beating with warm and generous emotions, a strong and clear understanding, and a spirit abhorring all meanness, insincerity, and oppression, Burns, in his early days, might have furnished the subject for a great and instructive moral poem. The true elements of poetry were in his life, as in his writings. The wild stirrings of his ambition-which he so nobly compared to the 'blind gropings of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave'-the precocious maturity of his passions and his intellect, his manly frame, that led him to fear no competitor at the plough, and his exquisite sensibility and tenderness, that made him weep over even the destruction of a daisy's flower or a mouse's nest-these are all moral contrasts or blendings that seem to belong to the spirit of romantic poetry. His writings, as we now know, were but the fragments of a great mind-the hasty outpourings of a full heart and intellect. After he had become the fashionable wonder and idol of his day—soon to be cast into cold neglect and poverty !-some errors and frailties threw a shade on the noble and affecting image, but its higher lineaments were never destroyed. The column was defaced, not broken; and now that the mists of prejudice have cleared away, its just proportions and symmetry are recognised with pride and gratitude by his admiring countrymen. of the kingdom. Burns was then in his twentyseventh year, having been born in the parish of Alloway, near Ayr, on the 25th of January 1759. His father was a poor farmer, a man of sterling worth and intelligence, who gave his son what education he could afford. The whole, however, was but a small foundation on which to erect the miracles of genius! Robert was taught English well, and 'by the time he was ten or eleven years of age, he was a critic in substantives, verbs, and particles.' He was also taught to write, had a fortnight's French, and was one summer quarter at land-surveying. He had a few books, among which were the Spectator, Pope's works, Allan Ramsay, and a collection of English Songs. Subsequently-about his twenty-third year-his reading was enlarged with the important addition of Thomson, Shenstone, Sterne, and Mackenzie. Other standard works soon followed. As the advantages of a liberal education were not within his reach, it is scarcely to be regretted that his library was at first so small. What books he had, he read and studied thoroughly-his attention was not distracted by a multitude of volumes-and his mind grew up with original and robust vigour. It is impossible to contemplate the life of Burns at this time, without a strong feeling of affectionate admiration and respect. His manly integrity of character-which, as a peasant, he guarded with jealous dignity-and his warm and true heart, elevate him, in our conceptions, almost as much as the native force and beauty of his poetry. We see him in the veriest shades of obscurity, toiling, when a mere youth, 'like a galley-slave,' to support his virtuous parents and their household, yet grasping at every opportunity of acquiring knowledge from men and books-familiar with the history of his country, and loving its very soil -worshipping the memory of Scotland's ancient patriots and defenders, and exploring the scenes and memorials of departed greatness-loving also the simple peasantry around him, 'the sentiments and manners he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers.' Burning with a desire to do something for old Scotland's sake, with a heart-for the lively and sarcastic, the wild and the * The edition consisted of 600 copies. A second was published in Edinburgh in April 1787, as many as 2800 copies being subscribed for by 1500 individuals. After his unexampled popularity in Edinburgh, Burns took the farm of Ellisland, near Dumfries, married his 'bonny Jean,' and entered upon his new occupation at Whitsunday 1788. He had obtained-what he anxiously desired as an addition to his means as a farmer-an appointment in the Excise; but the duties of this office, and his own convivial habits, interfered with his management of the farm, and he was glad to abandon it. In 1791 he removed to the town of Dumfries, subsisting entirely on his situation in the Excise, which yielded £70 per annum, with an occasional windfall from smuggling seizures. His great ambition was to be a supervisor, from which preferment it was said his political heresies' excluded him; but it has lately been proved, that if any rebuke was administered to the poet, it must have been verbal, for no censure against him was recorded in the excise books. He was on the list for promotion, and had he lived six months longer he would, in the ordinary routine of the service, have been promoted. In 1793. Burns published a third edition of his Poems, with the addition of Tam & Shanter and other pieces composed at Ellisland. A fourth edition, with some corrections, was published in 1794, and this seems to have been the last authorised edition in the poet's lifetime. He died at Dumfries on the 21st of July 1796, aged thirty-seven years and about six months. The story of the poet's life is so well known, that even this brief statement of dates seems unnecessary. The valuable edition of Dr Currie appeared in 1800, and realised a sum of £1400 for Burns's widow and