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 residence at Ellisland. Above two hundred songs Burns's House, Dumfries. 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 masterpiece: 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 But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben! Even for your sake! The Jolly Beggars is another strikingly original production. It is the most dramatic of his works, and the characters are all finely sustained. 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 were, however, thrown off by Burns in his latter years, and they embraced poetry of all kinds. Mr 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 chilled 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-not with all his strength, but in his happiest and 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 keynote 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 most heartfelt 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 73 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 ecstacy 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: '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 I saw thee eye the general mirth When ripened fields and azure skies, To vent thy bosom's swelling rise When youthful love, warm-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 I taught thy manners-painting strains, And some, the pride of Coila's plains, Thou canst not learn, nor can I show, With Shenstone's art; Yet, all beneath the unrivalled rose, Yet green the juicy hawthorn grows Then never murmur nor repine; Can give a bliss o'ermatching thine, To give my counsels all in one- And trust, the universal plan 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 deep 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 patronising 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, and 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. *The scraps of French in his letters to Dr Moore, Mrs Riddell, &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 Burns's letters, however, are valuable as memorials of his temperament and genius. He was often distinct, forcible, and happy in expression-rich in sallies of imagination and poetical 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: '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. In 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 life and thought which is so apt to reduce our existence to a kind of instinct, or even sometimes, and with some minds, to a state very little better than mere machinery. This day, the first Sunday of May, a breezy, blue-skied noon some time about the beginning, and a hoary morning and calm sunny day about the end of autumn; these, time out of mind, have been with me a kind of holiday. I believe I owe this to that glorious paper in the 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 manners. Yet his learned friends saw no change in the proud 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 charac ters,' 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 degradation 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 ham pered 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, în vexatious altercation, till the night come, and our fair is over!' Spectator-the Vision of Mirza-a piece that struck my young fancy before I was capable of fixing an idea to a word of three syllables: "On the 5th day of the moon, which, according to the custom of my forefathers, I always keep holy, after having washed myself, and offered up my morning devotions, I ascended the high hill of Bagdat, in order to pass the rest of the day in meditation and prayer." We know nothing, or next to nothing, of the substance or structure of our souls, so 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 favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle 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 Eolian 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 wo beyond death and the grave.' Burns seems to have clung with fond tenacity: it To the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, survived the wreck or confusion of his early impressions, and formed the strongest and most soothing of his beliefs. In other respects his creed was chiefly practical. Whatever mitigates the woes, or increases the happiness of others,' he says, "this is my criterion of goodness; and whatever injures society at large, or any individual in it, this is my reason of iniquity.' The same feeling he had expressed in one of his early poems But deep this truth impressed my mind, The heart benevolent and kind 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 as much as she has done her plants and trees. In Burns we have a genuine Scottish poet: why 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 swelled the long procession of English poets, stript of his originality, and bearing, though proudly, the ensign of conquest and sub mission. [From Burns's Epistles.] We'll sing auld Coila's plains and fells, Her moors red-brown wi' heather bells, Her banks and braes, her dens and dells, Where glorious Wallace Aft bure the gree, as story tells, Frae southron billies. 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 Are hoary gray: Oh nature! a' thy shows and forms Or winter howls in gusty storms The Muse, nae poet ever fand her, Oh sweet, to stray and pensive ponder Then farewell hopes o' laurel-boughs, And teach the lanely heights and 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, Comes hostin', hirplin' owre the field, Wi' creepin' pace. When ance life's day draws near the gloamin', And fareweel dear, deluding woman! Oh Life! how pleasant in thy morning, Like schoolboys, at the expected warning, We wander there, we wander here, Among the leaves! And though the puny wound appear, 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 neibor 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, There in thy scanty mantle clad, Such is the fate of artless maid, Such is the fate of simple bard, Of prudent lore. Such fate to suffering worth is given, Even thou who mourn'st the daisy's fate, That fate is thine-no distant date; Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives, elate, Full on thy bloom, Till crushed beneath the furrow's weight, Shall be thy doom. On Captain Matthew Henderson. A gentleman who held the patent for his honours immediately from Almighty God. Should the poor be flattered?'-Shakspeare. But now his radiant course is run, Oh Death! thou tyrant fell and bloody! And like stock-fish come o'er his studdie He's gane! he's gane! he's frae us torn, Where, haply, Pity strays forlorn, Ye hills, near neibors o' the starns, Where echo slumbers! Come join, ye Nature's sturdiest bairns, Mourn, ilka grove the cushat kens! Or foaming strang, wi' hasty stens, Mourn, little harebells o'er the lea; In scented bowers; Ye roses on your thorny tree, At dawn, when every grassy blade At even, when beans their fragrance shed Ye maukins whiddin through the glade, Mourn, ye wee songsters o' the wood; Ye whistling plover; And mourn, ye whirring paitrick brood! Mourn, sooty coots, and speckled teals, Mourn, clamering craiks at close o' day, Tell thae far worlds wha lies in clay 1 Eagles. Ye houlets, frae your ivy bower, Wail through the dreary midnight hour Oh, rivers, forests, hills, and plains! And frae my een the drapping rains Mourn, spring, thou darling of the year, Thy gay, green, flowery tresses shear Thou, autumn, wi' thy yellow hair, Wide o'er the naked world declare The worth we've lost! Mourn him, thou sun, great source of light! For through your orb he's ta'en his flight, Oh, Henderson! the man-the brother! Like thee, where shall we find another, Go to your sculptured tombs, ye great, [Songs.] Macpherson's Farewell. Farewell, ye dungeons dark and strong, The wretch's destinie! Macpherson's time will not be long On yonder gallows-tree. Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, Sae dauntingly gaed he; He played a spring, and danced it round, Oh, what is death but parting breath! Untie these bands from off my hands, I've lived a life of sturt and strife; I die by treacherie; It burns my heart I must depart Now farewell light-thou sunshine bright, May coward shame distain his name, |