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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Real Robert Burns, by J. L. Hughes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Real Robert Burns
+
+Author: J. L. Hughes
+
+Release Date: February 17, 2011 [EBook #35299]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REAL ROBERT BURNS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE REAL ROBERT BURNS
+
+
+
+
+  THE REAL ROBERT BURNS
+
+
+  BY J. L. HUGHES, LL.D.
+  Author of 'Dickens as an Educator,' &c.
+
+
+  LONDON: 38 Soho Square, W.1
+  W. & R. CHAMBERS, LIMITED
+
+  EDINBURGH: 339 High Street
+  THE RYERSON PRESS
+
+  TORONTO: Corner Queen and John Streets
+
+
+
+
+  Printed in Great Britain.
+  W. & R. CHAMBERS, LTD., LONDON and EDINBURGH.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                    PAGE
+
+  FOREWORD                                      7
+
+  I. THE TRUE VALUES OF BIOGRAPHY               9
+
+  II. THE EDUCATIONAL ADVANTAGES OF BURNS      17
+
+  III. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF BURNS            35
+
+  IV. BURNS WAS A RELIGIOUS MAN                63
+
+  V. BURNS THE DEMOCRAT                        99
+
+  VI. BURNS AND BROTHERHOOD                   126
+
+  VII. BURNS A REVEALER OF PURE LOVE          135
+
+  VIII. BURNS A PHILOSOPHER                   167
+
+  IX. THE DEVELOPMENT OF BURNS                197
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD.
+
+
+The writer of the following pages learned years ago to reverence the
+memories of Burns and Dickens. Frequently hearing one or the other
+attacked from platform or pulpit, and believing both to be great
+interpreters of the highest things taught by Christ, as the basis of the
+development of humanity towards the Divine, he resolved that some day he
+would try to help the world to understand correctly the work of these two
+great men. His book, _Dickens as an Educator_, has helped to give a new
+conception of Dickens, as an educational pioneer and as a philosopher. The
+purpose of this book is to show that Burns was well educated, and that
+both in his poems and in his letters he was an unsurpassed exponent of the
+highest human ideals yet expressed of religion--democracy based on the
+value of the individual soul, brotherhood, love, and the philosophy of
+human life.
+
+The writer believes that gossiping in regard to the weakness of the living
+is indecent and degrading, but that it is pardonable as compared with the
+debasing practice of gossiping about the weaknesses of the dead. Those who
+can wallow in the muck of degraded biographers are only a degree less
+wicked than the biographers themselves, who sin against the dead, and sin
+against the living by providing debasing matter for them to read.
+
+The evidence to prove the positions claimed to be true in this book is
+mainly taken from the poems and letters of Burns himself. Some may doubt
+the sincerity of Burns. Carlyle had no doubt about his sincerity or his
+honesty. He says of the popularity of Burns: '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 excellence? To answer
+this question will not lead us far. The excellence of Burns is, indeed,
+among the rarest, whether in poetry or in prose, but, at the same time, it
+is plain and easily recognised--_his sincerity, his indisputable air of
+truth_.'
+
+Speaking of the moral character of Burns, Carlyle said: 'We are far from
+regarding him as guilty before the world, as guiltier than the average;
+nay, from doubting that _he is less guilty than one of ten thousand_....
+What he _did_ under such circumstances, and what he _forbore to do_, alike
+fill us with astonishment at the _natural strength and worth of his
+character_.'
+
+Shakespeare says in _Hamlet_: 'Ay, sir, to be honest, as this world goes,
+is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.' Carlyle chose Burns as one
+of ten thousand.
+
+These quotations should help two classes of men: the 'unco guid,' who
+believe evil stories, most of which had no real foundation; and those
+professed lovers of Burns who love him for his weaknesses. The real Robert
+Burns was not weak enough to suit either of these two classes. 'Less
+guilty than one in ten thousand' is a high standard.
+
+To do something to help all men and women to a juster understanding of the
+real Robert Burns is the aim of the writer. Let us learn, and ever
+remember, that he was a reverent writer about religion, a clear
+interpreter of Christ's teaching of democracy and brotherhood, a profound
+philosopher, and the author of the purest love-songs ever written.
+
+
+
+
+THE REAL ROBERT BURNS.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE TRUE VALUES OF BIOGRAPHY.
+
+
+A man's biography should relate the story of his development in power, and
+his achievements for his fellow-men. Biography can justify itself only in
+two ways: by revealing the agencies and experiences that formed a man's
+character and aided in the growth of his highest powers; and by relating
+the things he achieved for humanity, and the processes by which he
+achieved them.
+
+Only the good in the lives of great men should be recorded in biographies.
+To relate the evil men do, or describe their weaknesses, is not only
+objectionable, it is in every way execrable. It degrades those who write
+it and those who read it. Biography should not be mainly a story; it
+should be a revelation, not of evil, but of good. It should unfold and
+impress the value of the visions of the great man whose biography is being
+written, and his success in revealing his high visions to his fellow-men.
+It should tell the things he achieved or produced to make the world
+better; the things that aid in the growth of humanity towards the divine.
+The biographer who tells of evils is, from thoughtlessness or malevolence,
+a mischievous enemy of mankind.
+
+No man's memory was ever more unjustly dealt with than the memory of
+Robert Burns. His first editor published many poems that Burns said on his
+death-bed should be allowed 'to sink into oblivion,' and told all of
+weakness that he could learn in order that he might be regarded as just.
+He considered justice to himself of more consequence than justice to
+Burns, or to humanity. His only claim to be remembered is the fact that he
+prepared the poems of Burns for publication, and wrote his biography. It
+is much to be regretted that he had not higher ideals of what a biography
+should be, not merely for the memory of the man about whom it is written,
+but for its influence in enlightening and uplifting those who read it.
+Biographers should reveal not weaknesses, but the things achieved for God
+and humanity.
+
+Carlyle, writing of the biographers of Burns, says: '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 important thing: their own and the
+world's true relation to the author, and the style in which 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 patronising, apologetic air, as
+if the polite public might think it strange and half unwarrantable that
+he, a man of science, a scholar and a gentleman, should do such honour to
+a rustic. In all this, however, we readily admit that his fault was not
+want of love, but weakness of faith; and regret 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 offends more deeply in the same kind,
+and both err alike in presenting us with a detached catalogue of his
+attributes, virtues, and vices, _instead of a delineation of the resulting
+character as a living unity_.'
+
+The biographers of Robert Burns criticised reputed defects of his--defects
+common among men of all classes and all professions in his time--but
+failed to give him credit for his revelations of divine wisdom. They
+bemoaned his lack of religion--though he was a reverently religious
+man--instead of telling the simple truth that he was the greatest
+religious reformer of his time in any part of the world. They said he was
+not a Christian because he did not perform certain ceremonies required by
+the churches, when freer and less bigoted men would have told the real
+fact, that he was one of the world's greatest interpreters of Christ's
+highest ideals--democracy and brotherhood. He still holds that high rank.
+They related idle gossip about his vanity and other trivial stories,
+instead of being content with proclaiming him the greatest genius of his
+time in the comprehensiveness of his visions, and in the scope of his
+powers. Some of them tried to prove that he was not a loyal man; they
+should have revealed him as the giant leader of men in making them
+conscious of the value of liberty and of the right of every man to its
+fullest enjoyment.
+
+The oft-repeated charge of disloyalty was disproved when the charge was
+made during the life of Burns, but the false accusation has been accepted
+as a fact by many people to the present time. Fortunately the records of
+the Dumfries Volunteers have been discovered recently, and Mr William
+Will has published them in a book entitled _Robert Burns as a Volunteer_.
+They prove most conclusively that Burns was a truly loyal man. When the
+Provost of Dumfries called a meeting of the citizens of Dumfries to
+consider the need of establishing a company of Volunteers Burns attended
+the meeting, and was chosen as a member of a small committee to write to
+the king asking permission to form a company. When permission was granted
+by the king, Burns joined the company on the night when it was first
+organised, and sat up most of the night composing 'The Dumfries
+Volunteers,' the most inspiring poem of its kind ever written. It did more
+to arouse the people of Scotland and England to put down the bolshevism of
+the time than any other loyal propaganda.
+
+The minutes of the Volunteer Company in Dumfries give a perfect answer to
+the basest slander ever made against Burns--that he had sunk so low as a
+hopelessly vile drunkard the respectable people of Dumfries would not
+associate with him; that he was ostracised by the community at large. Yet
+this 'ostracised man' was chosen by the best citizens of Dumfries as one
+of the committee to write to King George, and was elected as a member of
+the committee to manage the company. This slander was so generally
+accepted in Carlyle's time that even Carlyle himself wrote that Burns did
+not die too soon, as he had lost the respect of his fellow-men, and had
+lost also the power to write. His first statement is proved to have no
+true foundation by the record of the Dumfries Volunteer Company, and the
+second by the fact that Burns wrote the greatest poem ever written by any
+man to interpret Christ's highest visions, democracy and brotherhood, 'A
+Man's a Man for a' That,' the year before he died, and 'The Dumfries
+Volunteers.' The second year before his death he wrote 'The Tree of
+Liberty' and 'The Ode to Liberty,' and the third year before he died he
+wrote the clarion call to fight in defence of freedom, 'Scots, wha hae.'
+These poems have no equals in any literature of their kind. During the
+same three years of his life he wrote one hundred and seventeen other fine
+songs and sent them to Edinburgh for publication, the last one on the
+ninth day before his death. It should be remembered, too, that Burns had
+to ride two hundred miles each week in the discharge of his duty to the
+government; and that after the organisation of the Volunteer Company he
+had to drill four hours each week, and attend the meetings of the company
+committee. The minutes of the company show he was never fined for absence.
+
+The last meeting he attended before his fatal illness was called to
+prepare a letter of gratitude to God for preserving the life of the king
+when the London bolshevistic mob tried to kill him on his way to the House
+of Commons. Assisting to prepare this letter to the king was the last
+public act of Burns.
+
+Had his weaknesses been tenfold what they were, his biographers should
+have said nothing about them, for in spite of his human weakness he had
+divine power to reveal to all men Christ's teachings--democracy and
+brotherhood, based on the value of the individual soul. He was also the
+greatest poet of religion, ethics, and love; and he holds a high place
+among the loving interpreters of Nature.
+
+To relate facts in his life to account for the development of his powers,
+so that he was able to be so great a revealer of the highest things in the
+lives of men and women, should have been the work of his biographers.
+
+It is worthy of note that Wordsworth wrote to the publishers of the
+biography of Burns in regard to the true attitude of a biographer. He
+objected to recording imputed failings, and expressed indignation at Dr
+Currie for devoting so much attention to the infirmities of Burns.
+
+Chambers and Douglas were in most respects better than his other early
+biographers. The Rev. Lauchlan MacLean Watt, of Edinburgh, wrote for the
+Nation's Library in 1914 the sanest, truest book yet written about Burns.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE EDUCATIONAL ADVANTAGES OF BURNS.
+
+
+Many people still speak of Burns as an 'uneducated man.' Although a
+farmer, he was in reality a well-educated man. He was not a finished
+scholar in the accepted sense of the universities, but both in his poetry
+and in his unusually forceful and polished prose he was superior to most
+of the university men of his time. He had read many books, the best books
+that his intelligent father could buy, or that he could borrow from
+friends or from libraries. In addition to school-books, he names the
+following among those books read in his youth and young manhood--_The
+Spectator_, Pope's Works, Shakespeare, Works on Agriculture, _The
+Pantheon_, Locke's _Essay on the Human Understanding_, Stackhouse's
+_History of the Bible_, Justice's _British Gardener_, Boyle Lectures,
+Allan Ramsay's Works, Doctor Taylor's _Doctrine of Original Sin_, _A
+Select Collection of English Songs_, Hervey's _Meditations_, Thomson's
+Works, Shenstone's Works, _The Letters by the Wits of Queen Anne's
+Reign_, Sterne's _Tristram Shandy_, Mackenzie's _The Man of Feeling_,
+Macpherson's _Ossian_, two volumes of _Pamela_, and one novel by Smollett,
+_Ferdinand, Count Fathom_. In addition to these he had read some French
+and some Latin books, guided by one of the greatest teachers of his time,
+John Murdoch, who was so great that when he established a private school
+in London his fame spread to France, and some leading young men, notably
+Talleyrand, came to receive his training and inspiration.
+
+William Burns read regularly at night to his two sons, Robert and Gilbert,
+and after the reading the three fellow-students discussed the matter that
+had been read, each from his own individual standpoint. As the boys grew
+older they read books during their meals, so earnest were they in their
+desire to become acquainted with the best thought of the world's leaders,
+so far as it was available. David Sillar has stated that Robert generally
+carried a book with him when he was alone, that he might read and think.
+When Robert settled at Ellisland he aroused an interest among the people
+of the district, and succeeded in establishing a circulating library.
+
+His father, though a labourer, was supremely desirous that his family
+should be educated and thoughtful. This desire prompted him to become a
+farmer, that he might keep his family at home. He was an independent
+thinker himself, and by example and experience he trained his sons to love
+reading and to think independently. Robert never thought he was thinking
+when he let other people's thoughts run through his mind.
+
+The result of the reading and thinking which their father led Robert and
+Gilbert to do was most gratifying. The influence on Robert's mind must be
+recognised. He became not only a great writer in prose and in poetry, but
+a great orator as well. He stood modestly, but conscious of his power, and
+proved his superiority both in conversation and impromptu oratory to the
+leading university men of his time in Edinburgh. Gilbert, too, became an
+original thinker and a writer of clear and forceful English. In a long
+letter to Dr Currie he discussed very profoundly and very independently
+some deep psychological ideas in excellent language. Few men of his time
+could have written more thoughtfully or more definitely. As illustrations
+of Robert's learning, as well as of his independent thought in relating
+the books he read to each other and to human life, two instances are worth
+recording. First, in a letter to Dr Moore,[1] of London, an author of
+some distinction, who had sent him a copy of one of his books, Burns said,
+1790: 'You were pleased to express a wish for my opinion of your work,
+which so flattered me that nothing less would serve my overweening fancy
+than a formal criticism on the book. In fact, I have gravely planned a
+comparative view of you, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett in your
+different qualities and merits as novel writers. This, I own, betrays my
+ridiculous vanity, and I may probably never bring the business to bear,
+but I am fond of the spirit young Elihu shows in the Book of Job--"And I
+said, I will also declare my opinion."'
+
+To Mrs Dunlop he wrote, 1788: 'Dryden's _Virgil_ has delighted me. I do
+not know whether the critics will agree with me, but the _Georgics_ are to
+me by far the best of Virgil. It is indeed a species of writing entirely
+new to me, and has filled my head with a thousand fancies of emulation....
+I own I am disappointed in the _AEneid_. Faultless correctness may please,
+and does highly please, the letter critic; but to that awful character I
+have not the most distant pretensions. I do not know whether I do not
+hazard my pretensions to be a critic of any kind, when I say that I think
+Virgil, in many instances, a servile copier of Homer. If I had the
+_Odyssey_ by me, I could parallel many passages where Virgil has evidently
+copied, but by no means improved, Homer. Nor can I think there is anything
+of this owing to the translators; for from everything I have seen of
+Dryden, I think him in genius and fluency of language Pope's Master.'
+
+But a small percentage of university graduates of his time could have
+written independent criticisms, wise or otherwise, of Homer and Virgil, or
+even of English writers, as clearly as Burns did. They could have told
+what the opinions of other people were in regard to Homer and Virgil; they
+could have told what they had been told. Burns had been trained to think
+by his father, and to express his own thoughts about the books he read;
+they had merely been informed. The advantage in real education was greatly
+in favour of Burns. Their memories had been stored with opinions of
+others; his mind had been trained to read carefully, to relate the
+thoughts of others to life, to decide as to their wisdom, and to think
+independently himself. His education from books was somewhat limited, but
+the development of his mind that came from discussions of the value of the
+matter read was vital, and helped him to relate himself to men, to nature
+around him, to the universe, and to God.
+
+In schools Burns had not a very extended experience. When six years old he
+was sent to a small school beside the mill on the Doon at Alloway. His
+teacher gave up the school soon after Burns began to attend it. Mr Burns
+secured the co-operation of several of his neighbours, and they engaged a
+young man named Murdoch to teach their children, agreeing to take him in
+turn as their guest, and to pay him a small salary. The fact that John
+Murdoch formed a high estimate of Mr Burns is a proof of the ability and
+sincerity of the father of the poet.
+
+When Burns was seven years old his father removed to Mount Oliphant farm,
+but Robert continued to attend the school of Mr Murdoch, about two miles
+away, in Alloway. The books used were a spelling-book, the New Testament,
+the Bible, Mason's _Collection of Prose and Verse_, and Fisher's _English
+Grammar_.
+
+Mr Murdoch gave up his Alloway school when Burns was nine years old. After
+that time the teacher of his sons was their father. He taught them
+arithmetic, and bought them Salmon's _Geographical Grammar_, Derham's
+_Physico- and Astro-Theology_, Hay's _Wisdom of God in the Creation_, and
+the _History of the Reigns of James I. and Charles I. of England_. Robert,
+when eleven years old, showed a deep interest in the study of grammar and
+language, and 'excelled as a critic in substantives, verbs, and
+participles.' In his twelfth year he was kindled in his patriotic spirit
+by the _Life of Sir William Wallace_. Wallace remained a hero to him
+throughout his life. In his thirty-fifth year he wrote the grandest call
+to the defence of liberty ever written, beginning:
+
+  Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled.
+
+In his eleventh year, which seemed to be a kindling epoch in his mind, his
+mother's brother gave him a collection of _Letters by the Wits of Queen
+Anne's Reign_. He read them over and over again, greatly delighted by both
+their contents and their literary style. They had a distinct influence in
+forming his own prose style, as during his twelfth year he conducted an
+imaginary correspondence of quite an extensive character and in a stately
+style.
+
+When he was thirteen the greatest kindler of his early powers, John
+Murdoch, became teacher of English in the Ayr High School. Robert was
+sent to board with him to study grammar and composition. He received
+instruction from Murdoch in French and in Latin. He continued the study of
+French in the evenings at home, as he had obtained a French dictionary and
+a French grammar.
