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"Ilk happing bird, wee, helpless thing,
That in the merry month o' spring
Delighted me to hear thee sing,

What's come o' thee?

Where wilt thou cower thy chittering wing,
An' close thy e'e?"

hero:

The clachan yill had made me canty,

I wasna fou, but just had plenty;

I stachered whyles, but yet took tent aye
To free the ditches;

after with proud and tender faithfulness. Once when the two were "going together with carts for coal to the family (and I could yet point out the particular spot), the author first repeated to me the Address to the Deil." Another poem he heard of "as I was holding the plough, When morning comes, however, the and he was letting the water off the fields young poet shakes off his coil of painful, beside me." The "Cotter's Saturday pitiful thought, as chanticleer "shakes off Night" was made known to him first on the pouthery snaw." He, too, "hails the a Sunday afternoon walk-a pleasant morning with a cheer." The toil and moil moment of intercourse which the brothers may sometimes swell a poetic sigh; but often enjoyed together-and Gilbert was Burns is not afraid of them, nor moved by "electrified," as well he might be. A them. In the evening as he comes home, more effectual reply to the ordinary delu- a tipsy neighbour, fallen by the roadside, sion that unbounded leisure and ease are catches his eye; and moved with whimsinecessary for the production of poetry cal indulgent humour, he sits down on the could scarcely be given; for in these two low wall of the brig, and with laughter years Burns was labouring not less but shining in his eyes, summons up before harder than an ordinary ploughman -as him the devious progress of the fallen a man works on his own land, knowing that every prospect in his life depends. upon his exertions. He worked, and he courted, and he feasted, and yet found time, notwithstanding, for such a joyous, torrent of poetry-warm, full, and strong, instinct with life, and full of the delightful ease of inspiration as the most industrious poet by trade we have ever heard of could not have produced in the time. This stream of song included sketches of life and character which have lit up all Scotland; soft friendly outbursts of humour, and genial poetic laughter as sweet as silver bells; and mingled with these, such tender rural philosophies, such pathetic thoughtfulness, pity, and charity as go direct to the heart. It was his very climax of life. Every influence round him entered into his soul. Its doors stood open day and night ready to receive everything that was weak and wanted succour, and ready to be moved by everything that was lovely and noble. In all the world there was not a created thing which he shut out from his sympathy: from the "cowering beastie" in the fields, to auld Nickie-ben in "you lowin' heugh"- he felt for all. He is like a god in his tender thought, in his yearning for their welfare.

When he wakes by night and hears the storm shake the walls of the clay cottage, he does not hug himself upon his individual warmth and comfort like coun

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An' hillocks, stanes, and bushes kenned aye
Frae ghaists an' witches.

"The rising moon began to glower
The distant Cumnock hills out-owre;
To count her horns, wi' a' my power,
I set mysel';

But whether she had three or four,
I couldna tell."

Again, another whimsy seizes him. He vin du pays, the sadly misnamed water of will sing of "Scotch Drink," traditional life in northern lands. With ideal fervour he depicts its potency; ideal, for as yet, at least, no respectable peasant in

Kyle or Carrick is more sober than "rantin', rovin' Robin." He shows us how the "brawny, bainie, ploughman chiel" makes the glowing darksome smithy ring "wi’ dinsome clamour," and "Burnewin comes on like death," after the jovial dram. Even here there comes in a touch of kindly pathos the glimmer of the incipient tear beyond the bright eye's genial laughter,

as he describes how the drink he cele

brates " erects its head" sometimes among
the gentle :-

"But humbly kind in time o' need,
The poor man's wine,
His wee drap parritch, or his bread,
Thou kitchens fine."

The subjects are so much alike that we may almost say it is in the same poem that one of the most brilliant and animated battle-sketches ever made comes in. The Scotch reader foresees at once to what

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Was there ever a more splendid, animated, living picture? "The Highland gill," after all, has very little to do with it; but he whom no faint-hearted doubtings assail-whose rush of fervid valour is limited only by the thought how best to kill twa at a blow who breathes out in the face of death his faint huzzas, what a vision, rapid as the lightning, plucked out of the very heart of battle! In those days the British Isles was a fighting country, prompt to take offence, and ready to resent interfering in every man's affairs; and the reader of that period knew how true was the description. Homer himself could not be more nervous, more curtly powerful, or move us with a deeper roll and rush of heroic emotion. Thus the young ploughman sweeps on, playing upon his readers' hearts as upon a magical instrument, now rolling deep in thunderous swells of feeling, now breathing a sweetness akin to tears. It is impossible to follow him through all those manifold notes, through this flood of harmony at once exciting and soothing, without the warmest sympathy. We know these poems half by heart. Yet when we read them over again they are all as fresh as ever, as radiant with life as if they had been printed yesterday. We change, as the poet bids us, and are grave and gay, and laugh and weep like so many fools, without pause or intermission, while we turn from page to page. Where did he get this heavenly gift? But anyhow, he exercised it while ploughing and reaping, and leading coals along the country roads, and draining the clayey barren fields. Shall we say such a wonder never was? At least it has been as rare as became a miracle.

