Burns

“ Burns, in his innate appreciation of the dignity of humanity, is something of a Siegfried, with the fearless spirit of the forest vocal with the song of birds, the aroma of blossoming shrubs, the play of the waterfall and the restful stretch of meadows with their daisies and heather. ”

“ John Ellison forthwith produced a long bent bow of alder, strung with pieces of tied horse-hair.
"Listen," said Henry Burns; and he drew the bow gently across the resined rope. The sound that issued forth—the combined agony of the vibrating wash-boiler and the shrill squeak of the rope—was one hardly to be described. It was like a wail of some unworldly creature, ending with a shuddering twang that grated even on the nerves of Henry Burns's companions. Then Henry Burns laid the bow aside and was ready for the search. ”

“ One of the most interesting of all the pictures of the lives of the world’s literary leaders is the picture of Robert Burns, after a day of toil on the farm, walking from Mossgiel farm, when his evening meal was over, two miles to his favourite seat in the woods on Ballochmyle estate, and sitting there on the high bank of the Ayr in the long Scottish gloaming, and often on in the moonlight, ‘shut in with God,’ revealing in sublime form the visions that thrilled his soul. ”

“ 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 Humor. Everywhere, indeed, in his sunny moods, a full buoyant flood of mirth rolls through the mind of Burns; he rises to the high, and stoops to the low, and is brother and playmate to all Nature. ”

“ Burns, even more ardently than his wife, responded to the appeal. He no longer lounged among the pillows of the broad couch; he sat erect, his eyes intent, his lips relaxed, his cares forgot. He was a lover of music, as are many men of his profession, and he was more than ordinarily susceptible to its influences. He drank in the tones of the master, voiced by this devoted interpreter, like wine, and like wine they brought the colour to his face also, and the light to his eyes.
"Jove!" he murmured, as the last note died away, "he's a wonder. He must be older than he looks. How he loves it! ”

“ Such is the stamp of living literature; and there was never any more alive than that of Burns.
What a gust of sympathy there is in him sometimes flowing out in byways hitherto unused, upon mice, and flowers, and the devil himself; sometimes speaking plainly between human hearts; sometimes ringing out in exultation like a peal of bells! When we compare the Farmer’s Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie, with the clever and inhumane production of half a century earlier, The Auld Man’s Mare’s dead, we see in a nutshell the spirit of the change introduced by Burns. ”

“ Such grace and truth of external movement, too, presupposes in general a corresponding 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 sternest ire, or laughs with the loudest or sliest mirth ”

“ Were strange to a practical man like Burns,
Who minded only his own concerns,
Troubled no more by fancies fine
Than one of his calm-eyed, long-tailed kine—
Quite old-fashioned and matter-of-fact,
Slow to argue, but quick to act. ”

“ 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 perplexed ”

“ 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 nursery-ground anywise prospered, the boy Robert had been sent 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! ”

“ The manufacturing town, as well as the country, has found its Burns. As Burns grew and lived amid the open fields, inhaling their free winds, catching views of the majestic mountains as he trod the furrowed field, and making acquaintance with the lowliest flower and the lowliest creatures of the earth, as he toiled on in solitude; so Elliott grew and lived amid the noisy wilderness of dingy houses, inhaling smoke from a thousand furnaces, forges, and engine chimneys, and making acquaintance with misery in its humblest shapes, as he toiled on in the solitude of neglect. ”

“ Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how he sank unaided by any real help, uncheered by any wise sympathy, generous 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. ”

“ For an hour, in the light from one of the Green Imp's lamps, Chester sat on an overturned box and watched Burns work. He worked savagely, as if applying surgical measures to a mood as well as to a machine. He worked like a skilled mechanic as well; every turn of a nut, every polish of a thread meaning definite means to an end. ”

“ Burns had been recently laboring with some success, and where he had seen "a town giving itself up to utter ungodliness, a town where Satan's trenches were deep and wide, his wall strong and high, his garrison great and fearless, and where all that man could do seemed but as arrows shot against a tower of brass." ”

“ Another thing that disturbed Henry Burns not a little was the knowledge that his excursions over the roof were now attended with greater risk than ever. It would not do to encounter the stranger there unexpectedly. What might not the man, suddenly aroused, and desperate, as Henry Burns believed him to be, do to him, if he found himself discovered? A fall from such a height must mean instant death, and who was there to suspect that he had not fallen, if he should be found next day lying upon the ground? ”

“ All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has left, seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than a poor mutilated fraction 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 occasional effusions; poured forth with little premeditation; expressing, by such means as offered, the passion, opinion, or humor of the hour. ”