+
+His formal education, so far as it became an element in the cultivation of
+his mind and the development of his supreme powers, ended with the few
+weeks spent with John Murdoch in Ayr. They were epoch weeks to Burns;
+transforming weeks, because of the increased range of his learning, but
+made infinitely more richly transforming by the revelation of new visions
+of life, and by the culture gained by association with a man of rare
+ability and supreme kindling power, such as John Murdoch undoubtedly
+possessed. A genius like Burns, living with a great teacher like Murdoch,
+could in a month get many of the new revelations, the new visions, and the
+strong impulses that should come into a growing soul as the result of a
+university course.
+
+Burns, in his seventeenth year, was sent to Kirkoswald to study
+mensuration and surveying. He intended to become a surveyor. Peggy Thomson
+lived next door to the school he attended. He met Peggy, loved her madly,
+and found it impossible to study longer. He afterwards wrote two beautiful
+poems to her. His school life for a brief period in Kirkoswald had little
+influence in the development of his power, except for the organisation of
+a debating society composed of a companion, William Niven, and himself.
+They met weekly to hold debates, and these debates were greatly enjoyed by
+Burns. His practice in debating societies afterwards organised by him in
+Tarbolton and in Mauchline not only developed in him his unusual
+oratorical ability, but at the same time gave him mental training of vital
+importance. Impromptu speaking surpasses any other known educational
+process in developing the human mind. However, Burns could neither study
+for Hugh Rodger nor debate with William Niven after he fell in love with
+Peggy Thomson, so, after a sleepless week, he went home.
+
+Some may wonder, when they learn that for a time Burns took more interest
+in studying Euclid's _Elements of Geometry_ than in any other department
+of study in his home under his father's guidance. When the Rev. Archibald
+Alison sent him his book, _Essays on the Principles of Taste_, Burns
+thanked him, and in his letter said: 'In short, sir, except Euclid's
+_Elements of Geometry_, which I made a shift to unravel by my father's
+fireside in the winter evenings of the first season I held the plough, I
+never read a book which gave me such a quantum of information, and added
+so much to my stock of ideas, as your _Essays on the Principles of
+Taste_.'
+
+Burns evidently studied geometry at the time his mind was ripe for new
+development by that special study. All children and young people would be
+fortunate if they could be guided to the special study capable of arousing
+their deepest interest, and therefore capable of promoting their highest
+development, at the special period of their mental growth when that
+particular study will awaken their deepest and most productive interest.
+
+Robert's mind appears to have had a splendid power of adaptation to the
+books and studies which his father secured for his sons. Gilbert says:
+'Robert read all these with an avidity and industry scarcely to be
+equalled; and no book was so voluminous as to slacken his industry, or so
+antiquated as to damp his researches.' Dr Moore wrote to Burns in 1787: 'I
+know very well you have a mind capable of attaining knowledge by a shorter
+process than is commonly used, and I am certain you are capable of making
+better use of it, when attained, than is generally done.'
+
+This makes it easier to understand why Burns had a mind so well stored
+with so many kinds of knowledge; and knowledge classified by himself, and
+related to life, so well that he could use it readily when he required to
+do so. The university men in Edinburgh marvelled more at the vastness of
+his stores of different kinds of knowledge, when he met them with
+dignified calmness, than they did because of his wonderful gifts of poetic
+genius. Douglas says of Burns in Edinburgh: 'Burns did not fail to mix by
+times with the eminent men of letters and philosophy, who then shed lustre
+on the name of Scotland.'
+
+Lockhart wrote: 'Burns's poetry might have procured him access to these
+circles; but it was the extraordinary resources he displayed in
+conversation, the strong sagacity of his observations on life and manners,
+the splendour of his wit, and the glowing energy of his eloquence, that
+made him the serious object of admiration among these practised masters of
+the arts of talk. Even the stateliest of these philosophers had enough to
+do to maintain the attitude of equality when brought into contact with
+Burns's gigantic understanding; and every one of them whose impressions
+on the subject have been recorded agrees in pronouncing his conversation
+to have been the most remarkable thing about him.'
+
+Speaking of this, Chambers properly says: 'We are thus left to understand
+that the best of Burns has not been, and was not of a nature to be,
+transmitted to posterity.' Why was Burns, though a ploughman, able to meet
+a galaxy of leaders in different spheres of learning, and culture, and
+philosophy, and outshine any of them in his own special department? The
+answer is simple. He had two great teachers to kindle him and guide him in
+the development of his remarkable natural powers: his father, William
+Burns, and his teacher and friend, John Murdoch.
+
+His father made it certain that he would possess a wide range of knowledge
+of the best available books on religious, ethical, and philosophical
+subjects--philosophy of science and philosophy of the mind; and, better
+than that, he trained him definitely by nightly practice to digest, and
+expound, and relate, and even dare to disbelieve, the opinions expressed
+in the books he read. In nightly discussions with his father and Gilbert
+his mind became keen and broad, and he became self-reliant. He had not
+merely stored knowledge in his mind, he had wrought the knowledge into his
+being, as an element of his growing power. Like great players of chess who
+sometimes meet several opposing players of eminence at the same time and
+vanquish them all at one period of play, Burns could meet the leaders of
+many departments of progress, culture, and philosophy at the same time,
+and stand calm and serene in glory with each leader on the crest of his
+own special mountain of knowledge.
+
+From John Murdoch he received the inspiration of a vital comradeship, a
+fine training in English language--grammar, and a good introduction to
+literature--and visions of higher relationships to his fellow-men and to
+God.
+
+However, great as Murdoch was as a kindler and a teacher, the education of
+Robert Burns was mainly due to his remarkable father. Alexander Smith, in
+his memoir of Burns, which Douglas claimed to be 'the finest biography of
+its extent ever written,' speaking of William Burns, says: 'In his whole
+mental build and training he was superior to the people by whom he was
+surrounded. He had forefathers he could look back to; he had family
+traditions which he kept sacred. Hard-headed, industrious, religious,
+somewhat austere, he ruled his house with a despotism which affection and
+respect on the part of the ruled made light and easy. To the blood of the
+Burnses a love of knowledge was native, as valour in the old times was
+native to the blood of the Douglases.'
+
+John Murdoch wrote of William Burns: 'Although I cannot do justice to the
+character of this worthy man, yet you will perceive from what I have
+written _what kind of person had the principal part in the education of
+the poet_. He spoke the English language with more propriety, both with
+respect to diction and pronunciation, than any man I ever knew with no
+greater advantages; this had a very good effect on the boys, who talk and
+reason like men much sooner than their neighbours.'
+
+These two quotations help us to understand William Burns as a great
+teacher of his sons, and his daughters, too, although he did not deem it
+quite so important to educate his daughters as his sons. It is perfectly
+clear that the paternal despotism spoken of by Mr Smith, which indeed was
+supposed to be necessary one hundred and fifty years ago, was not the
+reason why his boys so early talked and reasoned like men. William Burns
+was the elderly friend of his sons, not a despot, when he trained them to
+love reading, and much better to speak freely their individual opinions
+about what they read. This naturally led his sons to speak like men early
+and fearlessly. Despotism on the part of the father would have had
+directly the opposite effect.
+
+Gilbert Burns sums up his father's estimate of early education and good
+training when he says: 'My father laboured hard, and lived with the most
+rigid economy, that he might be able to keep his children at home, thereby
+having an opportunity of watching the progress of our young minds and
+forming in them early habits of piety and virtue; and from this motive
+alone did he engage in farming, the source of all his difficulties and
+distresses.'
+
+Robert, after his father's death, wrote to his cousin, and said his father
+was 'the best of friends, and the ablest of instructors.'
+
+In the sketch of his life sent to Dr Moore, of London, he wrote: 'My
+father, after many years of wanderings and sojournings, picked up a pretty
+large quantity of observation and experience, to which I am indebted for
+most of my pretensions to wisdom.'
+
+An important element in the education of Burns was his love of Nature.
+His mind was specially susceptible to development by Nature in any of its
+forms of beauty or of majesty. A friend who was his guide through the
+grounds of Athole House, when he was making his tour through the
+Highlands, in a letter to Mr Alex. Cunningham, wrote: 'I had often, like
+others, experienced the pleasures which arise from the sublime or elegant
+landscape, but I never saw those feelings so intense as in Burns.'
+
+Burns was born and spent his early life and young manhood in a district
+whose beauty has few equals anywhere. Its rivers--Ayr, Doon, Afton, Lugar,
+Fail, and Cessnock; all, except Afton, within easy walking distance of his
+homes in Ayrshire--with their beautifully wooded banks, were, in a very
+definite way, transforming agencies in the growth of his mind, and
+therefore most important elements in his highest education. The 'winding
+Nith,' which flowed within a few yards of the home he built on Ellisland
+farm, around the promontory on which stand the ruins of Lincluden Abbey,
+and on through Dumfries, continued during the last few years of his life
+the educational work of the rivers of his native Ayrshire.
+
+The mind of Burns was brought into unity with spiritual ideals through
+the influence of Nature more productively than by any other agency. He
+walked in the gloaming, according to his own statement, by the riverside
+or in woodland paths when he was composing his poems. While residing in
+Dumfries he had a favourite walk up the Nith to Lincluden Abbey, amid
+whose ruins he sat in the gloaming, and on moonlight nights often till
+midnight, recording the visions that came to him in that sacred
+environment of wooded river and linn (waterfall).
+
+There was much similarity between the most vital educational development
+of Burns and of Mrs Browning. In _Aurora Leigh_, the record of her own
+growth, she describes her true education, although not her actual life's
+history. Aurora loses her mother in her fifth year, and lives with her
+father for nine great years near Florence; she says:
+
+  So nine full years our days were hid with God
+  Among His mountains. I was just thirteen,
+  Still growing like a plant from unseen roots
+  In tongue-tied springs; and suddenly awoke
+  To full life, and life's needs and agonies,
+  With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside
+  A stone-dead father. Life struck sharp on death
+  Makes awful lightning.
+
+Her years till thirteen are spent mainly in her father's fine library
+reading what she most loved of the treasuries of the world. Her own
+statement of her father's educational guidance is:
+
+  My father taught me what he had learnt the best
+  Before he died, and left me--grief and love;
+  And seeing we had books among the hills,
+  Strong words of counselling souls, confederate
+  With vocal pines and waters, out of books
+  He taught me all the ignorance of men,
+  And how God laughs in heaven when any man
+  Says, 'Here I'm learned; this I understand;
+  In that I'm never caught at fault or doubt.'
+
+Like Burns she reads good books with joyous interest; like Burns she has a
+father deeply interested in her education who teaches her vital things;
+and like Burns she loves to learn from the 'vocal pines and waters,' and
+finds her richest revelations for her mind 'with God among His mountains.'
+
+The hills of Ayrshire, the rivers, and the river-glens, whose sides are
+covered with beautiful trees, were to Burns kindlers of high ideals, and
+revealers of God.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE CHARACTERISTICS OF BURNS.
+
+
+He was a truly independent democrat. The love of liberty was the basic
+element of his character. His fundamental philosophy he expressed in the
+unanswered and unanswerable questions:
+
+  Why should ae man better fare,
+    And a' men brothers?
+
+                    _Epistle to Dr Blacklock._
+
+  If I'm designed yon lordling's slave,
+    By Nature's law designed,
+  Why was an independent wish
+    E'er planted in my mind?
+
+                    _Man was Made to Mourn._
+
+To the Right Hon. John Francis Erskine he wrote: 'The partiality of my
+countrymen has brought me forward as a man of genius, and has given me a
+character to support. In the Poet I have avowed manly and independent
+sentiments, which I trust will be found in the Man.'
+
+Referring to the fact that his father's family rented land from the
+'famous, noble Keiths,' and had the honour of sharing their fate--their
+estates were forfeited because they took part in the rebellion of
+1715--he says: 'Those who dare welcome Ruin and shake hands with Infamy,
+for what they believe sincerely to be the cause of their God and their
+King, are--as Mark Antony in Shakespeare says of Brutus and
+Cassius--"Honourable men."'
+
+Though his father was not born in 1715, he undoubtedly got from his family
+the principles of independence and the love of liberty which he afterwards
+taught to his sons, and which Robert propagated with so much zeal.
+
+In a letter to Mrs Dunlop he wrote: 'Light be the turf upon his breast who
+taught, "Reverence thyself."'
+
+To Lord Glencairn, after expressing his gratitude, he said: 'My gratitude
+is not selfish design--that I disdain; it is not dodging after the heel of
+greatness--that is an offering you disdain. It is a feeling of the same
+kind with my devotion.'
+
+In many of his letters he expresses the same sentiments. In his Epistle to
+his young friend, Andrew Aiken, he advises him, among other things,
+
+  To gather gear by every wile
+    That's justified by honor;
+  Not for to hide it in a hedge,
+    Nor for a train attendant;
+  But for the glorious privilege
+    Of being independent.
+
+In a letter to Mr William Dunbar, dealing with his consciousness of his
+responsibility for his children, he wrote, 1790: 'I know the value of
+independence; and since I cannot give my sons an independent fortune, I
+shall give them an independent line of life.'
+
+Writing to Mrs Dunlop about his son--her god-son--Burns said: 'I am myself
+delighted with the manly swell of his little chest, and a certain
+miniature dignity in the carriage of the head, and the glance of his fine
+black eye, which promise the undaunted gallantry of an independent mind.'
+
+In 'A Man's a Man for a' That' he says:
+
+  Ye see yon birkie, ca'd 'a lord,'
+    Wha struts, and stares, and a' that;
+  Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
+    He's but a coof for a' that.                    blockhead
+      For a' that, and a' that,
+        His ribband, star, and a' that,
+      The man o' independent mind
+        He looks and laughs at a' that.
+
+In the same great poem he crystallises a fundamental truth in the immortal
+couplet:
+
+  The rank is but the guinea stamp,
+    The man's the gowd for a' that.                 gold
+
+To Mrs Dunlop he wrote in 1787: 'I trust I have too much pride for
+servility, and too little prudence for selfishness.'
+
+To Mrs M'Lehose he wrote in 1788: 'The dignifying and dignified
+consciousness of an honest man, and the well-grounded trust in approving
+heaven, are two most substantial foundations of happiness.'
+
+To Mrs Dunlop he wrote in 1788: 'Two of my adored household gods are
+independence of spirit and integrity of soul.'
+
+To Mrs Graham he wrote in 1791: 'May my failings ever be those of a
+generous heart and an independent mind.'
+
+To John Francis Erskine he wrote in 1793: 'My independent British mind
+oppression might bend, but could not subdue.'
+
+In the 'Vision' the message he says he received from Coila, the genius of
+Kyle, the part of Ayrshire in which he was born, was:
+
+  Preserve the dignity of Man, with soul erect.
+
+Burns has been criticised for meddling with what his critics called
+politics. The highest messages Christ gave to the world were the value of
+the individual soul, and brotherhood based on the unity of developed
+individual souls. His highest messages were understood by Burns more
+clearly than by any one else during his time, and Burns was too great a
+man to be untrue to his greatest visions. His poems are still among the
+best interpretations of Christ's ideals of democracy and brotherhood.
+
+The supreme aim of Burns was to secure for all men and women freedom from
+the unnatural restrictions of class or custom, so that each individual
+might have equal opportunity for the development of his highest element of
+power, his individuality, or self-hood--really the image of God in each.
+God gave him the vision of the ideal: 'Why should ae man better fare, and
+a' men brothers?' and he tried to reveal the great vision to the world to
+kindle the hearts of men.
+
+Burns was a devoted son, and a loving, considerate, respectful, and
+generous brother. After his father died, Robert wrote to his cousin: 'On
+the 13th current I lost the best of fathers. Though, to be sure, we have
+had long warning of the impending stroke, still the feelings of nature
+claim their part, and I cannot recollect the tender endearments and
+paternal lessons of the best of friends and the ablest of instructors
+without feeling what, perhaps, the calmer dictates of reason would partly
+condemn.
+
+'I hope my father's friends in your country will not let their connection
+in this place die with him. For my part, I shall ever with pleasure--with
+pride--acknowledge my connection with those who were allied by the ties
+of blood and friendship to a man whose memory I shall ever honour and
+revere.'
+
+On the stone above his father's grave in Alloway Kirkyard are engraved the
+words Burns wrote as his father's epitaph:
+
+  O ye, whose cheek the tear of pity stains,
+    Draw near with pious reverence and attend!
+  Here lies the loving husband's dear remains,
+    The tender father, and the gen'rous friend;
+  The pitying heart that felt for human woe;
+    The dauntless heart that feared no human pride;
+  The friend of man--to vice alone a foe;
+    For ev'n his failings leaned to virtue's side.
+
+John Murdoch warmly approved of this epitaph of his former pupil and
+friend Robert. He wrote: 'I have often wished, for the good of mankind,
+that it were as customary to honour and perpetuate the memory of those who
+excel in moral rectitude, as it is to extol what are called heroic
+actions.'
+
+When Burns found that the Edinburgh edition of his poems had brought him
+about five hundred pounds, he loaned Gilbert one hundred and fifty pounds
+to assist him to get out of debt, in order that his mother and sisters
+might be placed in a position of security and greater happiness. In a
+letter to Robert Graham of Fintry, explaining the circumstances that led
+him to accept the position of an exciseman, he first explains that
+Ellisland farm, which he rented, was in the last stage of worn-out poverty
+when he got possession of it, and that it would take some time before it
+would pay the rent. Then he says: 'I might have had cash to supply the
+deficiencies of these hungry years; but I have a younger brother and three
+sisters on a farm in Ayrshire, and it took all my surplus over what I
+thought necessary for my farming capital to save not only the comfort, but
+the very existence, of that fireside circle from impending destruction.'
+
+He helped with sympathy, advice, and material support a younger brother
+who lived in England. His true attitude towards his own wife and family is
+shown in his 'Epistle to Dr Blacklock':
+
+  To make a happy fireside clime
+    For weans and wife,
+  Is the true pathos and sublime
+    Of human life.
+
+The greatest dread of his later years was that he might not be able to
+provide for his family in case of his death.
+
+Burns was an upright, honest man. To the mother of the Earl of Glencairn
+he wrote: 'I would much rather have it said that my profession borrowed
+credit from me, than that I borrowed credit from my profession.'
+
+To James Hamilton, of Glasgow, he wrote: 'Among some distressful
+emergencies that I have experienced in life, I have ever laid it down as
+my foundation of comfort--that he who has lived the life of an honest man
+has by no means lived in vain.'
+
+To Sir John Whitefoord he wrote in 1787: 'Reverence to God and integrity
+to my fellow-creatures I hope I shall ever preserve.'