And does not the reader see how, as these poems grew and breathed into being, the veil of the unknown was lifted, and all Lowland Scotland, sweet and cheery, came to light, as when the sun rises over an unseen land? Some one, we forget at this moment whom, has directed attention lately to the place Scotland held in fiction and poetry before Burns and Scott were. Even Smollett, a Scotsman, dared say very little for his country. It was a land of sour fanatics, of penurious misers, of mean bowing and scraping, of servile acts of all kinds a country which all its sons forsook as soon as possible, to pinch and scrape a living out of English prodigality, and to promote their raw-boned countrymen over the honest Saxon, who was no match for their grovelling cunning. This was the best that was said for us on the other side of the Tweed. The extraordinary revolution of sentiment since is due entirely to the two poets whose mission in very different ways was to make their country known. Burns was the first, and in some points he was very much the greatest. His revelation was deeper, stronger, more original than that of the other. It reached lower down, revealing almost more than one nationality in the warm and tender light by which it made Scotland visible for he made the poor visible at the same time, the common people, the universal basis of society. Hard must that man's heart have been, and opaque his intellect, who, after reading the "Cottar's Saturday Night," could have looked with unchanged eyes upon a cottage anywhere. Scotland was the first object of the revelation- - but after all the world. "At length his lonely cot appears in view, Beneath the shelter of an aged tree.

-

Th' expectant wee things, toddlin,' stacher through

To meet their dad, wi' flichterin' noise an’ glee.

His wee bit ingle, blinkin' bonnily, His clean hearthstane, his thriftie wifie's smile,

The lisping infant prattling on his knee,

Does a' his weary carking cares beguile, An' makes him quite forget his labour an' his toil.

"Belyve, the elder bairns came drapping in, At service out, amang the farmers roun';

Some ca' the pleugh, some herd, some tentie rin Their eldest hope, their Jenny, woman grown,

A cannie errand to a neebor town:

In youthfu' bloom, love sparkling in her e'e, Comes hame, perhaps, to show a braw new

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us is one which connects him with the name of Jean Armour - never thereafter to be separated from his.

The story of his connection with Jean is one which it is most distasteful to tell. Professor Wilson is justly indignant with who ventured to discuss in her lifetime the impertinent freedom of biographers whether her husband had loved her or not, and whether or not she was the occasion of all his misfortunes. It was fit that one of the most generous and manful of critics should have made this protest; but yet it is impossible to exonerate Mrs. Burns from blame. There can be no doubt that her facility and that easy-minded persuadableness, to use the mildest of terms, which made her give him up when not only his peace of mind, but her own honour, was concerned, procured for the man who was so faithful to her the severest trial of his life, and inflicted such pain upon him as nothing else could have done.

All this astonishing work, or at least the greater part of it, was done, as we have said in two years; and these most laborious, most anxious years, in which the poet did no more than "set want at defiance," We need not enter into this miserable and in which he had to maintain a continual story, which is sufficiently well known, conflict with fate, for the sake of all those further than to say that Jean's parents deadditions which the simplest civilization stroyed, with her consent, the "marriagemust add to the wants of nature. To pay lines" which made her Burns's lawful wife their rent, to keep the roof over their heads very shortly before the birth of her first and their mother's head, to preserve the child. Why the father and mother should humble independence of men who were have thus chosen disgrace for their daughtheir own masters, and not hired servants, ter is one of the utterly unexplainable mysthe brothers struggled, sometimes with teries which occur sometimes in the most failing, sometimes with courageous hearts. ordinary life; but when one reflects that During this period Robert met and loved but for this piece of monstrous and uninand lost his Highland Mary, the most spot- telligible folly, Burns's wife might have loss of all his loves. The little that we taken her place in the world as a spotless know of her is all tender, pure, and sweet. matron, no one, except, perhaps, some Her lover celebrated the house in which keen-sighted Mauchline gossip, being any she was a humble maid-servant, in strains the wiser, and the poet himself have been as passionate and reverent as ever knight spared the deepest affliction of his life, and of romance sang to his lady; and one of a stigma which never has been quite rethe sweetest pathetic love-partings re- moved from him, it is hardly possible to corded in the national mythology is that refrain from a certain bitterness of denunin which these two, with tears, and thoughts ciation. The Armours destroyed the martoo deep for tears, exchanged their troth, riage-lines, thus unmarrying the pair; reholding each other's hands across the burn|jected all Burns's overtures; and then, which wimpled between them. "Thou last insult and injury, raised proceedings shall not forswear thyself, but perform un- against him in order to compel him to give to the Lord thy oath," the poet wrote af- security for the maintenance of a child terwards in his Mary's Bible, that grand which he was not to be allowed to claim and simple register of all great incidents as legitimately his. The despair into which in the lives of the poor. But death met he was plunged by these proceedings seems Mary on her way, and compelled her to to us to acquit Burns of all the oft-repeated forswear herself. There is no record as to accusations of profligacy which have been how he bore this blow. His early biogra- brought against him. His own design had phers were all too busy finding out how he been to go to Jamaica (a scheme which was condescended to by the gentlemen, long had hovered in his brain), to work and how many fine houses he was asked to there for his wife's support; but he now dine at, to have eyes or ears for such hum- offered to stay at home, to hire himself out ble matters. And the next incident in as a farm-servant a descent in the world Burns's career which comes clearly before' which, though apparently small, was great