“ The real Burns was not the dropper of tears over ploughed-under weeds but the man who brought in the neighbours for a [Pg 308] kirn-night and kissed the lasses after every dance; the man who sat by farmers’ ingles and on ale-house benches listening to the racy earthy talk of his people and storing his mind with folk sayings and old songs. He was not ashamed of being a Scottish peasant, the heir of all the picturesque and frequently bawdy tradition of Scots folk literature. Neither was the man who wrote, ‘But yet the light that led astray Was light from Heaven’, ashamed of his human nature. ”

“ At the end of this strange season, Burns gloomily sums up his gains and losses, and meditates on the chaotic future. In money he is somewhat richer; 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. ”

“ Burns, he spent that day, though labouring under cold, in the usual work of his harvest, and apparently in excellent spirits. But as the twilight deepened, he appeared to grow 'very sad about something,' and at length wandered out to the barn-yard, to which his wife, in her anxiety for his health, followed him, entreating him, in vain, to observe that the frost had set in, and to return to the fireside. ”

“ Human suffering did not end with the life of Burns; neither was the solemn mandate, "Love one another, bear one another's burdens," [109] 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. ”

“ This is one and a chief charm of Burns' love-songs, which are certainly of all love-songs except those wild snatches left to us by her who flung herself from the Leucadian rock, the most in earnest, the tenderest, the "most moving delicate and full of life." Burns makes you feel the reality and the depth, the truth of his passion: it is not her eyelashes, or her nose, or her dimple, or even
"A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I' the bottom of a cowslip,"
that are "winging the fervour of his love;" ”

“ He is one of the most democratic of poets, he takes for his subject a simple experience—a family gathering at eventide, a fair, a merrymaking, a joy, a grief, the finding of a flower, the love of a lad for a lass—and with rare simplicity reflects the emotion that such an experience awakens. Seen through the poet's eyes, this simple emotion becomes radiant and lovely, a thing not of earth but of heaven. That is the genius of Burns, to ennoble human feeling, to reveal some hidden beauty in a commonplace experience. ”

“ We saw Burns's house - a place that made me deeply sad - and spent the afternoon down the banks of the Nith. I had not spent a day by a river since we lunched in the meadows near Sudbury. The air was as pure and clear and sparkling as spring water; beautiful, graceful outlines of hill and wood shut us in on every side; and the swift, brown river fled smoothly away from before our eyes, rippled over with oily eddies and dimples. White gulls had come up from the sea to fish, and hovered and flew hither and thither among the loops of the stream. ”

“ 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.... And that spirit, which might have soared could it but have walked, soon sank to the dust, its glorious faculties trodden under foot in the blossom; and died, we may almost say, without ever having lived. ”

“ Burns nodded—and bolted. These Job's comforters—were they trying to make the thing seem even more unbearable than it already was? Certainly they were succeeding admirably. He went on about his work with set teeth, expecting at the next turn to run into Fields. He would undoubtedly find him at the hospital, ready to greet him with some croaking sympathy. True to his expectations Fields met him at the door. He himself was looking particularly prosperous and cheerful, as people have a way of appearing to us when our trouble is root theirs. ”

“ But now,” he continued eloquently, his voice ringing with gladness, “the bright sunlight is peeping around the fast disappearing cloud, warming my very soul with its joyous rays. Oh, my lord, if ever the name of Robert Burns should e’en become familiar to his countrymen,’twill be through your graciousness, your benevolence, to a poor unknown, humble plowman,” and his eyes filled with tears of love and gratitude for his noble benefactor. ”

“ With our readers in general, with men of right feeling anywhere, 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. ”

“ Burns frowned. No physician likes to be questioned about his cases, particularly if they are not progressing to suit him. But he answered, in a sort of growl: "She's not doing."
King looked startled. "You mean—not doing well?"
"She's fighting for existence—and—slipping."
"But—you haven't given her up?"
Burns exploded with instant wrath. King might have known that question would make him explode. "Given her up! Don't you know a red-headed fiend like me better than that?"
"I know you're a bulldog when you get your teeth in," admitted Jordan King, looking decidedly unhappy and anxious. ”

“ CXXIX. A VISION.
[This Vision of Liberty descended on Burns among the magnificent ruins of the College of Lincluden, which stand on the junction of the Cluden and the Nith, a short mile above Dumfries. He gave us the Vision; perhaps, he dared not in those yeasty times venture on the song, which his secret visitant poured from her lips. The scene is chiefly copied from nature: the swellings of the Nith, the howling of the fox on the hill, and the cry of the owl, unite at times with the natural beauty of the spot, and give it life and voice. These ruins were a favourite haunt of the poet.] ”