+
+In a letter to John M'Murdo in 1793 he wrote: 'To no man, whatever his
+station in life, have I ever paid a compliment at the expense of truth.'
+
+In 'Lines written in Friar's Carse' he wrote:
+
+  Keep the name of Man in mind,
+  And dishonour not your kind.
+
+To Robert Ainslie he wrote: 'It is much to be a great character as a
+lawyer, but beyond comparison more to be a great character as a man.'
+
+To Andrew Aiken, in his 'Epistle to a Young Friend,' he wrote:
+
+  Where you feel your honour grip,
+  Let that aye be your border.
+
+In 'A Man's a Man for a' That' he expresses his faith in righteousness as
+a fundamental element in character, where he says:
+
+  The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,
+    Is king o' men for a' that.
+
+Burns had a sympathetic heart that overflowed with kindness for his
+fellow-men, and even for animals, domestic and wild. In a letter to the
+Rev. G. H. Baird in 1791 he said: 'I am fain to do any good that occurs in
+my very limited power to a fellow-creature, just for the selfish purpose
+of clearing a little the vista of retrospection.'
+
+It was the big heart of Burns that directed the writing of the first part
+of that sentence, and his modesty that led to the expression of the second
+part. The joy of remembering a good deed was never his chief reason for
+doing it. In a 'Tragic Fragment' he wrote:
+
+  With sincere though unavailing sighs
+  I view the helpless children of distress.
+
+A number of stories have been preserved to prove that while Burns was
+strict and stern in dealing with smugglers, and others who made a practice
+of breaking the law by illegally selling strong drink without licence, he
+was tenderly kind and protective to poor women who had little stores of
+refreshments to sell to their friends on fair and market days.
+
+Professor Gillespie related that he overheard Burns say to a poor woman of
+Thornhill one fair-day as she stood at her door: 'Kate, are you mad? Don't
+you know that the Supervisor and I will be in upon you in the course of
+forty minutes? Good-bye t'ye at present.'
+
+His friendly hint saved a poor widow from a heavy fine of several pounds,
+while the annual loss to the revenue would be only a few shillings.
+
+He was ordered to look into the case of another old woman, suspected of
+selling home-brewed ale without licence. When she knew his errand she
+said: 'Mercy on us! are ye an exciseman? God help me, man! Ye'll surely no
+inform on a puir auld body like me, as I hae nae other means o' leevin'
+than sellin' my drap o' home-brewed to decent folk that come to Holywood
+Kirk.'
+
+Burns patted her on the shoulder and said: 'Janet, Janet, sin awa', and
+I'll protect ye.'
+
+In 'A Winter Night' Burns reveals a deep and genuine sympathy with the
+outlying cattle, the poor sheep hiding from the storm, the wee helpless
+birds, and even for the fox and the wolf; and mourns because the pitiless
+tempest beats on them.
+
+Carlyle says of 'A Winter Night' that 'it is worth seven homilies on
+mercy, for it is the voice of Mercy herself. Burns indeed lives in
+sympathy; his soul rushes into all the realms of being; nothing that has
+existence can be indifferent to him.'
+
+The auld farmer's 'New Year Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare, Maggie,'
+reveals a profound and affectionate sympathy more tender than the pity he
+felt for the animals and birds that suffered from the winter storm. It is
+based on long years of friendly association in co-operative achievement.
+From the New Year's wish at the beginning, to the end, where he assures
+her that she is no less deserving now than she was
+
+  That day ye pranced wi' muckle pride
+  When ye bure hame my bonnie bride;
+  And sweet and gracefu' she did ride
+          Wi' maiden air!
+
+and tells her that he has a heapet feed of oats laid by for her, and will
+also tether her on a reserved ridge of fine pasture, where she may have
+plenty to eat and a comfortable place on which to rest; each verse is full
+of pleasant memories.
+
+His kindly sympathy is as appreciative as if she had been a human being
+instead of a mare.
+
+'Poor Mailie's Elegy' is a natural expression of sorrow in the heart--the
+great, loving heart of Burns--for the death of the pet lamb. He says:
+
+  He's lost a friend and neighbour dear
+            In Mailie dead.
+  Thro' a' the toun she trotted by him;
+  A lang half-mile she could descry him;
+  Wi' kindly bleat, when she did spy him,
+            She ran wi' speed;
+  A friend mair faithfu' ne'er cam nigh him,
+            Than Mailie dead.
+
+So in the pathos and emotion shown for the mouse whose home his plough
+destroyed at the approach of winter; for the wounded hare that limped past
+him; for the starving thrush with which he offered to share his last
+crust; and for the scared water-fowl that flew from him, when he regretted
+that they had reason to do so on account of man's treatment of them, he
+gives ample evidence of the warmth of the glow of his sympathy.
+
+One of the most prominent characteristics of Burns was loyalty to his
+native land. One of his earliest dreams, when he was a boy, was a hope
+that some day he might be able to do something that would bring honour to
+Scotland. In his Epistle to Mrs Scott of Wauchope-House he says:
+
+  I mind it weel, in early date,
+  When I was beardless, young, and blate,           bashful
+
+     *       *       *       *       *
+
+  When first amang the yellow corn
+    A man I reckoned was,
+
+     *       *       *       *       *
+
+  E'en then a wish (I mind its power),
+  A wish that to my latest hour
+    Shall strongly heave my breast;
+  That I for poor auld Scotland's sake
+  Some usefu' plan or book could make,
+    Or sing a sang at least.
+  The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide
+    Amang the bearded bear,                         barley
+  I turned the weeder-clips aside
+    And spared the symbol dear:
+      No nation, no station,
+        My envy e'er could raise;
+      A Scot still, but blot still,                 without
+      I knew nae higher praise.
+
+The boy who had such a reverent feeling in his heart for the thistle, the
+symbol of his native land, that he did not like to cut it, continued
+throughout his life to have a reverence for the land itself, and tried to
+honour it in every possible way.
+
+He did make the book and sing the songs that brought more lasting glory to
+Scotland than any other work done by any other man or combination of men
+in his time.
+
+He wrote more than two hundred and fifty love-songs, and he refused to
+accept a shilling for them, though he needed money very badly. Many of his
+love-songs were the direct out-pouring of his heart, the overflow of his
+love for Nellie Kirkpatrick and Peggy Thomson, the girl lovers of his
+boyhood; and for Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, Mary Campbell, and Mrs
+M'Lehose; but most of his love-songs were 'fictitious,' as he said they
+were in the inscription on the copy of his works presented to Jean
+Lorimer, the Chloris of his Ellisland and Dumfries period. They were
+written mainly to provide pure language and thought for fine melodies of
+Scotland composed long before his time; but the words of the songs that
+were sung to them were indelicate. He wrote his unequalled songs for
+Scotland's sake, and by doing so he gave to Scotland the gift of the
+sweetest love-songs ever written. But for these sacred songs his patriotic
+spirit resented the idea of acceptance of material reward. No higher
+revelation of genuine patriotism was ever shown than this.
+
+Burns was a sensitive and very shy man. He is commonly supposed to have
+been just the opposite. He was brought up in a home at Mount Oliphant
+where he rarely associated with other people. Months sometimes passed
+without an evening spent in any other way than in reading and discussions
+of the matter read by his father, Gilbert, and himself; so in boyhood and
+early youth he was reserved. When he began to go out among other young men
+his comparatively developed mind, his very unusual stores of
+knowledge--not merely stored, but classified and related--and his
+extraordinary power of eloquence made him at once a leader and a
+favourite, so he soon overcame his reserve and shyness with young men. It
+was not so with young women. He had been trained to wait for introductions
+to them. He was walking past Jean Armour, when she was at the town pump at
+Mauchline getting water to sprinkle the clothes on the bleaching-green,
+without speaking to her, and she spoke to him, recalling a remark she
+heard him make at the annual dance on the evening of the fair. He was
+twenty-five, and she was eighteen. He would have passed close to her in
+respectful silence if she had not spoken.
+
+Sir Walter Scott wrote: 'I was told, but did not observe it, that his
+address to females was extremely deferential.'
+
+Scott did not mean to suggest a doubt about what he was told, but just to
+intimate that he had not had opportunity to observe the fact. Scott met
+Burns only once in company, and Scott was a boy at the time.
+
+He dearly and reverently loved Alison Begbie when he was twenty-one. She
+was the first woman whom he asked to become his wife. She was a servant in
+a farm-house on the banks of Cessnock Water, in the neighbourhood of
+Lochlea farm. He was twenty-two when he asked her to marry him, and he was
+so shy, even at that age, that he could not propose when he was with her.
+She did not accept his offer. Few women of his acquaintance would have
+refused to accept his written proposal. Probably none of them--not even
+Alison Begbie--would have refused him if he had been able to overcome his
+shyness, and had proposed in person instead of by letter.
+
+He wrote five letters to Alison Begbie, and definitely asked her to marry
+him in the fourth letter. In the first he said: 'I am a stranger in these
+matters, as I assure you that you are the first woman to whom I ever made
+such a declaration, so I declare I am at a loss how to proceed. I have
+more than once come into your company with a resolution to say what I have
+just now told you; but my resolution always failed me, and even now my
+heart trembles for the consequence of what I have said.'
+
+The following copies of the letter containing his proposal (the fourth),
+and of his reply to her refusal, if read carefully, should reveal several
+admirable characteristics of Burns.
+
+     'LOCHLEA, 1781.
+
+     'MY DEAR E.,[2]--I have often thought it a peculiarly unlucky
+     circumstance in love that, though in every other situation in life,
+     telling the truth is not only the safest, but actually by far the
+     easiest way of proceeding, a Lover is never under greater difficulty
+     in acting, or more puzzled for expression, than when his passion is
+     sincere, and his intentions are honourable. I do not think that it is
+     very difficult for a person of ordinary capacity to talk of love and
+     fondness which are not felt, and to make vows of constancy and
+     fidelity which are never intended to be performed, if he be villain
+     enough to practise such detestable conduct; but to a man whose heart
+     glows with the principles of integrity and truth, and who sincerely
+     loves a woman of amiable person, uncommon refinement of sentiment,
+     and purity of manners--to such a one in such circumstances I can
+     assure you, my Dear, from my own feelings at this present moment,
+     _Courtship_ is a task indeed.
+
+     There is such a number of foreboding fears, and distrustful anxieties
+     crowd into my mind when I am in your company, or when I sit down to
+     write to you, that what to speak or what to write I am altogether at
+     a loss.
+
+     'There is one rule which I have hitherto practised, and which I shall
+     invariably keep with you, and that is, honestly to tell you the plain
+     truth. There is something so mean and unmanly in the arts of
+     dissimulation and falsehood, that I am surprised they can be used by
+     any one in so noble, so generous a passion as Virtuous Love. No, my
+     dear E., I shall never endeavour to gain your favour by such
+     detestable practices. If you will be so good and so generous as to
+     admit me for your partner, your companion, your bosom friend through
+     life, there is nothing on this side of eternity shall give me greater
+     transport; but I shall never think of purchasing your hand by any
+     arts unworthy of a man, and, I will add, of a Christian. There is one
+     thing, my Dear, which I earnestly request of you, and it is this:
+     that you would soon either put an end to my hopes by a peremptory
+     refusal, or cure me of my fears by a generous consent.
+
+     'It would oblige me much if you would send me a line or two when
+     convenient. I shall only add further, that if a behaviour regulated
+     (though perhaps but very imperfectly) by the rules of Honour and
+     Virtue, if a heart devoted to love and esteem you, and an earnest
+     endeavour to promote your happiness; if these are qualities you would
+     wish in a friend, in a husband, I hope you shall ever find them in
+     your real friend and sincere lover.'
+
+After her refusal he wrote:
+
+     'LOCHLEA, 1781.
+
+     'I ought in good manners to have acknowledged the receipt of your
+     letter before this time, but my heart was so shocked with the
+     contents of it, that I can scarcely yet collect my thoughts so as to
+     write to you on the subject. I will not attempt to describe what I
+     felt on receiving your letter. I read it over and over, again and
+     again, and though it was in the politest language of refusal, still
+     it was peremptory; you "were very sorry you could not make me a
+     return, but you wish me--what without you I can never obtain--you
+     wish me all kinds of happiness." It would be weak and unmanly to say
+     that without you I never can be happy; but sure I am, that sharing
+     life with you would have given it a relish that, wanting you, I can
+     never taste.
+
+     'Your uncommon personal advantages, and your superior good sense, do
+     not so much strike me; these possibly in a few instances may be met
+     with in others; but that amiable goodness, that tender, feminine
+     softness, that endearing sweetness of disposition, with all the
+     charming offspring of a warm, feeling heart--these I never again
+     expect to meet with in such a degree in this world. All these
+     charming qualities, heightened by an education much beyond anything I
+     have ever met with in any woman I ever dared to approach, have made
+     an impression on my heart that I do not think the world can ever
+     efface. My imagination had fondly flattered itself with a wish--I
+     dare not say it ever reached a hope--that possibly I might one day
+     call you mine. I had formed the most delightful images, and my fancy
+     fondly brooded over them; but now I am wretched for the loss of what
+     I really had no right to expect. I must now think no more of you as a
+     mistress, still I presume to ask to be admitted as a friend. As such
+     I wish to be allowed to wait on you, and as I expect to remove in a
+     few days a little farther off, and you, I suppose, will perhaps soon
+     leave this place, I wish to see you or hear from you soon; and if an
+     expression should perhaps escape me rather too warm for friendship,
+     I hope you will pardon it in, my dear Miss ---- (pardon me the dear
+     expression for once),
+
+     'R. B.'
+
+Those who say that these letters 'have an air of taskwork and constraint
+about them' should remember that Burns formed the style of his
+letter-writing when but a boy from a book containing the letters of
+leaders of Queen Anne's time, which was given to him by his uncle. His own
+letters on all subjects are written in a dignified style. It is worth
+noting that Motherwell, who criticised the style of the letters, says of
+them: 'They are, in fact, the only sensible love-letters we have ever
+seen.'
+
+Though naturally a very shy man, he grew to be happier as his powers
+developed. In his teens and young manhood he had fits bordering on
+despondency. But he passed through them and became more buoyant in spirit,
+and, though poor, was contented.
+
+In 'My Nannie O' he wrote:
+
+  Come weel, come woe, I care na by,
+  I'll tak what Heaven will sen' me.
+
+In 'It is na, Jean, thy Bonnie Face,' he said:
+
+  Content am I if Heaven shall give
+    But happiness to thee.
+
+This shows that consideration for others was one of his sources of
+happiness.
+
+In his 'Epistle to James Smith' he wrote:
+
+  Truce with peevish, poor complaining!
+  Is Fortune's fickle Luna waning?
+        E'en let her gang!
+  Beneath what light she has remaining
+        Let's sing our sang.
+
+Dr John M'Kenzie of Mauchline, in 1810, thirteen years after the death of
+Burns, described a visit made to see his father when he was ill. In it he
+says: 'Gilbert, in the first interview I had with him at Lochlea, was
+frank, modest, well-informed, and communicative. The poet seemed distant,
+suspicious, and without any wish to interest or please. He kept himself
+very silent in a dark corner of the room; and before he took any part in
+the conversation, I frequently detected him scrutinising me during my
+conversation with his father and brother.
+
+'But afterwards, when the conversation, which was on a medical subject,
+had taken the turn he wished, he began to engage in it, displaying a
+dexterity of reasoning, an ingenuity of reflection, and a familiarity with
+topics apparently beyond his reach, by which his visitor was no less
+gratified than astonished.'
+
+Burns lived next door to Dr M'Kenzie after he was married the second time
+to Jean Armour. They were great friends. Burns wrote a masonic poem to
+him, and called him 'Common-sense' in 'The Holy Fair.'
+
+In the letter from which the above quotation is made, Dr M'Kenzie says
+Robert took his characteristics mainly from his mother, and that Gilbert
+resembled his father.
+
+Burns looked like his mother, and inherited his temperamental
+characteristics mainly from her.
+
+Burns had a definitely religious tendency as one of his strong
+characteristics when he was a child. In the sketch of his life that he
+wrote to Dr Moore, of London, when he was twenty-eight years old, he says
+that as a boy he possessed 'an enthusiastic idiot-piety. I say idiot-piety
+because I was then a child.'
+
+He wrote several religious poems while living on Lochlea farm and on
+Mossgiel farm. 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' was written at Mossgiel.
+
+Throughout his life his religious tendency was one of his characteristics.
+This will be considered more fully in the chapter on 'Burns's Great Work
+for Religion.'
+
+Burns was the warm, personal friend of the best people in every district
+in or near which he lived. He must have been a good man who could count
+among his friends such men and women as the following: Lord Glencairn, Mrs
+Dunlop, the Earl of Eglintoun, Dr Moore, Dr M'Kenzie, Gavin Hamilton, Hon.
+Henry Erskine, the Duchess of Gordon, Right Rev. Bishop Geddes, Robert
+Graham of Fintry, Robert Riddell, Robert Aiken, the Earl of Buchan, Prof.
+Dugald Stewart, Dr Candlish, Sir John Whitefoord, John Murdoch, Dr
+Blacklock, Dr Hugh Blair, Alex. Cunningham, Rev. Archibald Alison, Sir
+John Sinclair, Rev. John M'Math, and the best ministers of the 'New
+Licht,' or progressive class; the leading professors in Edinburgh
+University, and the leading schoolmasters in his neighbourhood. In fact,
+he was loved and respected by leaders of all classes except the 'Auld
+Licht' preachers. He lives on and becomes more popular as he becomes
+better known.
+
+His one characteristic that would most fully represent him and his work
+for God and humanity is his propelling tendency to be a reformer of
+conditions. He accepted no existing conditions as good enough. He saw
+quickly and clearly the defects of conditions as they existed, and he
+never hesitated to attack any evil that he could help to overthrow. He
+saw that individual freedom and pure religion were vital and essential
+elements of human progress and happiness. He saw with unerring vision the
+lack of freedom and of vital religion in the lives of the people; so to
+make all men free, to give all children equal opportunity to develop the
+best in their souls, and to purify religion from superstition, hypocrisy,
+bigotry, and kindred evils that were blighting it, became his highest
+purposes.
+
+What was the character of Burns in the estimation of the leading people of
+his own time? On replying to a request that he would use his influence in
+favour of Burns for an appointment Sir John Whitefoord wrote: 'Your
+character as a man, as well as a poet, entitles you, I think, to the
+assistance of every inhabitant of Ayrshire.'