at that level, but which was refused like all Burns himself. Another idea was foremost the rest. It is impossible that a man who in his mind. Had he left the country as was ready to put his sincerity to such a he felt himself forced to do at that misertest, whose attempt to right the wrong he able crisis, he would have left it in disgrace had done was thus voluntary and unforced, - a man shamed, hunted away from his and who was capable of the sentiments native shores, rejected under the most agexpressed in the "Lament," could be a vul-gravating circumstances by the woman gar seducer, a village profligate conversant whom he loved. At such a dismal moment with such adventures. The promised fath- it was natural that there should rise in his er's tender name would have been terrible heart a desire to redeem his name as far and not sweet to such an ordinary villain; as was possible. "It was a delicious idea," and the chances are that such a man would he says, in the narrative of his early life have congratulated himself on the good which he addressed to Dr. Moore, not fortune of his escape, rather than broken much more than a year after, and in which his heart over the failure of his hopes. a certain levity of tone scarcely veils the Never was there sufferer more deeply to recent wounds, "that I should be called a be pitied than the unfortunate young man clever fellow, even though it should never who had thus been suddenly brought to a reach my ears." "It is just the last foolstop in the fulness of his youthful career. ish action I intend to do," he writes in It is as if a ship in full sail, reckless with June 1786, to a friend with whom no forced the security of good weather and past pros- feeling was necessary, a shoemaker in Glasperity, had been suddenly caught by a hur- gow, "and then turn a wise man as soon ricane and dashed against some unsus- as possible." With this motive he drew pected rock. Bitter mortification, wounded forth those homely writing-books and love and pride, the sense of a sacrifice of scraps of manuscript on which were writfered in vain, and of personal rejection and ten the verses which would at that mocontumely, mingled with all his external ment have been a greater loss to the world miseries. He was unable to give the se- than the Crown jewels, and took them to curity required. "I suppose," says Mr. an obscure Kilmarnock printer. Thus Lockhart,security for some four or five humbly stole into the world the last farepounds a year was the utmost that could well to his country of a young man ruined have been demanded from a person in his and wretched-a volume which made more rank: but the man who had in his desk commotion in the world of literature than the immortal poems to which we have been perhaps any one volume has inade since. referring, either disdained to ask, or tried Never was there a humbler entry upon any in vain to find, pecuniary assistance in his stage; and few débutants have been so time of need." Probably the former was heavy-hearted. He was still in hiding, the true state of the case, for borrowing living about in the houses of his friends, was horrible to him. That terrible bug- when the volume appeared. Either its imbear "a jail," a spectre which haunted him mediate success must have cowed those to his dying day with an almost childish strange enemies who were, so to speak, of terror, seemed now to open its gloomy his own house, or his improving prospects doors at his very side. The only thing to disarmed them; for as the book sold he save him was flight. And to fly, accord- seems to have lingered, making new friends, ingly, he made up his mind. The prosecu- and appearing at well-known houses in a tion raised by the Armours drove him into way scarcely practicable to a hunted man. hiding. He skulked from cover to cover Dugald Stewart, with condescension so as he himself describes it, miserable, shame- gracious and amiable that it seems cruel stricken, almost in despair. Even when to call it by that disagreeable name, but a situation was procured for him on the which still was condescension, though most estate of a Dr. Douglas in Jamaica, as un- delicately veiled, had him to his house of der-overseer, he had not money enough Catrine, where he even "dinnered with a (nine pounds) to pay his passage. It was lord" on an occasion which he celebrates in this emergency that he bethought him- with much fun and glee. He formed the self of publishing his poems, or, more like- acquaintance, besides, of Mrs. Stewart of ly, had that expedient suggested to him Stair, and of Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop, afterby his friends. They had become tolerably wards his steady friend and constant corknown in the local world by this time; respondent; and perhaps with some hopes and everybody who knew Burns took it in raised by the very names of these great hand to get subscribers. The hope of a people hopes of an exciseman's place, little profit in the matter scarcely seems, which already tempted him, among others we think, to have bulked very largely with '-he lingered through the autumn, ever