family. It contained the correspondence of the poet, and a number of songs, contributed to Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, and Thomson's Select Scottish Melodies. The editions of Burns since 1800 could with difficulty be ascertained; they were reckoned a few years ago at about a hundred. His poems circulate in every shape, and have not yet 'gathered all their fame.' Burns came as a potent auxiliary or fellowworker with Cowper, in bringing poetry into the channels of truth and nature. There was only about a year between the Task and the Cotter's Saturday Night. No poetry was ever more instantaneously or universally popular among a people than that of Burns in Scotland. A contemporary, Robert Heron, who then resided in Galloway, contiguous to Ayrshire, states that 'old and young, high and low, learned and ignorant, were alike transported with the poems, and that even ploughmen and maid-servants would gladly have bestowed the wages they earned, if they but might procure the works of Burns.' The volume, indeed, contained matter for all minds thoughtful, the poetical enthusiast and the man of the world. So eagerly was the book sought after, that, where copies of it could not be obtained, many of the poems were transcribed and sent round in manuscript among admiring circles. The subsequent productions of the poet did not materially affect the estimate of his powers formed from his first volume. His life was at once too idle and too busy for continuous study; and, alas! it was too brief for the full maturity and development of his talents. Where the intellect predominates equally with the imagination-and this was the case with Burnsincrease of years generally adds to the strength and variety of the poet's powers; and we have no doubt that, in ordinary circumstances, Burns, like Dryden, would have improved with age, and added greatly to his fame, had he not fallen at so early a period, before his imagination could be enriched with the riper fruits of knowledge and experience. He meditated a national drama; but we might have looked with more confidence for a series of tales like Tam o' Shanter, which -with the elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson, one of the most highly finished and most precious of his works-was produced in his happy 187 residence at Ellisland. Above two hundred songs were, however, thrown off by Burns in his latter years, and they embraced poetry of all kinds. Moore became a writer of lyrics, as he informs his readers, that he might express what music conveyed to himself. Burns had little or no technical knowledge of music. Whatever pleasure he derived from it, was the result of personal associations-the words to which airs were adapted, or the locality with which they were connected. His whole soul, however, was full of the finest harmony. So quick and genial were his sympathies, that he was easily stirred into lyrical melody by whatever was good and beautiful in nature. Not a bird sang in a bush, nor a burn glanced in the sun, but it was eloquence and music to his ear. He fell in love with every fine female face he saw; and thus kindled up, his feelings took the shape of song, and the words fell as naturally into their places as if prompted by the most perfect knowledge of music. The inward melody needed no artificial accompaniment. An attempt at a longer poem would have Ichilled his ardour; but a song embodying some one leading idea, some burst of passion, love, patriotism, or humour, was exactly suited to the impulsive nature of Burns's genius, and to his situation and circumstances. His command of language and imagery, always the most appropriate, musical, and graceful, was a greater marvel than the creations of a Handel or Mozart. The Scottish poet, however, knew many old airs-still more old ballads; and a few bars of the music, or a line of the words, served as a key-note to his suggestive fancy. He improved nearly all he touched. The arch humour, gaiety, simplicity, and genuine feeling of his original songs, will be felt as long as 'rivers roll and woods are green.' They breathe the natural character and spirit of the country, and must be coeval with it in existence. Wherever the words are chanted, a picture is presented to the mind; and whether the tone be plaintive and sad, or joyous and exciting, one overpowering feeling takes possession of the imagination. The susceptibility of the poet inspired him with real emotions and passion, and his genius reproduced them with the glowing warmth and truth of nature. Tam o' Shanter is usually considered to be Burns's master-piece: it was so considered by himself, and the judgment has been confirmed by Campbell, Wilson, Montgomery, and almost every critic. It displays more various powers than any of his other productions, beginning with low comic humour and Bacchanalian revelry-the dramatic scene at the commencement is unique, even in Burns-and ranging through the various styles of the descriptive, the terrible, the supernatural, and the ludicrous. The originality of some of the phrases and sentiments, as Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious— the felicity of some of the similes, and the elastic force and springiness of the versification, must also be considered as aiding in the