+
+Sir John owned the Ballochmyle estate near Mauchline, and was one of the
+leading country gentlemen of Ayrshire in his time.
+
+Mr Archibald Prentice, editor of the _Manchester Times_, was the son of a
+prominent man who lived about half-way between Mauchline and Edinburgh, at
+Covington, in Lanarkshire. Mr Prentice, senior, was a great admirer of
+Burns, as were leaders everywhere. Mr Archibald Prentice, writing about
+his father's affectionate respect for Burns, said; 'My father, though a
+strictly moral and religious man himself, always maintained that the
+virtues of the poet greatly predominated over his faults. I once heard him
+exclaim with hot wrath, when somebody was quoting from an apologist,
+"What! do _they_ apologise for _him_! One half of his good, and all his
+bad divided among a score of them, would make them a' better men!"
+
+'In the year 1809 I resided for a short time in Ayrshire, in the
+hospitable house of my father's friend Reid, and surveyed with a strong
+interest such visitors as had known Burns. I soon learned how to
+anticipate their representations of his character. The men of strong minds
+and strong feelings were invariable in their expressions of admiration;
+but the _prosy_, consequential _bodies_ all disliked him as exceedingly
+dictatorial. The men whose religion was based on intellect and high moral
+sentiment all thought well of him; but the mere professors [of religion]
+"with their three-mile prayers and half-mile graces" denounced him as
+worse than an infidel.'
+
+The progress of religious reformers has always been a thorny one. The
+Master, Christ Himself, was crucified by the 'Auld Lichts' of His time,
+and they stoned Stephen to death. So, through the centuries unprogressive
+theologians have persecuted and often murdered the religious reformers,
+who saw the evils in theology, and wished to remove them from the creeds
+that blighted men's souls. They burned Latimer in England; and Luther in
+Germany was saved by the action of his friends by shutting him in Wartburg
+Castle for protection. Religious reformers in the time of Burns were not
+burned or stoned to death, but they were persecuted and prosecuted before
+the Church Courts by men who did not approve of their higher visions of
+truth. Burns himself was regarded as unorthodox, but his creed is much
+more in harmony with the religious thought of to-day than it was with the
+creed of the 'Auld Licht' preachers. One of the marvels of human
+development through the ages has been that the bigoted theologians of each
+succeeding century resented the attempts of men with clearer vision to
+reform their creeds.
+
+Men who truly believe in God cannot believe that any creed made by men can
+be infallible; they should know that from generation to generation
+humanity consciously grows towards the Divine, and that as they climb they
+see in the clearer spiritual air new visions of higher meaning in regard
+to life and to vital religion, revealing to each man new conceptions of
+his duty to God and to his fellow-men.
+
+Lovers of Burns reverence his memory because he was so great and so wise a
+reformer, and did so much to make men truly free, and to make religion a
+more vitally uplifting agency in the hearts of men.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+BURNS WAS A RELIGIOUS MAN.
+
+
+'Burns a religious man!' scoffers exclaim. 'He was a drunkard.' Burns was
+a moderate drinker compared with most of the ministers of his time. If
+drinking whisky was a disqualification for religious character in the time
+of Burns, a large proportion of the ministers of his time were
+disqualified. Burns should not, in all fairness, be judged by the
+standards of our time. More than fifty years after Burns died it was
+customary for even Methodist ministers in Canada, when visiting the
+members of their churches, to accept a little whisky punch as an evidence
+of good fellowship and comradeship. This custom persisted in Scotland and
+England for more than a century after Burns died, and in many places it
+exists still. In a letter to Mr William Cruickshank in 1788 he said: 'I
+have fought my way severely through the savage hospitality of this
+country--the object of all hosts being to send every guest to bed drunk if
+they can.'
+
+Burns was not speaking of hotel-keepers, but of homes of people of high
+respectability. He wrote in 1793: 'Taverns I have totally abandoned, but
+it is the private parties in the family way among the hard-drinking
+gentlemen of the country that do me the mischief.'
+
+He did occasionally go to the Globe Tavern in Dumfries after 1793, when
+the guest of visitors who came to Dumfries solely for the purpose of
+meeting him and having the honour of entertaining him.
+
+In his short life of Burns, Alexander Smith says: 'If he drank hard, it
+was in an age when hard drinking was fashionable. If he sinned in this
+respect, he sinned in company with English Prime Ministers, Scotch Lords
+of Session, grave dignitaries of the Church in both countries, and
+thousands of ordinary blockheads who went to their graves in the odour of
+sanctity, and whose epitaphs are a catalogue of all the virtues.'
+
+Burns spoke with all sincerity, in a letter to his friend Samuel Clark of
+Dumfries, when he wrote: 'Some of our folks about the Excise office,
+Edinburgh, had, and perhaps still have, conceived a prejudice against me
+as being a drunken, dissipated character. I might be all this, you know,
+and yet be an honest fellow; but you know that _I am an honest fellow_,
+and am nothing of this.' His superiors in the Excise department gave him
+a high record for accuracy and honesty in his work.
+
+Other objectors say: 'He could not be religious, because he attacked
+religion.' This statement is not correct. He attacked the evils that in
+his time robbed religion of its vital power, but never religion. Emerson
+says: 'Not Luther, not Latimer, struck stronger blows against false
+theology than did the poet Burns.'
+
+To Clarinda, Burns wrote: 'I hate the superstition of a fanatic, but I
+love the religion of a man.'
+
+In his poem 'The Tree of Liberty' he lays the blame of the terrible
+degradation of the French peasantry on
+
+  Superstition's wicked brood.
+
+In his 'Epistle to John Goudie' he speaks of
+
+  Poor gapin', glowrin' superstition.
+
+He attacked superstition, but not religion.
+
+He attacked hypocrisy, and true men are grateful to him because he did so.
+
+In his 'Epistle to Rev. John M'Math,' the 'New Licht' minister of
+Tarbolton, Burns says:
+
+  God knows I'm not the thing I should be,
+  Nor am I ev'n the thing I could be;
+  But twenty times I rather would be
+        An atheist clean,
+  Than under gospel colours hid be
+        Just for a screen.
+
+He ridiculed hypocrisy, and we are grateful to him for doing so. Nothing
+more contemptible than a religious hypocrite can be made of a being
+created in the image of God. Hypocrisy is not religion.
+
+He attacked bigotry, one of the most savage monsters that ever tried to
+block the way of Christ's highest teaching, the brotherhood of man. No
+phenomenal religious absurdity is more incomprehensible than the idea that
+Christianity can be promoted by the multiplication of religious
+denominations; especially when, as in the time of Burns, and long after
+his time, leaders of so-called Christian denominations refused to have
+fellowship with each other, or to unite on a common platform in working
+for the promotion of Christian ideals. How trivial the formalisms of
+theologians seem that kept men apart whom Christ desired to become
+co-operative and loving brothers, working harmoniously together for the
+achievement of the great visions he revealed!
+
+He wrote to Clarinda, 1788: 'I hate the very idea of a controversial
+divinity; and I firmly believe that every upright, honest man, of whatever
+sect, will be accepted of the Deity.'
+
+In his 'Epistle to John Goudie' Burns calls bigotry
+
+  Sour bigotry on its last legs.
+
+He wrote this in 1785, and much more than a century later bigotry is still
+on its legs, but it is tottering to its final overthrow. Burns attacked
+bigotry, but not religion.
+
+He attacked the doctrine of predestination, as taught in his time, a most
+soul-dwarfing doctrine, calculated to rob humanity of motives to stimulate
+it to greater and nobler efforts to achieve for God. He makes Holy Willie
+say he deserved damnation five thousand years before he was born. Few
+people now regard predestination as an element in vital religion.
+
+He attacked one of the most horribly blasphemous doctrines ever preached,
+but preached in the time of Burns, and long after:
+
+  That God sends ane to heaven and ten to hell
+             For His ain glory.
+
+He puts this impious doctrine into the mouth of Holy Willie. More than
+half a century after the time of Burns, preachers in the presence of
+mothers of their dead babies taught that the babes could not go to heaven
+because they were too young to be 'believers in Christ;' and being unable
+to account for their statements logically, would say, 'God did these
+things for His own glory.' Burns attacked such horrible teaching, but in
+doing so he was not attacking religion.
+
+Burns did not believe in the use of the fear of hell as a means of
+promoting true religion. There is no soul-kindling power in fear. Fear is
+one of the most powerful agencies of evil in preventing the conscious
+development of the soul, and of the faith that each soul should have in
+God as the source of power, in Christ as the revealer of individual power,
+and in himself as God's partner. Fear is a negative agency that appeals to
+the weaker side of character. Humanity will not be able to make the rapid
+progress towards the Divine that it should make until fear ceases to be a
+motive in the minds of men, women, and children. In his great 'Epistle to
+a Young Friend' Burns says:
+
+  The fear o' hell's a hangman's whip
+    To haud the _wretch_ in order.             keep
+
+Burns proved himself to be a philosopher when he attacked the common plan
+of using fear o' hell to make men religious. This was not attacking
+religion.
+
+The Rev. L. MacLean Watt says: 'While the professional Christians of
+Scotland were fighting about Hell, the humble hearts by the lowly
+firesides, with the open book before them, were enriched by the knowledge
+of heaven; and while the hypocrites in holy places were scourging those
+who were in their power with the thorns of Christ, there were cotters in
+their kitchens that had found the healing and the balm of the warm blood
+of a Redeemer who died on Calvary for _a wider world_ than theologians
+seemed to know.'
+
+Speaking further of the theologians of the time of Burns the Rev. Mr Watt
+says: 'Their idea of God was shaped in fashion like themselves--merciless,
+remorseless, hating, and hateful; His only passion seeming to their narrow
+souls to be damnation and torture of the wretched, lost, and wandering.
+Their preachers loved to picture the souls of the condemned swathed in
+batches lying in eternal anguish of a most real blazing hell as punishment
+for some small offence, or as having been outcast from grace through the
+wanton exercise of divine prerogatives. To commend such a God for worship
+were like praising and complimenting the cruel child who, for sport, spent
+a whole day plucking the limbs and wings from the palpitating body of some
+poor, helpless insect. It was a false and blasphemous insult to the human
+intelligence.'
+
+Burns had the good fortune to be a cotter, trained by a father who was a
+remarkably able man, a great teacher, and a reverently religious man of
+very advanced ideals; and it took a century or more of theological
+evolution to bring the religious teaching of the world up to the standards
+of belief of the Ayrshire cotter.
+
+He attacked the doctrine of Faith without Works. In a letter to Gavin
+Hamilton, one of the leading men of the town of Mauchline, a warm,
+personal friend of the poet, and an advanced thinker among 'New Licht'
+laymen, he wrote in a humorous but really profound way: 'I understand you
+are in the habit of intimacy with that Boanerges of Gospel powers, Father
+Auld. Be earnest with him that he will wrestle in prayer for you that you
+may see the vanity of vanities in trusting to, even practising, the carnal
+moral works of charity, humanity, and generosity; things which you
+practised so flagrantly that it was evident you delighted in them,
+neglecting, or perhaps profanely despising, the wholesome doctrine of
+_faith without works_, the only hope of salvation.'
+
+Burns did not say a word against faith in Christ, or love for Christ, or
+reverence for the teaching of Christ. So true a Christian as Dean Stanley
+said Burns was a 'wise religious teacher.' Burns deplored the fact that
+the love of Christ--the highest revelation of love ever given to the
+world--should be limited to saving the individual believer from eternal
+punishment. That was degrading the highest love into selfishness. Burns
+pleaded for loving service for humanity, and for Christ's highest
+revelation, brotherhood, as evidence of vital Christian-hood; not merely
+'sound believing.' This was not attacking religion. He attacked the men
+who attacked other men, like Gavin Hamilton among laymen, and Rev. Dr
+M'Gill of Ayr among ministers, because they had advanced ideas regarding
+religion.
+
+He attacked the gloom and awful Sunday solemnity of those who professed to
+be religious. The world owes him a debt of gratitude for helping to remove
+the shadows of religious gloom from human lives. In his poem 'A
+Dedication,' addressed to Gavin Hamilton, he advises him ironically, in
+order that he may be acceptable to Daddy Auld and others of the 'Auld
+Licht' creed, to
+
+  Learn three-mile pray'rs an' half-mile graces,
+  Wi' weel-spread looves, an' lang, wry faces; palms
+  Grunt up a solemn, lengthened groan,
+  And damn a' parties [religious] but your own;
+  I'll warrant then you're nae deceiver,
+  A steady, sturdy, staunch believer.
+
+If true religion means anything vitally hopeful to a man, it should mean
+what Burns said it meant to him in a letter to Mrs Dunlop: 'My dearest
+enjoyment.'
+
+In his wise poem, 'Epistle to a Young Friend,' he says:
+
+  But still the preaching cant forbear,
+    And ev'n the rigid feature.
+
+He attacked the 'unco guid,' who delighted to tell how good they were
+themselves, and how many were the weaknesses and evil-doings of their
+neighbours. He had no more respect for the self-righteous than Christ had.
+The fact that he attacked and exposed them, and spoke kindly and
+reasonably to them, in his great 'Address to the Unco Guid,' is an
+evidence that in this respect at any rate he was a true Christian. One of
+the most comprehensively Christian doctrines ever written is the verse:
+
+  Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
+    Decidedly can try us;
+  He knows each heart--its various tone,
+    Each spring--its various bias.
+
+  Then at the balance let's be mute,
+    We never can adjust it;
+  What's done we partly may compute,
+    But know not what's resisted.
+
+There is sound philosophy in the first verse of the poem addressed to the
+unco guid:
+
+  The rigid righteous is a fool,
+    The rigid wise another.
+
+He often advised the 'douce folks' to be considerate of those who had
+greater temptations than they knew; and advised them to try to help them
+to overcome their temptations, and with Christian comradeship win their
+admiration and sympathetic co-operation in some department of achieving
+good.
+
+In the time of Burns nothing would have surprised a wayward man or woman
+more than to have received genuine sympathy and respectful comradeship
+from members of the Church, the institution that claimed to represent
+Christ, who told the story of the one stray lamb, and the story of the
+prodigal son; the Great Teacher who said, 'Let him that is without sin
+cast the first stone.'
+
+Burns attacked superstition, hypocrisy, bigotry, predestination (taught in
+its most repellent form in the time of Burns), the equally repellent
+doctrine that 'God sends men to hell for His own glory;' fear of hell as a
+basis of religious life; faith without works; religious gloom; and the
+spirit of the unco guid. He helped to free religion from these evils more
+than any other man of his time did; but that was just the opposite to
+attacking religion.
+
+In the 'Holy Fair' and 'The Twa Herds' he criticised with biting sarcasm
+certain things connected with religion in his time, from which it is now
+happily free. But he did not attack religion. The Rev. L. MacLean Watt,
+when summing up the great work Burns did for true religion, especially in
+'The Holy Fair,' 'The Twa Herds,' and 'Holy Willie's Prayer,' says: 'It
+was in consequence of this ecclesiastical contact that he was, ere long,
+involved in a bitter and incessant warfare with the mediaeval shadows of
+ultra-Calvinism, which laid upon the people the bondage of a rigid
+predestinarianism, the terrible result of which in parochial religion was,
+that it became a commonplace in the matter of conduct that it did not
+matter what you did so long as you believed certain hard and fast tenets
+dealing with the purpose of God and the future of the human soul. This
+could not but inevitably lead to the observation of grave discrepancies
+between creed and conduct; and the setting up of the greatest hypocrisies,
+veiled in the cloak of religiousness, that yet, with searching eye of
+judgment, sat testing the conduct of better men. Burns was one of the
+better men.'
+
+His own attitude towards true religion is shown in his 'Epistle to the
+Rev. John M'Math,' a progressive Presbyterian minister in Tarbolton. In it
+he says:
+
+  All hail, Religion! maid divine!
+  Pardon a muse sae mean as mine,
+  Who in her rough, imperfect line
+      Thus daurs to name thee;
+  To stigmatise _false friends_ of thine
+      Can ne'er defame thee.
+
+He stigmatised false friends of religion, but not religion itself.
+
+There are some who yet say 'Burns could not have been a religious man,
+because he was a sceptic.' Burns was an independent thinker. His mind did
+not accept dogmas or creeds without investigation. In his father's fine
+school he was not trained to think he was thinking, when he was merely
+allowing the ideas of others to run through his head on the path of
+memory. Burns was not trained to believe that he believed, but to think
+till he believed; and to accept in the realm beyond his power to reason
+great fundamental principles that supplied the conscious needs of his own
+heart, as those principles are revealed in the Bible.
+
+In a letter to Mrs Dunlop he wrote: 'I am a very sincere believer in the
+Bible; but I am drawn by the conviction of a man, not by the halter of an
+ass.'
+
+To Mrs Dunlop he wrote, 1788: 'My idle reasonings sometimes made me a
+little sceptical, but the necessities of my own heart always gave the cold
+philosophisings the lie.'
+
+To Mr Peter Stuart he wrote, referring to the poet Fergusson, 1789: 'Poor
+Fergusson! If there be a life beyond the grave, which I trust there is;
+and if there be a good God presiding over all Nature, which I am sure
+there is--thou art now enjoying existence in a glorious world, where worth
+of the heart alone is the distinction of man.'
+
+To Mrs Dunlop, to whom more than to any other person he revealed the
+depths of his heart, he wrote again, 1789: 'In vain would we reason and
+pretend to doubt. I have myself done so to a very daring pitch; but when I
+reflected that I was opposing the most ardent wishes, and the most darling
+hopes of good men, and flying in the face of all human belief, in all
+ages, I was shocked at my own conduct.'
+
+To Robert Aiken he wrote, 1786: 'Though sceptical in some points of our
+current belief, yet I think I have every evidence for the reality of a
+life beyond the stinted bourne of our present existence.'
+
+To Dr Candlish, of Edinburgh, he wrote, 1787: 'Despising old women's
+stories, I ventured into the daring path Spinoza trod, but my experience
+with the weakness, not the strength, of human power _made me glad to grasp
+revealed religion_.'
+
+To Clarinda he wrote, 1788: 'The Supreme Being has put the immediate
+administration of all this for wise and good ends known to Himself into
+the hands of Jesus Christ, a great personage whose relation to Him we
+cannot comprehend, but whose relation to us is that of a Guide and
+Saviour.'
+
+In his epistle to his young friend Andrew Aiken, he sums up in two lines
+his attitude to scepticism:
+
+  An atheist's laugh's a poor exchange
+    For Deity offended.