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reluctant to tear himself from his home. ing in this world so much as ploughmen But no help came from any of his patrons; that the entertainments of the fine people, and the poems had produced twenty or at least those "writers' feasts" with pounds. With this he secured a passage which he was most conversant, were, with in a ship from Greenock, and even sent off a few differences in manner, as like as two his chest containing all his humble posses- peas to the peasant carouses in alehouse sions, It was on a gloomy autumn night kitchens. Nay, there would even seem in that he left the manse of Loudoun, where his utter silence about it a kind of suggeshe had gone to take leave of the minister, tion that Burns found in the revels at Dr. Laurie, a friend who was exerting him- Poosie Nansie's the rudimental germ from self busily though secretly on the poet's which the whole sprang, with different debehalf; and gloomier still were his confused grees, no doubt, of decency and politeness, and melancholy thoughts. As he strode but little that was fundamentally greater. over the dreary moorland in the cloudy The ploughmen were like the beggars, gloaming, hope forsook the young man and the writers like the ploughmen, and thus "abandoned, exiled, and forlorn." the lords and philosophers like the writers; Tears came to his eyes, and the familiar and nowhere were there any demi-god 3, language of song to his lips. "Farewell," any Society, high-seated on the topmost he said, with all the bitterness of the parting swelling over him

"Farewell auld Coila's hills and dales,
Her heathy moors and winding vales;
The scenes where wretched fancy roves,
Pursuing past unhappy loves!
Farewell my friends, farewell my foes!
My peace with these my love with those;
The bursting tears my heart declare:
Farewell the bonnie banks of Ayr!"

This was the very darkest moment before the dawn. He had scarcely gone from Loudoun Manse when a letter arrived there from Dr. Blacklock in Edinburgh, a letter which the kind minister had been hoping for, which seems to have raised Burns at once from the depths of despondency to immediate and brilliant hope, though it contained nothing but warm praise and encouragement, and urgent advice that another edition of the poems should be published. So in place of going to Jamaica, the poet, no longer despairing, went off to Edinburgh, and all his life changed like the shifting of a scene in a theatre. The first portion was over, and many scenes completed; but now another fytte of the eventful history was to begin.

rank of humanity, such as Olympus might have stooped to, such as a man might be proud to rise to. For such a society a poet might have born even to be patronized; but he had learned that it was not to be found.

it

Thus there was no illusion in the eyes with which he looked out, gentle but stern, upon society in Edinburgh. Already he had found that siren out, and she could no longer delude, no more excite him. This painful enlightenment is visible through all that follows. He is never enthusiastic, never carried away, always on his guard. He does not plunge into the new world with a neophyte's generous all-belief and foolish admiration, but approaches gravely, holding his peasant head high, penetrated by the discovery that one rank is no better than another, and that one monotonous line of limitation is to be found in all. Had he been transported out of himself, dazzled by his new associations, it would have been more natural, and, perhaps, notwithstanding all that must have followed, it might have been better for him. But the wonder remarked by all was that Burns was never dazzled. He held his head perhaps even a little rigid The next chapter in Burns's life is a very in his sad determination not to be again decurious one; but it was not of the import- ceived, seeing with clear eyes, through all ance which by all rules of likelihood it the homage paid him, that delicatest insoought to have been. He went among the lence of wonder that the ploughman "first circles" of Edinburgh without per- should hold his own so calmly — that softturbation, without enthusiasm, with a calm est, kindest consciousness of his inferiority which utterly and with reason perplexed which ran beneath all the sparkling stream all his learned and witty and refined en- of admiration and adulation. The Ayrtertainers. The secret of this calm lay, shire Ploughman! - he was so distinno doubt, in the fact that he had been al-guished in print and in talk, delicately laready disenchanted. He had found out belled in society, so that no man might what society was from his Mauchline ex- fail to perceive what special claims he had periences, being "quick to learn and wise on the forbearance of the gentlefolks; but to know" as ever man was. He had it was disappointing to them to find no found out that gentlemen were like noth- need for forbearance. Never was a more

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