effect. The poem reads as if it were composed in one transport of inspiration, before the bard had time to cool or to slacken in his fervour; and such we know was actually the case. Next to this inimitable 'tale of truth' in originality, and in happy grouping of images, both familiar and awful, we should be disposed to rank the Address to the Deil. The poet adopted the common superstitions of the peasantry as to the attributes of Satan; but though his Address is mainly ludicrous, he intersperses passages of the highest beauty, and blends a feeling of tenderness and compunction with his objurgation of the Evil One. The effect of contrast was never more happily displayed than in the conception of such a being straying in lonely glens and rustling among trees-in the familiarity of sly humour with which the poet lectures so awful and mysterious a personage-who had, as he says, almost overturned the infant world, and ruined all; and in that strange and inimitable outbreak of sympathy in which a hope is expressed for the salvation, and pity for the fate, even of Satan himself— But fare-you-weel, auld Nickie-ben! I'm wae to think upo' yon den, The Jolly Beggars is another strikingly original production. It is the most dramatic of his works, and the characters are all finely sustained. Currie has been blamed by Sir Walter Scott and others for over-fastidiousness in not admitting that humorous cantata into his edition, but we do not believe that Currie ever saw the Folly Beggars. The poem was not published till 1801, and was then printed from the only copy known to exist in the poet's handwriting. Of the Cotter's Saturday Night, the Mountain Daisy, or the Mouse's Nest, it would be idle to attempt any eulogy. In these Burns is seen in his fairest colours-not with all his strength, but in his happiest and most heart-felt inspiration-his brightest sunshine and his tenderest tears. The workmanship of these leading poems is equal to the value of the materials. The peculiar dialect of Burns being a composite of Scotch and English, which he varied at will-the Scotch being generally reserved for the comic and tender, and the English for the serious and lofty-his diction is remarkably rich and copious. No poet is more picturesque in expression. This was the result equally of accurate observation, careful study, and strong feeling. His energy and truth stamp the highest value on his writings. He is as literal as Cowper. The banks of the Doon are described as faithfully as those of the Ouse; and his views of human life and manners are as real and as finely moralised. His range of subjects, however, was infinitely more diversified, including a varied and romantic landscape, the customs and superstitions of his country, the delights of good-fellowship and boon society, the aspirations of youthful ambition, and, above all, the emotions of love, which he depicted with such mingled fervour and delicacy. This ecstasy of passion was unknown to the author of the Task. Nor could the latter have conceived anything so truly poetical as the image of Coila, the tutelar genius and inspirer of the peasant youth in his clay-built hut, where his heart and fancy overflowed with love and poetry. Cowper read and appreciated Burns, and we can picture his astonishment and delight on perusing such strains as Coila's address: Extract from The Vision.' With future hope I oft would gaze, Fired at the simple, artless lays 'I saw thee seek the sounding shore, Strike thy young eye. 'Or when the deep green-mantled earth Warm cherished every flow'ret's birth, And joy and music pouring forth In every grove, I saw thee eye the general mirth 'When ripened fields and azure skies, Called forth the reapers' rustling noise, I saw thee leave their evening joys, And lonely stalk, To vent thy bosom's swelling rise 'When youthful love, warm rm-blushing, strong, I taught thee how to pour in song, 'I saw thy pulse's maddening play, By passion driven; But yet the light that led astray Was light from Heaven. 'I taught thy manners-painting strains, And some, the pride of Coila's plains, "Thou canst not learn, nor can I shew, With Shenstone's art; Or pour, with Gray, the moving flow 'And wear thou this '-she solemn said, And, like a passing thought, she fled Burns never could have improved upon the grace and tenderness of this romantic vision-the finest revelation ever made of the hope and ambition of a youthful poet. Greater strength, however, he undoubtedly acquired with the experience of manhood. His Tam o' Shanter, and Bruce's Address, are the result of matured powers; and his songs evince a conscious mastery of the art and materials of composition. His Vision of Liberty at Lincluden is a great and splendid fragment. The reflective spirit evinced in his early epistles is found, in his Lines written in Friars Carse Hermitage, to have settled into a vein of moral philosophy, clear and true as the lines of Swift, and informed with a higher wisdom. It cannot be said that Burns absolutely fails in any kind of composition, except in his epigrams; these are coarse without being pointed or entertaining. Nature, which had lavished on him such powers of humour, denied him wit. In reviewing the intellectual career of the poet, his correspondence must not be overlooked. His prose style