+
+The men who believe most profoundly are those who honestly doubted in
+early life, but who naturally loved truth, and sought it with hopeful
+minds till they found it. Burns was not a sceptic. He was a reverently
+religious man. No man could have written 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' who
+was not a reverently religious man. His father, from the earliest years,
+when his children were old enough to understand them, began to teach them
+fundamental religious principles. They took root deeply in Robert's mind.
+William Burns preferred not to use the 'Shorter Catechism,' so he wrote a
+special catechism for his own family. It is a remarkable production for a
+man in his position in life. It deals with vitally fundamental principles,
+and shows a clear understanding of the Bible.
+
+Burns wrote several short religious poems in his early young manhood,
+probably his twenty-second and twenty-third years, showing that his mind
+was deeply impressed by the majesty, justice, and love of God. Two of
+these poems are paraphrases of the Psalms.
+
+The fact that religion was one of the most important elements of his
+thought and life is amply proved by the five letters he wrote to Alison
+Begbie in his twenty-first and twenty-second years--even before he wrote
+his early religious poems. Love-letters though they were, they related
+nearly as much to religion as to love. Some people have tried to say
+irreverently smart things about the absurdity of writing about religion in
+letters to his loved one. Both the religion and the love of his letters to
+the first woman he ever asked to marry him are too sacred to provoke
+ridicule in the minds of men with proper reverence for either religion or
+love. No one can carefully read these five letters without having a
+deeper respect for Burns, the young gentleman who loved so deeply that he
+regarded love worthy to be placed in association with religion. Religion
+was the subject that had been given first place in his life and thought by
+the teaching and the life of his father, who had meant infinitely more to
+him than most fathers ever mean to their sons.
+
+In his epistle to Andrew Aiken he recommends, in the last verse but one,
+two things of vast importance 'when on life we're tempest-driv'n': first,
+
+  A conscience but a canker.                        without
+
+Second,
+
+  A correspondence fixed wi' Heaven
+    Is sure a noble anchor.
+
+Many people read the last couplet without consciously thinking what a
+correspondence fixed with Heaven means. Clearly it may have three
+meanings: prayer, communion in spirit with the Divine, and similarity to
+or harmony with the divine spirit.
+
+Burns had family worship in his home every day to the end of his life when
+he was not absent, and though some scoffers may smile, he was earnest and
+sincere in trying to conduct for himself and for his family a
+'correspondence fixed with heaven' in a spirit of communion with the
+Divine Father. He had other altars for communion with God in addition to
+his home. He composed his poems in the gloaming after his day's work, in
+favourite spots in the deep woods, where he was 'hid with God' alone. God
+revealed Himself to Burns in the woods and by the sides of his sacred
+rivers more fully than in any other places. One of the most sacred shrines
+in Scotland is the great root under one of the mighty beeches of the fine
+park on Ballochmyle estate, on which Burns sat so often to compose his
+poems in the long Scottish twilights, and later on in the moonlight, when
+he lived on Mossgiel farm. Then next night, at his desk over the stable at
+Mossgiel, he would rewrite them and improve their form.
+
+No man but a religious man would have written, in his 'Epistle to a Young
+Friend,' as Burns did to Andrew Aiken:
+
+  The great Creator to revere
+    Must sure become the creature.
+
+When in Irvine, in his twenty-third year, he wrote a letter to his father.
+As usual, he wrote not of trivial matters, but of the great realities of
+time and eternity. Among other serious things he wrote: 'My principal,
+and, indeed, my only pleasurable, employment is looking backwards and
+forwards in a moral and religious way.' In the same letter he wrote:
+
+  The soul, uneasy and confined, at home
+  Rests and expatiates in a life to come.[3]
+
+Burns follows this quotation by saying to his father: 'It is for this
+reason that I am more pleased with the 15th, 16th, and 17th verses of the
+7th Chapter of Revelation than with any ten times as many verses in the
+whole Bible, and would not exchange the noble enthusiasm with which they
+inspire me for all that the world has to offer.'
+
+His imagination enabled him to see clearly the glories of joy, and
+service, and association, and reward, in the heavenly paradise, as
+revealed in those triumphant verses.
+
+To Mrs Dunlop he wrote, 1788: 'Religion, my honoured Madam, has not only
+been all my life my chief dependence, but my dearest enjoyment.... An
+irreligious poet would be a monster.'
+
+In his 'Grace before Eating' he reveals his gratitude and conscious
+dependence on God:
+
+  O Thou, who kindly dost provide
+    For every creature's want!
+  We bless Thee, God of Nature wide,
+    For all Thy goodness lent.
+
+In 'Winter: a Dirge' he says, in reverent submission to God's will:
+
+  Thou Power supreme, whose mighty scheme
+    Those woes of mine fulfil,
+  Here firm I rest, they must be best,
+    Because they are Thy Will.
+
+In a poem to Clarinda he wrote, recognising the blessing of Gods universal
+presence, not in awe so much as in joy:
+
+  God is ever present, ever felt,
+  In the void waste, as in the city full;
+  And where He vital breathes, there must be joy!
+
+In the 'Cotter's Saturday Night' he teaches absolute faith in God, and
+indicates man's true relationship to the Divine Father:
+
+      Lest in temptation's path ye gang astray,
+    Implore His counsel and assisting might:
+  They never sought in vain, that sought the Lord aright.
+
+Writing in condemnation of a miserably selfish miser, he said:
+
+  See these hands, ne'er stretched to save,
+  Hands that took, but never gave;
+  Keeper of Mammon's iron chest,
+  Lo, there she goes, unpitied and unblest;
+  She goes, but not to realms of everlasting rest.
+
+  And are they of no more avail,
+    Ten thousand glittering pounds a year?
+  In other worlds can Mammon fail,
+    Omnipotent as he is here?
+  O, bitter mockery of the pompous bier,
+    While down the wretched Vital Part is driven!
+  The cave-lodged beggar, with a conscience clear,
+    Expires in rags, unknown, and goes to heaven.
+
+The philosophy of his mind, and the affectionate sympathy of his heart
+made Burns believe that unselfish service for our fellow-men should be one
+of the manifestations of true religion.
+
+In the fine poem he wrote to Mrs Dunlop on New Year's Day, 1790, he says:
+
+  A few days may, a few years must,
+  Repose us in the silent dust.
+  Then is it wise to damp our bliss?
+  Yes--all such reasonings are amiss!
+  The voice of Nature loudly cries,
+  And many a message from the skies,
+  That something in us never dies;
+  That on this frail, uncertain state
+  Hang matters of eternal weight;
+  That future life in worlds unknown
+  Must take its hue from this alone;
+  Whether as heavenly glory bright,
+  Or dark as Misery's woeful night.
+  Let us the important Now employ,
+  And live as those who never die.
+  Since, then, my honoured first of friends,
+  On this poor living all depends.
+
+Any honest man who reads those lines must admit that Burns was a man of
+deep religious thought and feeling.
+
+Mrs Dunlop, to whom he wrote so many letters, was one of the leading women
+of Scotland in her time. She was a woman of great wisdom and deep
+religious character. Like the other great people who knew Burns, she was
+his friend. Many of his clearest expressions of his religious opinions are
+contained in his letters to her. In a letter to her on New Year's morning,
+1789, he said: 'I have some favourite flowers in Spring, among which are
+the mountain-daisy, the hare-bell, the foxglove, the wild brier-rose, the
+budding birk [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 the Summer noon, or the wild, mixing cadence of a troop of
+grey-plover 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 that, like the AEolian
+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 these 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--these proofs that we deduct by dint of
+our own powers of observation. However respectable Individuals in all ages
+have been, I have ever looked on Mankind in the lump to be nothing better
+than a foolish, head-strong, credulous, unthinking Mob; and their
+universal belief has ever had extremely little weight with me. Still, I am
+a very sincere believer in the Bible.'
+
+In September 1789 he wrote to Mrs Dunlop: 'Religion, my dear friend, is
+true comfort! A strong persuasion in a future state of existence; a
+proposition so obviously probable, that, setting revelation aside, every
+nation and people, so far as investigation has reached, for at least four
+thousand years, have, in some mode or other, firmly believed it.'
+
+To Mrs Dunlop, in 1792, he wrote: 'I am so convinced that an unshaken
+faith in the doctrines of religion is not only necessary by making us
+better men, but also by making us happier men, that I shall take every
+care that your little god-son [his son], and every creature that shall
+call me father, shall be taught them.'
+
+One of his most beautiful religious letters was written to Alexander
+Cunningham, of Edinburgh, in 1794: 'Still there are two pillars that bear
+us up amid the wreck of misfortune and misery. The _one_ is composed of
+the different modifications of a certain noble, stubborn something in man,
+known by the names of courage, fortitude, magnanimity. The _other_ is made
+up of those feelings and sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny
+them, or the enthusiast may disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced,
+original and component parts of the human soul; those _senses of the
+mind_, if I may be allowed the expression, which connect us with and link
+us to, those awful, obscure realities--an all-powerful and equally
+beneficent God, and a world to come, beyond death and the grave. The first
+gives the nerve of combat, while a ray of hope beams on the field; the
+last pours the balm of comfort into the wounds which time can never cure.
+
+'I do not remember, my dear Cunningham, that you and I ever talked on the
+subject of religion at all. I know some who laugh at it, as the trick of
+the crafty FEW, to lead the undiscerning MANY; or at most as an uncertain
+obscurity, which mankind can never know anything of, and with which they
+are fools if they give themselves much to do. Nor would I quarrel with a
+man for his irreligion, any more than I would for his want of a musical
+ear. I would regret that he was shut out from what, to me and to others,
+were such superlative sources of enjoyment. It is in this point of view,
+and for this reason, that I will deeply imbue the mind of every child of
+mine with religion. If my son should happen to be a man of feeling,
+sentiment, and taste, I shall thus add largely to his enjoyments. Let me
+flatter myself that this sweet little fellow, who is just now running
+about my desk, will be a man of a melting, ardent, glowing heart; and an
+imagination, delighted with the painter and rapt with the poet. Let me
+figure him wandering out in a sweet evening, to inhale the balmy gales,
+and enjoy the glowing luxuriance of the spring; himself the while in the
+blooming youth of life. He looks abroad on all Nature, and thro' Nature up
+to Nature's God; his soul, by swift delighting degrees, is rapt above this
+sublunary sphere, until he can be silent no longer, and bursts out into
+the glorious enthusiasm of Thomson:
+
+  '"These, as they change, Almighty Father--these
+  Are but the varied God; the rolling year
+  Is full of thee."
+
+'and so on, in all the spirit and ardour of that charming hymn.
+
+'These are no ideal pleasures; they are real delights; and I ask what of
+the delights among the sons of men are superior, not to say equal, to
+them? And they have this precious, vast addition, that conscious Virtue
+stamps them for her own, and lays hold on them to bring herself into the
+presence of a witnessing, judging, and approving God.'
+
+In 1788 he wrote to Clarinda: 'My definition of worth is short: truth and
+humanity respecting our fellow-creatures; reverence and humility in the
+presence of that Being, my Creator and Preserver, and who, I have every
+reason to believe, will be my judge.'
+
+Again to Clarinda he wrote in 1788: 'He who is our Author and Preserver,
+and will one day be our Judge, must be--not for His sake in the way of
+duty, but from the natural impulse of our hearts--the object of our
+reverential awe and grateful adoration. He is almighty and all-bounteous;
+we are weak and dependent; hence prayer and every other sort of devotion.
+"He is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to
+everlasting life;" consequently it must be in every one's power to embrace
+His offer of everlasting life; otherwise He could not in justice condemn
+those who did not.'
+
+Again in 1788 he wrote to Clarinda: 'In proportion as we are wrung with
+grief, or distracted with anxiety, the ideas of a Compassionate Deity, an
+Almighty Protector, are doubly dear.'
+
+To Mrs Dunlop, in 1795, a year and a half before he died, he wrote: 'I
+have nothing to say to any one as to which sect he belongs to, or what
+creed he believes; but I look on the man who is firmly persuaded of
+Infinite Wisdom and Goodness superintending and directing every
+circumstance that can happen in his lot--I felicitate such a man as having
+a solid foundation for his mental enjoyment; a firm prop and stay in the
+hour of difficulty, trouble, and distress; and a never-failing anchor of
+hope when he looks beyond the grave.'
+
+This quotation emphasises his lifelong faith in God, and his belief in his
+own immortality. It also shows his perfect freedom from bigotry, and the
+broadness of his creed.
+
+In his first 'Commonplace Book' he wrote: 'The grand end of Human being is
+to cultivate an intercourse with that Being to whom we owe life, with
+every enjoyment that renders life delightful; and to maintain an
+integritive conduct towards our fellow-creatures; that by so forming Piety
+and Virtue into habit, we may be fit members for that society of the
+Pious, and the Good, which reason and revelation teach us to expect beyond
+the grave.'
+
+There are no truly good men who will yield to the temptation to speak
+sneeringly of any man who fails in his life to reach his highest ideals.
+The little-minded men who may sneer at Burns, when they read this
+quotation written in his youth, should read his 'Address to the Unco Guid'
+over and over, till they get a glimmering comprehension of its meaning.
+Whatever the puny minds may be focussed on in the life of Burns, they
+should be 'mute at the balance.' They should remember that Burns did more
+than any man of his time for true religion, and that to the end of his
+life his mind and heart overflowed with the same faith and gratitude to
+God that he almost continuously expressed throughout his life.
+
+A final quotation from the letters of Burns about religion may fittingly
+be taken from a letter to Robert Aiken, written in 1786: 'O thou unknown
+Power! Thou Almighty God who hast lighted up Reason in my breast, and
+blessed me with immortality! I have frequently wandered from that order
+and regularity necessary for the perfection of Thy works, yet Thou hast
+never left me nor forsaken me.'
+
+Burns was a reverently religious man. Dean Stanley said: 'Burns was a wise
+religious teacher.' Principal Rainy objected to Dean Stanley's view
+because 'Burns had never become a member of a church on profession of
+Faith in Christ.' Professor Rainy either did not remember, or had never
+realised, that Burns had done more to reveal Christ's highest
+teachings--the value of the individual soul, and brotherhood--than any
+other man in the church, or out of it, in Scotland in his time; and also
+did more to make religion free from false theology and dwarfing practices,
+than any other man of his time, or of any other time in Scotland.
+
+Rev. L. MacLean Watt, of Edinburgh, in his most admirable book on Burns,
+answers Principal Rainy's objections with supreme ability, as the
+following quotations amply prove: 'Because a man does not categorically
+declare his belief in Christ, as that belief is formulated in existing
+dogmatic statements of theological authority, it does not mean that he
+abhors that belief; nor even though he withhold himself from explicitly
+uttering that confession of the Christian faith, does it preclude him from
+being a religious teacher. A man may have an enormous influence as a
+religious teacher, and yet never have made a formal statement of
+Christianity, nor signed a Christian creed.'--'The measure of a man's
+faithfulness to the better side of his nature is not to be gauged by the
+depth of his fall, but the height to which he rises.... Burns was,
+unfortunately, confronted by a narrow and self-righteous set, who were
+enslaved to doctrine and dogma, rather than to the practice of the
+Christian life with charity and humanity of spirit, part and parcel of a
+system of petty tyrannies and mean oppressions, the exercise of which made
+for exile from the fold, because of the spiritual conceit and sectarian
+humbug which created such characters as "Holy Willie," and the "Unco
+Guid," with the superior airs of religious security from which they looked
+down on all besides.'
+
+We should test neither the terrible theologians of his time--those men who
+attacked Burns and called him irreligious, because he had a clear vision
+of a higher, holier religion than the one they preached--nor Burns himself
+by the conditions of our own time. It is unjust both to Burns and to his
+enemies to do so.
+
+A comparison of the religious principles of the best Christians in the
+world nearly a century and a half after his time will show, however, that
+the creed of the present is more--much more--like the creed of Burns than
+the creed of the dreadful theologians of his time. The creed of the
+religious leaders a century hence will be still more like the creed of
+Robert Burns than is the creed of to-day.
+
+The following creed is taken from the letters of Burns, expressed in his
+own language, except the last article, which is found in longer form in
+many of his letters, and more nearly in 'The Hermit,' in which he says:
+
+  Let me, O Lord! from life retire,
+  Unknown each guilty, worldly fire,
+  Remorse's throb, or loose desire;
+      And when I die
+  Let me in this belief expire--
+      To God I fly.
+
+
+THE CREED OF ROBERT BURNS.
+
+     1. Religion should be a simple business, as it equally concerns the
+     ignorant and the learned, the poor and the rich.
+
+     2. There is a great and incomprehensible Being to whom I owe my
+     existence.
+
+     3. The Creator perfectly understands the being He has made.
+
+     4. There is a real and eternal distinction between vice and virtue.
+
+     5. There must be a retributive scene of existence beyond the grave.
+
+     6. From the sublimity, the excellence, and the purity of His
+     doctrines and precepts, I believe Jesus Christ came from God.
+
+     7. Whatever is done to mitigate the woes, or increase the happiness
+     of humanity, is goodness.
+
+     8. Whatever injures society or any member of it is iniquity.
+
+     9. I believe in the immaterial and immortal nature of man.
+
+     10. I believe in eternal life with God.
+
+Carlyle expressed regret that 'Burns became involved in the religious
+quarrels of his district.' This statement proves that Carlyle failed fully
+to comprehend the religious character of Burns. His chivalrous nature was
+partly responsible for his entering the battle waged by the 'Auld Lichts'
+against his dear friend the Rev. Dr M'Gill of Ayr and Gavin Hamilton of
+Mauchline; but his chief reason was his innate determination to free
+religion from the evils taught and practised in the name of religion in
+his time. He had the soul of a reformer, and the two leading elements in
+his soul were Religion and Liberty for the individual. It would have
+robbed the world of one of the greatest steps in human progress towards
+the Divine made in the eighteenth century, if Burns had failed to be true
+to the greatest things in his mind and heart.
+
+Carlyle had clearly not studied the religious elements in either the poems
+or the letters of Burns, or he could not have written his comparison
+between Burns and Locke, Milton, and Cervantes, who did in poverty and
+unusual difficulties grand work. He asks: '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 not self-seekers and
+self-worshippers; but seekers and worshippers of something far better than
+self. Not personal enjoyment was their object; but a high heroic idea of
+Religion, of Patriotism, of Heavenly Wisdom in one form or the other form
+ever hovered before them.
