
 they had a message to deliver, which left them no rest till it 
 was accomplished ; in dim throes of pain, this divine behest 
 lay smouldering within them ; for they knew not what it 
 meant, and felt it only in mysterious anticipation, and they 
 had to die without articulately uttering it. They are in the 
 
70 BUENS. 
 
 camp of the Unconverted ; yet not as high messengers of 
 rigorous though benignant truth, but as soft flattering singers, 
 and in pleasant fellowship will they live there : they are first 
 adulated, then persecuted ; they accomplish little for others ; 
 they find no peace for themselves, but only death and the 
 peace of the grave. We confess, it is not without a certain 
 mournful awe that we view the fate of these noble souls, so 
 richly gifted, yet ruined to so little purpose with all their gifts. 
 It seems to us there is a stern moral taught in this piece of 
 history, — twice told us in our own time ! Surely to men of 
 like genius, if there be any such, it carries with it a lesson of 
 deep impressive significance. Surely it would become such a 
 man, furnished for the highest of all enterprises, that of being 
 the Poet of his Age, to consider well what it is that he at- 
 tempts, and in what spirit he attempts it. For the words of 
 Milton are true in all times, and were never truer than in this : 
 " He who would write heroic poems must make his whole life 
 a heroic poem." If he cannot first so make his life, then let 
 him hasten from this arena ; for neither its lofty glories, nor 
 its fearful perils, are fit for him. Let him dwindle into a 
 modish balladmonger ; let him worship and besing the idols 
 of the time, and the time will not fail to reward him. If, 
 indeed, he can endure to live in that capacity ! Byron and 
 Burns could not live as idol-priests, but //the fire of their own 
 hearts consumed them ;l/and better it was for them that they 
 could not. For it is not in the favor of the great or of the 
 small, but in a life of truth, and in the inexpugnable citadel of 
 his own soul, that a Byron's or a Burns's strength must lie. 
 Let the great stand aloof from him, or know how to reverence 
 him. Beautiful is the union of wealth with favor and further- 
 ance for literature ; like the costliest flower-jar enclosing the 
 loveliest amaranth. Yet let not the relation be mistaken. A 
 true poet is not one whom they can hire by money or flattery 
 to be a minister of their pleasures, their writer of occasional 
 verses, their purveyor of table-wit ; he cannot be their menial, 
 he cannot even be their partisan. At the peril of both parties, 
 let no such union be attempted ! Will a Courser of the Sun 
 work softly in the harness of a Dray-liorse ? His hoofs are of. 
 
BURN'S. 71 
 
 fire, and his path is through the heavens, bringing light to all 
 lands ; will he lumber on mud highways, dragging ale for 
 earthly appetites from door to door ? 
 
 But we must stop short in these considerations, which would 
 lead us to boundless lengths. //We had something to say on the 
 public moral character of Burns ; but this also we must for- 
 bear. / We are far from regarding him as guilty before the 
 worl^, as guiltier than the average ; nay from doubting that 
 he is less guilty than one of ten thousand. Tried at a tribunal 
 far more rigid than that where the Plehiscita^^^ of common 
 civic reputations are pronounced, he has seemed to us even 
 there less worthy of blame than of pity and wonder. But the 
 world is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men ; un- 
 just on many grounds, of which this one may be stated as the 
 substance : It decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes ; 
 and not positively but negatively, less on w^hat is done right, 
 than on what is or is not done wrong. Not the few inches of 
 deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily 
 measured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, con- 
 stitutes the real aberration. This orbit may be a planet's, its 
 diameter the breadth of the solar system ; or it may be a city 
 hippodrome ; nay the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score 
 of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are meas- 
 ured : and it is assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse, 
 and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when com- 
 pared with them ! Here lies the root of many a blind, cruel 
 condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, ^^* Rousseaus,^^^ which one 
 never listens to with approval. Granted, the ship comes into 
 harbor with shrouds and tackle damaged ; the pilot is blame- 
 worthy ; he has not been all-wdse and all-powerful : but to 
 know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has 
 
 133. Pleblscita: Lat. pi. of plebiscitum ; plehs. people, and scituvi, de- 
 cree. Hence a decision by the people, as opposed to one b}' the senate or 
 ruling body. 
 
 134. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745): Author of the famous "Gulliver's 
 Travels," and the bitterest and strongest satirist in our literature. See 
 note, p. 58. 
 
 135. Jean Jacques Kousseau (1712-1778): A brilliant French writer, 
 whose political and social speculations were widely influential and mis- 
 chievous. His " Confessions" reveals a man in whom genius and wickedness 
 were strangely mingled. 
 
72 BURNS. 
 
 been round the Globe, or only to Kamsgate"^ and the Isle of 
 Dogs.'" 
 
 With our readers in general, with men of right feeling any- 
 where, we are not required to plead for Burns. In pitying 
 admiration he lies enshrined in all our hearts, in a far nobler 
 mausoleum than that one of marble ; neither will his Works, 
 even as they are, pass away from the memory of men. While 
 the Shakspeares and Miltons roll on like mighty rivers through 
 the country of Thought, bearing fleets of traflBckers and as- 
 siduous pearl-fishers on their waves ; this little Valclusa"® 
 Fountain will also arrest our eye : for this also is of Nature's 
 own and most cunning workmanship, bursts from the depths 
 of the earth, with a full gushing current, into the light of 
 day ; and often will the traveler turn aside to drink of its 
 clear waters, and muse among its rocks and pines ! 
 
 136. Ramssrate : A seaport on the southeast coast of England. 
 
 137. Isle of Dogs : A peninsula of the Thames, where formerly the King's 
 hounds were kept, now occupied by the West India docks. 
 
 1.38. Valclusa : A romantic valley near Avignon, where the Italian poet 
 Petrarch secluded himself for several years. 
 
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