was more ambitious than that of his poetry. In the latter he followed the dictates of nature, warm from the heart, whereas in his letters he aimed at being sentimental, peculiar, and striking; and simplicity was sometimes sacrificed for effect. As Johnson considered conversation to be an intellectual arena, wherein every man was bound to do his best, Burns seems to have regarded letter-writing in much the same light, and to have considered it necessary at times to display all his acquisitions to amuse, gratify, or astonish his admiring correspondents. Considerable deductions must, therefore, be made from his published correspondence, whether regarded as an index to his feelings and situation, or as models of the epistolary style. In subject, he adapted himself too much to the character and tastes of the person he was addressing, and in style he was led away by a love of display. A tinge of pedantry and assumption, or of reckless bravado, was thus at times superinduced upon the manly and thoughtful simplicity of his natural character, which sits as awkwardly upon it as the intrusion of Jove or Danaë into the rural songs of Allan Ramsay.* Burns's letters, however, are valu * The scraps of French in his letters to Dr Moore, Mrs Riddel, &c. have an unpleasant effect. If he had an affectation in anything,' says Dugald Stewart, 'it was in introducing occasionally (in conversation] a word or phrase from that language.' Campbell makes a similar statement, and relates the following anecdote: 'One of his friends, who carried him into the company of a French lady, remarked, with surprise, that he attempted to converse with her in her own tongue. Their French, however, was mutually unintelligible. As far as Burns could make himself understood, he unfortunately offended the foreign lady. He meant to tell her that she was a charming person, and delightful in conversation, but expressed himself so as to appear to her to mean that she was fond of speaking: to which the Gallic dame indignantly replied, that it was quite as common for poets to be impertinent as for women to be loquacious.' The friend who introduced Burns on this occasion (and who herself related the anecdote to Mr Campbell) was Miss Margaret Chalmers, afterwards Mrs Lewis Hay, who died in 1843. The wonder is, that the dissipated aristocracy of the Caledonian Hunt, and the buckish tradesmen of Edinburgh,' left any part of the original plainness and simplicity of his Yet his learned friends saw no change in the proud manners. 189 of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the Æolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? 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 and the grave. able as memorials of his temperament and genius. bell, the foxglove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, He was often distinct, forcible, and happy in ex- and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with pression-rich in sallies of imagination and poeti-particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle cal feeling at times deeply pathetic and impressive. He lifts the veil from the miseries of his latter days with a hand struggling betwixt pride and a broken spirit. His autobiography, addressed to Dr Moore, written when his mind was salient and vigorous, is as remarkable for its literary talent as for its modest independence and clear judgment; and the letters to Mrs Dunlop-in whom he had entire confidence, and whose ladylike manners and high principle rebuked his wilder spirit-are all characterised by sincerity and elegance. One beautiful letter to this lady we are tempted to copy; it is poetical in the highest degree, and touches with exquisite taste on the mysterious union between external nature and the sympathies and emotions of the human frame: In another of his letters we have this striking autobiographical fragment: I have been this morning taking a peep through, as Young finely says, 'the dark postern of time long elapsed; and you will easily guess 'twas a rueful prospect what a tissue of thoughtlessness, weakness, and folly! My life reminded me of a ruined temple; what strength, what proportion in some parts! what unsightly gaps, what prostrate ruins in others! I kneeled down before the Father of Mercies, and said: 'Father, I have sinned against Heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son." I rose eased and strengthened. I despise the superstition of a fanatic, but I love the religion of a man. And again in a similar strain : ELLISLAND, New-year-day Morning, 1789. This, dear madam, is a morning of wishes, and would to God that I came under the apostle James's description !