+
+It passes understanding to comprehend how Carlyle could regard Burns as a
+'selfish' man, or a man with 'a double aim'--that is, two conflicting and
+opposing aims that he wasted his power in trying to harmonise.
+
+Burns had three great aims: Purer Religion, a just Democracy, and closer
+Brotherhood; but these aims are in perfect harmony.
+
+Carlyle ends the contrast between Burns and his model trio--Locke, Milton,
+and Cervantes--by saying of Burns: 'He has no religion; 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.'
+
+'The heart not of a mere hot-blooded, popular verse-monger, or poetical
+_Restaurateur_, but of a true poet and singer, worthy of the old religions
+heroic, had been given him, and he fell in an age, not of heroism and
+religion, but of scepticism, selfishness, and triviality, when true
+nobleness was little understood, and its place supplied by a hollow,
+dissocial, altogether barren and unfruitful principle of Pride.'
+
+In a just comparison between Burns and the three named by Carlyle, Burns
+will need no apologists. Burns, directly in opposition to the statement
+of Carlyle, was more vitally religious and less selfish than any of them.
+When twenty-one years of age he said, in one of his beautiful love-letters
+to Alison Begbie: 'I grasp every creature in the arms of universal
+benevolence, and equally participate in the pleasures of the happy, and
+sympathise with the miseries of the unfortunate.' This alone proves that
+Burns was one of the least selfish men who ever lived.
+
+As an heroic teacher of vital religion Burns was infinitely greater than
+any other man of his time, and has been much more influential since his
+time in promoting Christ's ideals than the men named by Carlyle. He was a
+fearless hero, and so meets the requirements specified by Carlyle,
+because, when he recognised the evils connected with religion in his time,
+when true religion was, to use Carlyle's words, 'becoming obsolete,' he
+valiantly attacked them, hoping to enable his fellow-men to see the vision
+of true religion which his father had given him by his life and teaching.
+
+There was absolutely no justification for calling Burns a mere
+verse-monger. To write such a wild nightmare dream about Scotland's
+greatest and most self-less poet was unworthy of one of Scotland's leading
+prose-writers.
+
+It seems almost ludicrous to take notice of the assertion that Burns had
+not a high ideal of patriotism, as compared with the three ideal men of
+Carlyle--Burns, whose love for Scotland was a sacred feeling, a holy fire
+that never ceased to burn. This criticism needs no answer now.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+BURNS THE DEMOCRAT.
+
+
+No man ever comprehended Christ's ideals regarding democracy more fully
+than did Burns. Christ based His teaching of the need of human liberty on
+His revelation of the value of the individual soul. Burns clearly
+understood Christ's ideals regarding individual freedom, and faithfully
+followed Him.
+
+The message of Coila in 'The Vision' to Burns was:
+
+  Preserve the dignity of man
+    With soul erect.
+
+This was the central thought in the work of Burns regarding the freedom of
+all mankind: freedom from oppression by other men; freedom from the
+bondage imposed on the peasant and the labouring man by customs organised
+by so-called 'higher classes'; freedom from the hardship and sorrow of
+poverty; freedom for each child to grow under proper conditions of
+nourishment, of physical development, and of educational training.
+
+His whole nature was stirred to dignified indignation and resentment by
+class distinctions among men and women who were all created in the image
+of God, and who, in accordance with the teaching of Christ, should be
+brothers. He despised class distinctions which were made by man, whether
+the distinctions were made on the basis of rank or wealth. He was ashamed
+of the toadies who reverenced a lord merely because he chanced to be born
+a lord, and pitied those who accepted without protest inferiority to men
+of wealth. He was so true a democrat that he freely and respectfully
+recognised the worth of members of the aristocracy or of the wealthy class
+whose ability and high character made them worthy of respect; but he held
+in contempt those who assumed superiority simply because of rank or gold.
+
+One of his most brilliant poems is 'A Man's a Man for a' That.' In it he
+gives comprehensive expression to his opinions, based on the fundamental
+principle,
+
+  The honest man, though e'er sae poor,
+    Is King o' men for a' that.
+
+  Is there for honesty poverty,
+    That hangs his head an' a' that?
+
+  The coward-slave, we pass him by;
+    We dare be poor for a' that.
+
+        For a' that, an' a' that,
+          Our toils obscure, an' a' that;
+        The rank is but the guinea stamp,
+          The man's the gowd for a' that.           gold
+
+  Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,
+    Wha struts, and stares, an' a' that;
+  Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
+    He's but a coof for a' that:                    blockhead
+
+        For a' that, an' a' that,
+          His ribband, star, an' a' that;
+        The man of independent mind
+          He looks and laughs at a' that.
+
+  A prince can mak a belted knight,
+    A marquis, duke, an' a' that;
+  But an honest man's aboon his might,              above
+    Gude faith he maunna fa' that.                  must not try
+
+        For a' that, an' a' that,
+          Their dignities an' a' that,
+        The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth,
+          Are higher ranks than a' that.
+
+Labouring man on farm or in factory, this is your charter. Let this be
+your creed. Sing this great democratic hymn at your gatherings--ay, sing
+it in your homes with your children, and each time you sing it, it should
+kindle some new light in your soul that will bring you new vision of the
+greatest fact in connection with human life and duty, that you are alive
+to be God's partner, and that while you remain honest, and unselfishly
+consider the rights of others, as fully as you consider your own, you are
+entitled to stand with kings, because you are an honest man.
+
+The discussion between Caesar the aristocratic dog and Luath the cotter's
+dog is a fair representation of class conditions in Scotland in the time
+of Burns. Caesar describes the laird's riches, his idleness, his racked
+rents, and the compulsory services required from the poor tenants; dilates
+on the wastefulness in connection with the meals even of the servants in
+the homes of the great; and expresses surprise that poor folks could exist
+under their trying conditions.
+
+Luath admits that sometimes the strain on the cotter was very severe:
+digging ditches, building dykes with dirty stones, baring a quarry, 'an'
+sic like,' as a means of sustaining a lot of ragged children with nothing
+but his hand labour. He acknowledges that, when ill or out of work, it
+sometimes seems hopeless; but, after all, though past his comprehension,
+the poor folks are wonderfully contented, and stately men and clever
+women are brought up in their homes.
+
+Caesar then expatiates on the contemptuous way the poor are 'huffed, and
+cuffed, and disrespecket.' He especially sympathises with the poor on
+account of the way tenants are treated by the laird's agents on
+rent-day--compelled to submit to their insolence, while they swear and
+threaten to seize their property; and concludes that poor folks must be
+very wretched.
+
+Luath replies that, after all, they are not so wretched as he thinks; that
+their dearest enjoyments are in their wives and thriving children; that
+they often forget their private cares and discuss the affairs of kirk and
+state; that Hallowe'en and Christmas celebrations give them grand
+opportunities for happiness that make them forget their hardships and
+sorrows, and that during these festivals the old folks are so cheery and
+the young ones are so frolicsome that he 'for joy has barket wi' them!'
+Still, he admits that it is owre true what Caesar says, and that many
+decent, honest folk 'are riven out, baith root and branch, some rascal's
+pridefu' greed to quench.'
+
+Caesar then describes the reckless way in which the money received from
+the poor cotters was wasted at operas, plays, mortgaging, gambling,
+masquerading, or taking trips to Calais, Vienna, Versailles, Madrid, or
+Italy; and finally to Germany, to some resort where their dissipations may
+be overcome by drinking muddy German water.
+
+Luath is surprised to learn that the money for which the cotters have
+toiled so hard should be spent so wastefully; and wishes the gentry would
+stay at home and take interest in the sports of their own country, as it
+would be so much better for all: laird, tenant, and cotter. He closes by
+saying that many of the lairds are not ill-hearted fellows, and asks Caesar
+if there is not a great deal of true pleasure in the lives of the rich.
+
+Caesar replies:
+
+  Lord, man, were ye but whyles where I am,
+  The gentles ye wad ne'er envy them.
+
+Admitting that they need not starve or work hard through winter's cold or
+summer's heat, or suffer in old age from working all day in the wet, he
+says:
+
+  But human bodies are sic fools,
+  For a' their colleges and schools,
+  That when nae real ills perplex them,
+  They mak enow themsels to vex them;
+  An' aye the less they hae to sturt them,
+  In like proportion less will hurt them.
+
+  A country fellow at the pleugh,
+  His acres till'd, he's right eneugh;
+  A country girl at her wheel,
+  Her dizzens dune, she's unco weel;
+  But gentlemen, and ladies warst,
+  Wi' ev'n-down want o' wark are curst.
+  They loiter, lounging, lank and lazy;
+  Tho' deil-haet ails them, yet uneasy;
+  Their days insipid, dull, an' tasteless;
+  Their nights unquiet, lang, and restless.
+  An' even their sports, their balls and races,
+  Their galloping through public places,
+  There's sic parade, sic pomp an' art,
+  The joy can scarcely reach the heart.
+
+  The ladies arm-in-arm in clusters,
+  As great and gracious a' as sisters;
+  But hear their absent thoughts o' ither,
+  They're a' run deils and jads thegither.
+  Whyles, ower the wee bit cup an' plaitie,
+  They sip the scandal-potion pretty;
+  Or lee-lang nights, wi' crabbet leuks,
+  Pore ower the devil's pictured beuks;             cards
+  Stake on a chance a farmer's stackyard,
+  An' cheat like ony unhanged blackguard.
+  There's some exceptions, man an' woman;
+  But this is gentry's life in common.
+
+Burns was a philosopher, and he knew such conditions were wrong, and that
+they should not be allowed to last. They are better, after more than a
+century, since Burns became the champion of the poor; but the great
+problem, 'Why should ae man better fare, and a' men brothers?' is not
+properly answered yet. The wisest among the aristocracy know this, and
+admit it, and sincerely hope that the inevitable evolution to juster
+conditions and relationships may be brought about by constitutional means,
+and not by revolution.
+
+Professor Dugald Stewart, of Edinburgh University, wrote: 'I recollect
+once he told me, when I was admiring a distant prospect in one of our
+morning walks, that the sight of so many smoking cottages gave a pleasure
+to his mind none could understand who had not witnessed, like himself, the
+happiness and the worth which they contained.'
+
+It was not the unhappiness of the peasantry that stirred the democratic
+heart of Burns. It was 'man's inhumanity' to his fellow-men; the
+assumption of those belonging to the so-called upper classes that they had
+a divine right to hold higher positions than the common people, and that
+the poorer people should be contented in the 'station to which God had
+called them,' that led Burns to write so ably in favour of democracy. He
+recognised no human right to establish stations to which people were
+called, and in which they should remain, in spite of their right to fill
+any positions for which they had proved their fitness. He could not be so
+irreverent or so unreasonable as to believe God could establish the
+conditions found all around him, so he claimed the right of every child to
+full opportunity for its best development, and to rise honourably to any
+position to which it could attain.
+
+In a letter to Miss Margaret Chalmers, 1788, he wrote: 'What signify the
+silly, idle gewgaws of wealth, or the idle trumpery of greatness? When
+fellow-partakers of the same nature fear the same God, have the same
+benevolence of heart, the same nobleness of soul, the same detestation of
+everything dishonest, and the same scorn at everything unworthy--in the
+name of common-sense, are they not equals?'
+
+To Mrs Dunlop he wrote in 1788: 'There are few circumstances, relating to
+the unequal distribution of good things of this life, that give me more
+vexation (I mean in what I see around me) than the importance the opulent
+bestow on their trifling family affairs, compared with the very same
+things on the contracted scale of the cottage. Last afternoon I had the
+honour to spend an hour or two at a good woman's fireside, where the
+planks that composed the floor were decorated with a splendid carpet, and
+the gay table sparkled with silver and china. 'Tis now about term-day [a
+regular time twice a year was fixed for hiring servants], and there has
+been a revolution among those creatures [servants], who, though in
+appearance partakers, and equally noble partakers, of the same nature as
+Madame, are from time to time--their nerves, sinews, their health,
+strength, wisdom, experience, genius, time, nay, a good part of their very
+thoughts--sold for months and years, not only to the necessities but the
+caprices of the important few. We talked of the insignificant creatures;
+nay, notwithstanding their general stupidity and rascality, did some of
+the poor devils the honour to commend them. But light be the turf upon his
+breast who taught "Reverence thyself!" We looked down on the unpolished
+wretches, their impertinent wives, and clouterly brats, as the lordly bull
+does on the little, dirty anthill, whose puny inhabitants he crushes in
+the carelessness of his ramble, or tosses in the air in the wantonness of
+his pride.'
+
+Such experiences added fuel to the divine purpose in his mind to free a
+large portion of his fellow-countrymen from the bonds that had been bound
+on their bodies and souls by long years of class presumption and heartless
+tyranny, which, till Burns attacked them, had grown more unjust and
+contemptuous as generation succeeded generation.
+
+Burns's reverence for real manhood, a basic principle of true democratic
+spirit, is shown in the closing verse of his 'Elegy on Captain Matthew
+Henderson':
+
+  Go to your sculptured tombs, ye Great,
+  In a' the tinsel trash o' state!
+  But by thy honest turf I'll wait,
+          Thou man of worth!
+  And weep the ae best fellow's fate
+          E'er lay in earth.
+
+To John Francis Erskine he wrote, 1793: 'Burns was a poor man from birth
+and an exciseman from necessity; but--I will say it--the sterling of his
+honest worth no poverty could debase, and his independent British mind
+oppression might bend, but could not subdue.... Can I look tamely on and
+see any machination to wrest from them the birthright of my boys--the
+little, independent Britons, in whose veins runs my own blood?... Does
+any man tell me that my full efforts can be of no service, and that it
+does not belong to my humble station to meddle with the concerns of a
+nation? I can tell him that it is on such individuals as I that a nation
+has to rest, both for the hand of support and the eye of intelligence. The
+uninformed Mob may swell a Nation's bulk, and the titled, tinsel, courtly
+throng may be its feathered ornament; but the number of those who are
+elevated enough in life to reason and reflect, yet low enough to keep
+clear of the venal contagion of a court--these are a nation's strength.'
+
+He wrote the letter, from which this is an extract, because some
+super-loyalists were trying to undermine his reputation on account of his
+independence of spirit and his democratic principles, with a view to
+having him removed from the paltry position he held as an Excise officer.
+
+He was proudly, sensitively independent. He inherited his temperamental
+characteristics from his mother. He was happier defending others than
+working for himself. Writing to the Earl of Eglintoun, he said: 'Mercenary
+servility, I trust, I shall ever have as much honest pride as to detest.'
+
+Writing to Mr Francis Grose, F.S.A., in 1790, about Professor Dugald
+Stewart, he said: 'Mr Stewart's principal characteristic is your favourite
+feature--that sterling independence of mind which, though every man's
+right, so few men have the courage to claim, and fewer still the
+magnanimity to support.'
+
+In 1795, the year before his death, he wrote three poems favourable to the
+election of Mr Heron, the Whig candidate. In the first poem he said:
+
+  The independent commoner
+  Shall be the man for a' that.
+
+Mrs Riddell, writing of Burns after his death, said: 'His features were
+stamped with the hardy character of independence.'
+
+He was a democrat whose democracy was based on the rock of independence
+and a character that 'preserved the dignity of man with soul erect.'
+
+Burns saw both sides of the ideal of freedom. He hated tyrants, and he
+despised those who tamely submitted to tyranny. The inscription on the
+Altar to Independence, erected by Mr Heron at Kerroughtree, written by
+Burns, reads:
+
+  Thou of an independent mind,
+  With soul resolv'd, with soul resign'd;
+  Prepar'd Power's proudest frown to brave,
+  Who wilt not be, nor have a slave;
+  Virtue alone who dost revere,
+  Thy own reproach alone dost fear--
+  Approach this shrine, and worship here.
+
+The man of whom Burns approved was 'one who wilt not _be_ nor _have_ a
+slave.'
+
+In 'Lines Inscribed in a Lady's Pocket Almanac' he says:
+
+  Deal Freedom's sacred treasures free as air,
+  Till Slave and Despot be but things that were.
+
+In the 'Lines on the Commemoration of Rodney's Victory' he wrote:
+
+  Be Anarchy cursed, and be Tyranny damned;         condemned
+  And who would to Liberty e'er be disloyal
+  May his son be a hangman--and he his first trial.
+
+Burns was a philosopher whose mind had been trained to look at both sides
+of a question, and estimate truly their relationships to each other. Even
+in one of his beautiful poems to his wife, written after he was married,
+'I Hae a Wife o' My Ain,' he wrote:
+
+  I am naebody's lord,
+  I'll be slave to naebody.
+
+While Burns was an intense lover of freedom, he had no sympathy with those
+who would overturn constituted authority. He wished to achieve the freedom
+of the people, but to achieve it by constitutional means. He was a
+national volunteer in Dumfries, and he composed a fine patriotic song for
+the corps to sing. He revealed his balanced mind in the following lines in
+that song:
+
+  The wretch that would a tyrant own,
+    And the wretch, his true-born brother,
+  Who would set the mob aboon the throne,           above
+    May they be damned together.
+
+Burns had as little respect for a king who was a tyrant, as he had for a
+tyrant in any other situation in life; but he clearly saw the wicked folly
+of allowing mob-rule to be substituted for constitutional authority.
+
+In the Prologue written to be spoken by an actor on his benefit night,
+Burns wrote:
+
+  No hundred-headed Riot here we meet
+  With decency and law beneath his feet;
+  Nor Insolence assumes fair Freedom's name.
+
+Here, again, he records the dominant ideal of his mind through life; but
+at the same time he utters a warning against ignorant and wild theorists,
+who, in their madness, would overthrow civilisation.
+
+He overflows again on his favourite theme in the 'Lines on the
+Commemoration of Rodney's Victory,' when he was proposing toasts:
+
+  The next in succession I'll give you's the King!
+  Whoe'er would betray him, on high may he swing!
+  And here's the grand fabric, the free Constitution,
+  As built on the base of our great Revolution.
+
+The love of liberty grew stronger in his heart and in his mind as he grew
+older. In his songs, and in his letters, he frequently moralised on
+independence of character and the value of liberty. In a letter to the
+_Morning Chronicle_ he said, 1795: 'I am a Briton, and must be interested
+in the cause of liberty.'
+
+To Patrick Miller he sent a copy of his poems in 1793, accompanied by a
+letter expressing gratitude for his kindness and appreciation of him 'as a
+patriot who in a venal, sliding age stands forth the champion of the
+liberties of my country.'
+
+In his love-song, 'Their Groves o' Sweet Myrtle,' he compares the boasted
+glories of tropical lands with the beauty of his beloved Scotland, and
+boasts in pride of the charms of the
+
+                 Lone glen o' green breckan,        ferns
+  Wi' the burn stealing under the lang yellow broom,
+
+and of the sweetness of
+
+                Yon humble broom bowers,
+  Where the blue-bell and gowan lurk, lowly, unseen.
+
+He cannot close the song, however, without claiming that beautiful as are
+the 'sweet-scented woodlands' of these foreign countries, they are, after
+all, 'the haunt of the tyrant and slave,' and that
+
+  The slave's spicy forests, and gold-bubbling fountains,
+    The brave Caledonian views wi' disdain;
+  He wanders as free as the winds of his mountains.
+
+Burns celebrated the success of the French Revolution in a poem entitled
+'The Tree of Liberty.' His heart bled for the peasantry of France, whom
+the aristocrats had treated so contemptuously, and with such lack of
+consideration, and cruelty. He rejoiced in the overthrow of their
+oppressors, and the establishment of a republican form of government. In
+this poem he gives credit to Lafayette, the great Frenchman who had gone
+to assist the people of the United States in their brave struggle to get
+free. He asks blessings on the head of the noble man, Lafayette, in the
+verse:
+
+  My blessings aye attend the chiel
+    Wha pitied Gallia's slaves, man,
+  And staw a branch, spite o' the deil,             stole
+    Frae yont the western waves, man.
+  Fair Virtue watered it wi' care,
+    And now she sees wi' pride, man,
+  How weel it buds and blossoms there,
+    Its branches spreading wide, man.
+
+     *       *       *       *       *
+
+  A wicked crew syne, on a time,
+    Did tak a solemn aith, man,                     oath
+  It ne'er should flourish to its prime,
+    I wat they pledged their faith, man.
+  Awa they gaed, wi' mock parade,
+    Like beagles hunting game, man,
+  But soon grew weary o' the trade,
+    And wished they'd stayed at hame, man.
+
+  Fair Freedom, standing by the tree,
+    Her sons did loudly ca', man;
+  She sang a song o' liberty,                       Marseillaise
+    Which pleased them ane and a', man.
+  By her inspired, the new-born race
+    Soon drew the avenging steel, man;
+  The hirelings ran--her friends gied chase
+    And banged the despot weel, man.
+
+     *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Wi' plenty o' sic trees, I trow,
+    The warld would live at peace, man;
+  The sword would help to mak' a plough;
+    The din o' war wad cease, man.
+
+The greatest poem Burns wrote to rejoice at the victorious progress of
+humanity towards freedom was his 'Ode to Liberty,' written to express his
+supreme gratification at the success of the people of the United States in
+their struggle for independence from England. He wrote it, as he wrote
+most of his poems during his life in Dumfries, in the moonlight in
+Lincluden Abbey ruins, on the Nith River, just outside of Dumfries. He
+introduces the ode in a poem named 'A Vision.'
+
+He tells that, at midnight, while in the ruins, he saw in the roofless
+tower of the abbey, a vision:
+
+  By heedless chance I turned my eyes,
+    And, by the moonbeam, shook to see
+  A stern and stalwart ghaist arise,                ghost
+    Attired as minstrels wont to be.
+
+  Had I a statue been o' stane,
+    His daring look had daunted me;
+  And on his bonnet graved was plain,
+    The sacred posy, 'Libertie.'
+
+  And frae his harp sic strains did flow
+    Might rouse the slumbering dead to hear;
+  But oh! it was a tale of woe,
+    As ever met a Briton's ear!
+
+The ghost tells the story of the tyranny England exercised over the people
+of the United States, and of the breaking of the tyrant's chains. Burns
+had no more respect for despotism by an English king than he had for the
+despotism of a tyrant in any other land. He knew the people of the
+American colonies were right. England's greatest statesman, Pitt, had
+said so, when the colonists, driven to desperation, rebelled; so the
+ghost's revelation should be to a liberty-loving Briton's ear 'a tale of
+woe.'
+
+The ode begins:
+
+  No Spartan tube, no Attic shell,
+    No lyre AEolian I awake;
+  'Tis liberty's bold note I swell;
+    Thy harp, Columbia, let me take!
+  See gathering thousands, while I sing,
+  A broken chain exultant bring,
+  And dash it in the tyrant's face,
+    And dare him to his very beard,
+    And tell him he no more is feared--
+  No more the despot of Columbia's race!
+  A tyrant's proudest insults braved,
+  They shout--a People freed! They hail an Empire saved.
+
+     *       *       *       *       *
+
+  But come, ye sons of Liberty,
+  Columbia's offspring, brave and free.
+  In danger's hour still flaming in the van,
+  Ye know and dare maintain 'the Royalty of Man.'
+
+So the poem proceeds, till he appeals to King Alfred, and finally to
+Caledonia:
+
+  Alfred! on thy starry throne,
+    Surrounded by the tuneful choir,
+    The bards that erst have struck the patriotic lyre,
+    And rous'd the freeborn Briton's soul of fire,
+  No more thy England own!
+  Dare injured nations form the great design,
+    To make detested tyrants bleed?
+    Thy England execrates the glorious deed!
+    Beneath her hostile banners waving,
+    Every pang of honour braving,
+  England, in thunder calls, 'The tyrant's cause is mine!'
+  That hour accurst how did the fiends rejoice,
+  And hell, through all her confines, raise the exulting voice!
+  That hour which saw the generous English name
+  Linkt with such damned deeds of everlasting shame!
+
+  Thee, Caledonia! thy wild heaths among,
+  Fam'd for the martial deed, the heaven-taught song,
+    To thee I turn with swimming eyes;
+  Where is that soul of Freedom fled?
+  Immingled with the mighty dead,
+    Beneath that hallow'd turf where Wallace lies!
+  Hear it not, Wallace! in thy bed of death.
+    Ye babbling winds! in silence sweep,
+    Disturb not ye the hero's sleep,
+  Nor give the coward secret breath.
+    Is this the ancient Caledonian form,
+    Firm as the rock, resistless as the storm?
+
+He loved to stir the liberty-loving spirit of his beloved Caledonia, so to
+her sons he makes the final appeal in his great ode. He wrote in a similar
+strain in the Prologue written for his friend Woods, the actor:
+
+    O Thou dread Power! whose empire-giving hand
+  Has oft been stretched to shield the honoured land!
+  Strong may she glow with all her ancient fire!
+  May every son be worthy of his sire!
+  Firm may she rise with generous disdain
+  At Tyranny's, or direr Pleasure's, chain;
+  Still self-dependent in her native shore,
+  Bold may she brave grim Danger's loudest roar,
+  Till fate the curtain drop on worlds to be no more.
+
+He reached the highest degree of patriotic fervour, and his clearest call,
+not only to Scotsmen, but to all true men, to be ready to do their duty
+for justice and liberty, in 'Bruce's Address at Bannockburn.'
+
+In a letter to the Earl of Buchan, 1794, enclosing a copy of this poem, he
+wrote: 'Independent of my enthusiasm as a Scotsman, I have rarely met with
+anything in history which interests my feelings as a man equal with the
+story of Bannockburn. On the one hand a cruel, but able, usurper, leading
+on the finest army in Europe, to extinguish the last spark of freedom
+among a greatly daring and greatly injured people; on the other hand, the
+desperate relics of a gallant nation, devoting themselves to rescue their
+bleeding country or perish with her. Liberty! thou art a prize truly and
+indeed invaluable, for never canst thou be too dearly bought.'
+
+  Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled,
+  Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
+  Welcome to your gory bed,
+      Or to Victorie!
+  Now's the day and now's the hour;
+  See the front o' battle lour!
+  See approach proud Edward's power--
+      Chains and slaverie!
+
+  Wha will be a traitor knave?
+  Wha can fill a coward's grave?
+  Wha sae base as be a slave?
+      Let him turn and flee!
+  Wha for Scotland's King and Law,
+  Freedom's sword will strongly draw,
+  Free-Man stand, or Free-Man fa'?
+      Let him follow me!
+
+  By Oppression's woes and pains!
+  By your Sons in servile chains!
+  We will drain our dearest veins,
+      But they _shall_ be free!
+  Lay the proud Usurpers low!
+  Tyrants fall in every foe!
+  Liberty's in every blow!
+      Let us Do--or Die.
+
+  'So may God ever defend the cause of Truth and Liberty as he did
+  that day.
+
+  'ROBERT BURNS.'
+
+Because he was so outspoken in regard to democracy, some men assumed he
+was not a loyal man. The truth is, that he always loved his country, but
+he ardently desired to improve the conditions of the great body of his
+countrymen. Complaints were made about his disloyalty to the Excise
+commissioners under whom he worked. These complaints were investigated,
+and Burns was found to be a loyal man.
+
+When the call came from the Government for volunteers, Burns joined the
+Dumfries Volunteers. In his great song composed for these volunteers he
+strongly expresses his loyalty, both to his country and to his king, in
+the following quotations:
+
+  We'll ne'er permit a foreign foe
+    On British ground to rally.
+
+  Be Britain still to Britain true,
+    Amang oursels united;
+  For never but by British hands
+    Maun British wrangs be righted.                 must
+
+  Who will not sing 'God save the King,'
+    Shall hang as high's the steeple!
+  But while we sing 'God save the King,'
+    We'll ne'er forget the people.
+
+To Robert Graham of Fintry, 1792, he wrote: 'To the British Constitution
+on revolution principles, next after my God, I am most devoutly
+attached.'
+
+Again, a month later, he wrote to Mr Graham: 'I never uttered any
+invectives against the King. His private worth it is altogether impossible
+that such a man as I can appreciate; but in his public capacity I always
+revered, and always will, with the soundest loyalty, revere the Monarch of
+Great Britain as (to speak in Masonic) the sacred Keystone of our Royal
+Arch Constitution. As to reform principles, I look upon the British
+Constitution, as settled at the Revolution, to be the most glorious
+Constitution on earth, or that perhaps the wit of man can frame.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'I never dictated to, corresponded with, or had the least connection with,
+any political association whatever--except that when the magistrates and
+principal inhabitants of Dumfries met to declare their attachment to the
+Constitution, and their abhorrence of riot.'
+
+He had strong desires to effect many reforms in public life, but he was an
+intelligent believer in the British Constitution, and had no faith in any
+method of achieving reforms in the Empire except by constitutional
+measures. He was a radical reformer with a grand mental balance-wheel; and
+such reformers make the best type of citizens, ardent reformers with cool
+heads and unselfish hearts.
+
+Carlyle strangely misunderstood the spirit of democracy in Burns, although
+he justly wrote, long after the poet's death: 'He appears not only as a
+true British poet, but as one of the most considerable British men of the
+eighteenth century.'
+
+What were the achievements, in addition to his poetic power, that made
+Burns 'one of the most considerable men of the eighteenth century?' Mainly
+the work he did to develop in the souls of men a consciousness of
+fundamental principles of democracy, and higher ideals of vital religion;
+yet Carlyle does not approve of his efforts to reform either social or
+religious conditions. As the centuries pass, the work of Burns for
+Religion, Democracy, and Brotherhood will be recognised as his greatest
+work for humanity.
+
+Carlyle's belief was that Burns wrote about the wrongs of the oppressed
+because he could not become rich. In that belief he was clearly in error.
+The love of freedom, justice, and independence was a basic passion in the
+character of Burns. The anxiety of Burns regarding money was not for
+himself, but for his family in case he should die. Several times he
+referred to this in letters to his most intimate friends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+BURNS AND BROTHERHOOD.
+
+
+In the third letter Burns wrote Alison Begbie, the first woman he asked to
+marry him, he said: 'I grasp every creature in the arms of Universal
+Benevolence, and equally participate in the pleasures of the happy, and
+sympathise with the miseries of the unfortunate.'
+
+This statement of one of the fundamental principles which guided him
+during his whole life is a profound interpretation of the teachings of
+Christ in regard to the attitude that each individual should have, must
+have, in order that brotherhood may be established on the earth. He taught
+universal benevolence and vital sympathy _with_--not _for_--humanity; not
+merely when sorrows and afflictions bring dark clouds to hearts, but in
+times of happiness and rejoicing; affectionate sympathy, unostentatious
+sympathy, co-operative sympathy that stimulates helpfulness and
+hopefulness; sympathy that produces activity of the divine in the human
+heart and mind, and leads to brotherhood.
+
+The amazing fact is, not that Burns wrote such fundamental Christian
+philosophy in a love-letter, but that a youth of twenty-one could think it
+and express it so perfectly.
+
+To Clarinda he wrote, 1787: 'Lord! why was I born to see misery which I
+cannot relieve?'
+
+Again, in 1788, he wrote to her: 'Give me to feel "another's woe," and
+continue with me that dear-loved friend that feels with mine.'
+
+To Mrs Walter Riddell he wrote, 1793: 'Of all the qualities we assign to
+the Author and Director of Nature, by far the most enviable is to be able
+"to wipe away all tears from all eyes." O what insignificant, sordid
+wretches are they, however chance may have loaded them with wealth, who go
+to their graves, to their magnificent mausoleums, with hardly the
+consciousness of having made one poor, honest heart happy.'
+
+In 'A Winter Night,' the great poem of universal sympathy, he says:
+
+  Affliction's sons are brothers in distress;
+  A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss.
+
+He closes the poem with four great lines:
+
+  But deep this truth impressed my mind--
+    Thro' all His works abroad,
+  The heart benevolent and kind
+    The most resembles God.
+
+In the same poem he paints the characters who lack loving sympathy, and
+whose lives and attitudes towards their fellow-men separate men, and break
+the ties that should unite all men, and thus prevent the development of
+the spirit of brotherhood. After describing the fierceness of the storm
+and expressing his heartfelt sympathy for the cattle, the sheep, the
+birds, and even with destructive animals such as prey on hen-roosts or
+defenceless lambs, his mind was filled with a plaintive strain, as he
+thought of the bitterness of man to his brother man, and he proceeds:
+
+    Blow, blow, ye winds, with heavier gust!
+    And freeze, thou bitter-biting frost!
+    Descend, ye chilly, smothering snows!
+    Not all your rage, as now united, shows
+      More hard unkindness, unrelenting,
+      Vengeful malice unrepenting,
+  Than heaven-illumined man on brother man bestows.
+
+The depth and universality of his sympathy is shown in 'To a Mouse,' after
+he had destroyed its nest while ploughing:
+
+  I'm truly sorry man's dominion
+  Has broken Nature's social union,
+  An' justifies that ill opinion
+          Which makes thee startle
+  At me, thy poor earth-born companion,
+          An' fellow-mortal!
+
+In his 'Epistle to Davie,' a brother poet, he emphasises the value of true
+sympathy, that should bind all hearts, must yet bind all hearts in
+universal brotherhood, when he says:
+
+  All hail! ye tender feelings dear!
+  The smile of love, the friendly tear,
+          The sympathetic glow!
+  Long since, this world's thorny ways
+  Had numbered out my weary days,
+          Had it not been for you.
+
+In his 'Epistle to Robert Graham of Fintry,' after describing the thrifty
+but selfishly prudent, 'who feel by reason and who give by rule,' and
+expressing regret that 'the friendly e'er should want a friend,' he
+writes:
+
+  But come ye, who the godlike pleasure know,
+  Heaven's attribute distinguished--to bestow!
+  Whose arms of love would grasp the human race.
+
+In the opinion of Burns, they are the ideal men and women who best
+understood, and most perfectly practised, the teaching of Christ.
+
+In one of his epistles to his friend Lapraik he says:
+
+  For thus the royal mandate ran,
+  When first the human race began:
+  The social, friendly, honest man,
+         Whate'er he be--
+  'Tis _he_ fulfils great Nature's plan,
+         And none but he.
+
+The influence of any act on society, on the brotherhood of man as a whole,
+was the supreme test of Burns to distinguish between goodness and evil.
+
+To Dr Moore, of London, he said: 'Whatsoever is not detrimental to
+society, and is of positive enjoyment, is of God, the giver of all good
+things, and ought to be received and enjoyed by His creatures with
+thankful delight.'
+
+To Clarinda he wrote: 'Thou Almighty Author of peace, and goodness, and
+love! Do thou give me the social heart that kindly tastes of every man's
+cup! Is it a draught of joy? Warm and open my heart to share it with
+cordial, unenvying rejoicing! Is it the bitter potion of sorrow? Melt my
+heart with sincerely sympathetic woe! Above all, do Thou give me the manly
+mind, that resolutely exemplifies in life and manners those sentiments
+which I would wish to be thought to possess.'
+
+In 'On the Seas and Far Away' he says:
+
+  Peace, thy olive wand extend,
+  And bid wild war his ravage end;
+  Man with brother man to meet,
+  And as a brother kindly greet.
+
+In the 'Tree of Liberty' he says, if we had plenty of the trees of Liberty
+growing throughout the whole world:
+
+  Like brothers in a common cause
+    We'd on each other smile, man;
+  And equal rights and equal laws
+    Wad gladden ev'ry isle, man.
+
+To Clarinda, when he presented a pair of wine-glasses--a perfectly proper
+gift to a lady in the opinion of his time--he gave her at the same time a
+poem, in which he said:
+
+  And fill them high with generous juice,
+    As generous as your mind;
+  And pledge them to the generous toast,
+    'The whole of human kind!'
+
+In his 'Epistle to John Lapraik,' after describing those whose lives do
+not help men towards brotherhood, he describes those who are true to the
+great ideal:
+
+  But ye whom social pleasure charms,
+  Whose hearts the tide of kindness warms,
+  Who hold your being on the terms,
+      'Each aid the others,'
+  Come to my bowl, come to my arms,
+      My friends, my brothers.
+
+Burns gives each man the true test of the influence of his life for the
+promotion of true brotherhood in the short line, 'Each aid the others.'
+That line is the supreme test of duty, and is the highest interpretation
+of Christ's commandment to His disciples, and through them to all men,
+'Love one another, as I have loved you.' Vital love means vital
+helpfulness.
+
+Dickens gives the same great message as Burns when, in describing Little
+Dorritt, he says: 'She was something different from the rest, and she was
+that something for the rest.' This is probably the shortest sentence ever
+written that conveys so clearly the two great revelations of Christ:
+Individuality and Brotherhood.