-the prayer of a righteous man availeth much. În that case, madam, you should welcome in a year full of blessings; everything that obstructs or disturbs tranquillity and self-enjoyment should be removed, and every pleasure that frail humanity can taste should be yours. I own myself so little a Presbyterian, that I approve of set times and seasons of more than ordinary acts of devotion, for breaking in on that habituated routine of There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more life and thought which is so apt to reduce our existence-I do not know if I should call it pleasure-but someto a kind of instinct, or even sometimes, and with some thing which exalts me, something which enraptures me minds, to a state very little better than mere machinery. -than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood or high This day, the first Sunday of May, a breezy, blue-plantation in a cloudy winter-day, and hear the stormy skied noon some time about the beginning, and a hoary wind howling among the trees, and raving over the morning and calm sunny day about the end of autumn; these, time out of mind, have been with me a kind of plain! It is my best season for devotion: my mind is wrapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to Him, who, in holiday. the wings of the wind.' the pompous language of the Hebrew bard, 'walks on I believe I owe this to that glorious paper in the Spectator-the Vision of Mirza-a piece that struck my young fancy before I was capable of fixing an idea to a To the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, word of three syllables: 'On the 5th day of the moon, Burns seems to have clung with fond tenacity; it which, according to the custom of my forefathers, I survived the wreck or confusion of his early imalways keep holy, after having washed myself, and pressions, and formed the strongest and most offered up my morning devotions, I ascended the high soothing of his beliefs. In other respects, his hill of Bagdat, in order to pass the rest of the day in creed was chiefly practical. "Whatever mitigates meditation and prayer.' We know nothing, or next to nothing, of the sub-the woes, or increases the happiness of others,' he stance or structure of our souls, so cannot account for those seeming caprices in them, that one should be ticularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which on minds of a different cast, makes no extra ordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain daisy, the hare par self-sustained and self-measuring poet. He kept his ground, and he asked no more. A somewhat clearer knowledge of men's affairs, scarcely of their characters,' says the quaint but true and searching Thomas Carlyle, this winter in Edinburgh 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 degrada: tion 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 for ever between two opinions, two objects; making hampered advancement towards either. But so it is 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!' says, this is my criterion of goodness; and what- But deep this truth impressed my mind, The most resembles God. Conjectures have been idly formed as to the probable effect which education would have had on the mind of Burns. We may as well speculate on the change which might be wrought by the engineer, the planter, and agriculturist, in assimilating the wild scenery of Scotland to that of England. Who would wish-if it were possible-by successive graftings, to make the birch or the pine approximate to the oak or the elm? Nature is various in all her works, and has diversified genius In Burns we have a genuine Scottish poet: why as much as she has done her plants and trees. should we wish to mar the beautiful order and variety of nature by making him a Dryden or a Gray? Education could not have improved Burns's songs, his Tam o' Shanter, or any other of his great poems. He would never have written them but for his situation and feelings as a peasant --and could he have written anything better? The whole of that world of passion and beauty which he has laid open to us might have been hid for ever; and the genius which was so well and worthily employed in embellishing rustic life, and adding new interest and glory to his country, would only have placed him in the long procession of English poets, stripped of his originality, and bearing, though proudly, the ensign of conquest and submission. From the Epistle to James Smith. This while my notion 's ta'en a sklent To try my fate in guid black prent; But still the mair I 'm that way bent, Something cries 'Hoolie! I red you, honest man, tak tent! Ye'll shaw your folly. "There's ither poets, much your betters, Now moths deform in shapeless tatters, Then farewell hopes o' laurel-boughs, An' teach the lanely heights an' howes I'll wander on, with tentless heed I'll lay me with the inglorious dead, But why o' death begin a tale? And large before enjoyment's gale, This life, sae far's I understand, Where pleasure is the magic wand, Maks hours like minutes, hand in hand, The magic wand then let us wield; Wi' wrinkled face, We wander there, we wander here, We eye the rose upon the brier, Unmindful that the thorn is near, Among the leaves! And though the puny wound appear, Short while it grieves. From the Epistle to W. Simpson. At Wallace' name what Scottish blood Still pressing onward, red-wat shod, Oh, sweet are Coila's haughs and woods, While through the braes the cushat croods With wailfu' cry! Even winter bleak has charms to me When winds rave through the naked tree; Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree To a Mountain Daisy, On turning one down with the plough in April 1786. To spare thee now is past my power, Alas! it's no thy neebor sweet, When upward-springing, blithe, to greet Cauld blew the bitter-biting north Scarce reared above the parent earth The flaunting flowers our gardens yield, |