+
+There are some who dislike the expression 'Come to my bowl.' They should
+test Burns by the accepted standards of his time, not by the standards of
+our time. The bowl was the symbol of true comradeship in castle and cot,
+in the manse and in the layman's home, in the time of Burns.
+
+No other writer has interpreted Christ's revelations of Democracy and
+Brotherhood so clearly and so fully as Robert Burns. He sums up the whole
+matter of man's relationship to man in 'A Man's a Man for a' That,' in the
+last verse:
+
+  Then let us pray that come it may--
+    As come it will for a' that--
+  That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth,
+    Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.               pre-eminence
+      For a' that, an' a' that,
+        It's coming yet, for a' that,
+      That man to man the world o'er,
+        Shall brothers be for a' that.
+
+He revealed his supreme purpose in 'A Revolutionary Lyric':
+
+  In virtue trained, enlightened youth
+    Will love each fellow-creature;
+  And future years shall prove the truth--
+    That man is good by nature.
+
+  The golden age will then revive;
+    Each man will love his brother;
+  In harmony we all shall live,
+    And share the earth together.
+
+While the so-called religious teachers of the time of Burns were dividing
+men into creeds based on petty theological distinctions, Burns was
+interpreting for humanity the highest teachings of Christ: Democracy based
+on recognition of the value of the individual soul, and Brotherhood as the
+natural fruit of true democracy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+BURNS A REVEALER OF PURE LOVE.
+
+
+Many people yet believe that Burns was a universal and inconstant lover.
+He really did not love many women. He loved deeply, but he had not a great
+many really serious experiences of love. He loved Nellie Kirkpatrick when
+he was fifteen, and Peggy Thomson when he was seventeen. He says his love
+of Nellie made him a poet. There is no other experience that will kindle
+the strongest element in a human soul during the adolescent period so
+fully, and so permanently, as genuine love. Love will not make all young
+people poets, but it will kindle with its most developing glow whatever is
+the strongest natural power in each individual soul. Parents should foster
+such love in young people during the adolescent period, instead of
+ridiculing it, as is too often done. God may not mean that the love is to
+be permanent, but there is no other agency that can be so productive at
+the time of adolescence as love that is reverenced by parents who, by due
+reverence, sympathy, and comradeship, help love to do its best work.
+
+These two adolescent loves did their work in developing Burns, but they
+were not loves of maturity. From seventeen till he was twenty-one he was
+not really in love. Then he met, and deeply and reverently loved, Alison
+Begbie. She was a servant girl of charm, sweetness, and dignity, in a home
+not far from Lochlea farm. He wrote three poems to her: 'The Lass o'
+Cessnock Banks,' 'Peggy Alison,' and 'Mary Morrison.' He reversed her name
+for the second title, because it possessed neither the elements of metre
+nor of rhyme. He gave his third poem to her the title 'Mary Morrison' to
+make it conform to the same metre as 'Peggy Alison.' There was a Mary
+Morrison who was nine years of age when Burns wrote 'Mary Morrison.' She
+is buried in Mauchline Churchyard, and on her tombstone it is stated that
+she was 'the Mary Morrison of Burns.' His brother Gilbert knew better. He
+said the poem was written to the lady to whom 'Peggy Alison' was written.
+It is impossible to believe that Burns would write 'Mary Morrison' to a
+child only nine years old.
+
+Burns wrote five love-letters to Alison Begbie. Beautiful and reverent
+letters they were, too. In the fourth, he asked her to become his wife. In
+Chapter III. it has been explained that he was too shy, even at
+twenty-two, to ask the woman whom he loved to marry him when he was with
+her. This does not indicate that he had a new love each week, as many yet
+believe. Miss Begbie refused to marry him, and his reply should win him
+the respect of every reasonable man or woman who reads it. It is the
+dignified and reverent outpouring of a loving heart, held in control by a
+well-balanced and considerate mind.
+
+Although Burns had no lover from seventeen to twenty-one years of age, he
+wrote love-songs during those years, but even his mother could not tell
+the name of any young woman who kindled his muse during these four years.
+Neither could the other members of his family.
+
+He wrote one poem, 'My Nannie O,' during this period. He first wrote for
+the first line:
+
+  Beyond the hills where Stinchar flows.
+
+He did not like the word 'Stinchar,' so he changed it to 'Lugar,' a much
+more euphonious word. He had no lover named 'Nannie.' Lugar and Stinchar
+were several miles apart. He was really writing about love, not the love
+of any one woman, during those four years; and he was writing about other
+great subjects more than about love, mainly religious and ethical ideals.
+
+From the age of twenty-two he was for three years without a lover. At
+twenty-five he met Jean Armour, then eighteen. Jean spoke first to the
+respectfully shy man. At the annual dance on Fair night in Mauchline,
+Burns was one of the young men who were present. His dog, Luath, who loved
+him, and whom he loved in return, traced his master upstairs to the dance
+hall. Of course the dance was interrupted when Luath got on the floor and
+found his master. Burns kindly led the dog out, and as he was going he
+said, 'I wish I could find a lassie to loe me as well as my dog.' A short
+time afterwards Burns was going along a street in Mauchline, and was
+passing Jean Armour without speaking to her, because he had not been
+introduced to her. She was at the village pump getting water to sprinkle
+her clothes on the village green, and as he was passing her she asked,
+'Hae you found a lassie yet to loe you as well as your dog?' Burns then
+stopped and conversed with her. She was a handsome, bright young woman.
+Their acquaintance soon developed a strong love between them, and resulted
+in a test of the real manhood of the character of Burns. When he realised
+that Jean was to become a mother, he did not hesitate as to his duty. He
+gave her a legal certificate of marriage, signed by himself and regularly
+witnessed, which was as valid as a marriage certificate of a clergyman or
+a magistrate in Scottish law.
+
+Jean's father compelled her to destroy, or let him destroy, the
+certificate. This, and her father's threatened legal prosecution, nearly
+upset the mind of Burns. He undoubtedly loved Jean Armour. In a letter
+written at the time to David Brice, a friend in Glasgow, he wrote: 'Never
+man loved, or rather adored, a woman more than I did her; and, to confess
+a truth between you and me, I do still love her to distraction after
+all.... May Almighty God forgive her ingratitude and perjury to me, as I
+from my very soul forgive her; and may His grace be with her, and bless
+her in all her future life.'
+
+He had arranged to leave Scotland for Jamaica to escape from his mental
+torture, when two things came into his life: Mary Campbell, and the
+suggestion that he should publish his poems. The first filled his heart,
+the second gave him the best tonic for his mind--deeply and joyously
+interesting occupation.
+
+Mary Campbell, 'Highland Mary,' he had met when she was a nursemaid in the
+home of his friend Gavin Hamilton. Meeting her again, when she was a
+servant in Montgomery Castle, he became acquainted with her, and they soon
+loved each other. It is not remarkable that Burns should love Mary
+Campbell, because she was a winsome, quiet, refined young woman, and his
+heart was desolate at the loss of Jean Armour. He, at the time he made
+love to Mary, had no hope of reconciliation with Jean. The greater his
+love for Jean had been, and still was, the greater his need was for
+another love to fill his heart, and he found a pure and satisfying lover
+in Mary. Their love was deep and short, lasting only about two months. Two
+busy months they were, as Burns was preparing his poems for the Kilmarnock
+edition, till he and Mary agreed to be married. They parted for the last
+time on 14th May 1785. The day was Sunday. They spent the afternoon in the
+fine park of Montgomery Castle, through which the Fail River runs for a
+mile and a half. In the evening they went out of the grounds about half a
+mile to Failford, a little village at the junction of the Fail with the
+Ayr. The Fail runs parallel to the Ayr, and in the opposite direction
+after leaving the castle grounds, until it reaches Failford. There it
+meets a solid rock formation, which compels it to turn squarely to the
+right and flow into the Ayr, about three hundred yards away. At a narrow
+place where the Fail had cut a passage through the soft rock on its way to
+the Ayr, Burns and Highland Mary parted. He stood on one side of the river
+and Mary on the other, and after they had exchanged Bibles, they made
+their vows of intention to marry, he holding one side of an open Bible and
+she the other side. Mary went home to prepare for her marriage, but a
+relative in Greenock fell ill with malignant fever, and Mary went to nurse
+him, and caught the fever herself and died.
+
+The poems he wrote to her and about her made her a renowned character.
+When in 1919 a shipbuilding company at Greenock, after a four years'
+struggle, finally purchased the church and churchyard in which Mary was
+buried, with the intention of removing the bodies to another place, the
+British Parliament passed an Act providing that her monument must stand
+forever over her grave, where it had always stood.[4] Though she held a
+humble position, the beautiful poems of her lover gave her an honoured
+place in the hearts of millions of people all over the world.
+
+Burns did not go to Jamaica, although he had secured a berth on a ship to
+take him to that beautiful island. Calls came to him just in time to
+publish an edition of his poems in Edinburgh. He answered the calls,
+startled and delighted Edinburgh society, published his poems, and met
+Clarinda.
+
+Mrs M'Lehose was a cultured and charming grass-widow. She had been courted
+and married by a wealthy young man in Glasgow when she was only seventeen
+years of age. Though a lady of the highest character, on the advice of
+relatives and friends she left her husband. He then went to Jamaica.
+
+Burns and Mrs M'Lehose mutually admired each other when they met, and
+their friendship quickly developed into affection. Under the names of
+Sylvander and Clarinda they conducted a love correspondence which will
+probably always remain the finest love correspondence of the ages.
+Clarinda was a religious and cultured woman; Burns was a religious and
+cultured man, so their letters of love are on a high plane. Clarinda wrote
+very good poems as well as good prose, and Burns wrote some of his best
+poems to Clarinda. His parting song to Clarinda is, in the opinion of many
+literary men, the greatest love-song of its kind ever written. Those who
+study the Clarinda correspondence will find not only love, but many
+interesting philosophical discussions regarding religion and human life.
+
+Thus ends the record of his real loves, notwithstanding the outrageous
+misstatements that his loves extended, according to one writer, to nearly
+four hundred. He had just four deep and serious loves, not counting the
+two deep and transforming affections of his adolescent period for Nellie
+Kirkpatrick and Peggy Thomson. He loved four women: Alison Begbie, Jean
+Armour, Mary Campbell, and Mrs M'Lehose. At the age of twenty-one he loved
+Alison Begbie, and, when twenty-two, he asked her to marry him. She
+declined his proposal. He was too shy to propose to her when he was with
+her. Get this undoubted fact into your consciousness, and think about it
+fairly and reasonably, and it will help you to get a truer vision of the
+real Burns. Read the proposal and his subsequent letter on pages 51-55,
+and your mind should form juster conceptions of Burns as a lover and as a
+man. You will find it harder to be misled by the foolish or the malicious
+misrepresentations that have too long passed as facts concerning him as a
+lover.
+
+From twenty-two to twenty-five he had no lover; then he loved and married
+Jean Armour. No act of his prevented that marriage-contract remaining in
+force. When her father forced the destruction of the contract, and much
+against his will, and in defiance of the love of his heart, he found that
+he had lost his wife beyond any reasonable hope of reconciliation and
+reunion, and was therefore free to love another, he loved Mary Campbell,
+and honourably proposed marriage to her. She accepted his offer, but died
+soon after. He was untrue to no one when he took Clarinda into his heart.
+Of course he could not ask her to marry him, as she was already married.
+
+The first three women he loved after he reached the age of twenty-one
+years were Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, and Mary Campbell. The first
+refused his offer; he married the second, and was forced into freedom by
+her father; the third accepted his offer of marriage, but died before they
+could be married. The fourth woman whom he loved loved him, but could not
+marry him, a fact recognised by both of them. There is not a shadow of
+evidence of inconstancy or unfaithfulness on his part in the eight years
+during which he loved the four women--the only four he did love after he
+became a man.
+
+It may be answered that Burns was not loyal to Jean Armour because he
+loved Mary Campbell and Clarinda after he was married to Jean. Burns
+absolutely believed that his marriage to Jean was annulled by the burning
+of the marriage certificate. He would not have pledged matrimony with Mary
+Campbell if he had known that Jean was still his wife. When Mary died, and
+he found Jean's father was willing that he might again marry Jean, he did
+marry her in Gavin Hamilton's home. In writing to Clarinda he forgot
+himself for a moment and spoke disrespectfully of Jean, but his prompt and
+honourable action in marrying her soon after showed him to be a true man.
+
+It should ever be remembered that Burns was in no sense a fickle lover. To
+each of the three women whom he loved, his love was reverent and true. He
+had a reverent affection for Alison Begbie after she refused him; he loved
+Jean Armour after she allowed their marriage-certificate to be destroyed;
+and he loved Mary Campbell, not only till she died, but to the end of his
+life. The fact that he sat out in the stackyard on Ellisland farm through
+the long moonlit night, with tears flowing down his cheeks, on the third
+anniversary of her death, and wrote 'To Mary in Heaven,' proves the depth
+and permanency of his love.
+
+In 'My Eppie Adair' he says:
+
+  By love and by beauty, by law and by duty,
+  I swear to be true to my Eppie Adair.
+
+In these lines Burns truly defines his own type of love.
+
+It is true that Miss Margaret Chalmers told the poet Campbell, after Burns
+died, that he had asked her to marry him. His letters to her are letters
+of deep friendship--reverent friendship--not love. It is true that the
+last poem he ever wrote was written to Margaret Chalmers, and that in it
+he said:
+
+  Full well thou knowest I love thee, dear.
+
+But it must be remembered that Burns had been married to Jean and living
+happily with her for eight years, so the love of this line was not the
+love that is expected to lead to marriage, but an expression of reverent
+affection. The whole tenor of this last poem of his life indicates that
+he thought her feeling for him was cooling, and his deep affectionate
+friendship urged him to plead with her for a continuance of their
+long-existing and quite unusual relationship.
+
+Many people will doubtless say, 'What about Chloris?' Chloris was his name
+for Jean Lorimer, the daughter of a friend of his who dwelt near him when
+he lived on Ellisland farm after his second marriage to Jean Armour.
+Chloris was a sweet singer and player, who frequently visited Mrs Burns,
+and who sang for Burns, sometimes, with Mrs Burns the grand old Scottish
+airs that had long been sung to words that were not pure, and to which he
+was writing new and pure words nearly every day. A number of these songs
+were addressed to Chloris, but in a book of his poems presented to Miss
+Lorimer he states clearly that the love he appeared to be expressing for
+her was an assumed, or, as he called it, a 'fictitious,' and not a real
+love.
+
+When Burns had earned five hundred pounds by the sale of the Edinburgh
+edition of his poems, he decided 'that he had the responsibility for the
+temporal and possibly the eternal welfare of a dearly loved
+fellow-creature;' so again giving proof of his honest manhood and
+recognising his plain duty, he married Jean Armour a second time, in the
+home of his dear friend Gavin Hamilton. Of the first three women whom he
+loved one refused him, one died after their sacred engagement, and the
+third he married twice. The fourth and last woman that he loved could not
+marry.
+
+Any one of the first three would have made him a good wife, but no one
+could have been more considerate or more faithful than the one he married.
+
+Could any reasonable man believe that if Burns had really loved other
+women, as he loved Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, Mary Campbell, and Mrs
+M'Lehose, the names of the other women would not have been known by the
+world? He never tried to hide his love. He wrote songs of love with other
+names attached to them, used for variety. In a letter to a friend he
+regretted the use of 'Chloris' in several of his Ellisland and Dumfries
+poems, and to her directly he said they were 'fictitious' or assumed
+expressions of love. Notwithstanding the foolish or malicious statements
+that Burns had many lovers, he had but four real loves. One would have
+been his limit if the first had accepted him and lived as long as he did.
+
+It has been said that 'the love of Burns was the love of the flesh.' It
+is worth while to examine the love-songs of Burns to learn what elements
+of thought and feeling dominated his mind and heart. He wrote two hundred
+and fifty love-songs, and only three or four contain indelicate
+references; even these were not considered improper in his time.
+
+What were the themes of his love-songs? What were the symbols that he used
+to typify love? There is no beauty or delight in Nature on earth or sky
+that he did not use as a symbol of true love. He saw God through Nature as
+few men ever saw Him, and he therefore naturally used the beauty and
+sweetness and glory of Nature to help to reveal the beauty and sweetness
+and glory of love, the element of the Divine that thrilled him with the
+deepest joy and the highest reverence.
+
+In his first poem, written when he was fifteen, describing his
+fourteen-year-old sweetheart, he says:
+
+  A bonnie lass, I will confess,
+    Is pleasant to the e'e;
+  But without some better qualities,
+    She's no a lass for me.
+
+     *       *       *       *
+
+  But it's innocence and modesty
+    That polishes the dart.
+
+  'Tis this in Nelly pleases me,
+    'Tis this enchants my soul;
+  For absolutely in my breast
+    She reigns without control.
+
+Of Peggy Thomson, his second love, he wrote:
+
+  Not vernal showers to budding flowers,
+    Not autumn to the farmer,
+  So dear can be as thou to me,
+    My fair, my lovely charmer.
+
+Of Alison Begbie he wrote in 'The Lass o' Cessnock Banks':
+
+  But it's not her air, her form, her face,
+    Tho' matching beauty's fabled queen;
+  'Tis the mind that shines in ev'ry grace,
+    And chiefly in her rogueish een.
+
+In 'Young Peggy Blooms' he describes her:
+
+  Young Peggy blooms our bonniest lass,
+    Her blush is like the morning,
+  The rosy dawn, the springing grass
+    With early gems adorning.
+  Her eyes outshine the radiant beams
+    That gild the passing shower,
+  And glitter o'er the crystal streams,
+    And cheer each fresh'ning flower.
+
+In 'Will Ye Go to the Indies, My Mary?' he says:
+
+  O sweet grows the lime and the orange,
+    And the apple o' the pine;
+  But a' the charms o' the Indies
+    Can never equal thine.
+
+The following are emblems of beauty in the 'Lass o' Ballochmyle':
+
+  On every blade the pearls hang.
+
+  Her look was like the morning's eye,
+    Her air like Nature's vernal smile.
+
+  Fair is the morn in flowery May,
+    And sweet is night in autumn mild.
+
+Describing 'My Nannie O' he says:
+
+  Her face is fair, her heart is true;
+    As spotless as she's bonnie, O;
+  The opening gowan, wat wi' dew,                   daisy
+    Nae purer is than Nannie O.
+
+In 'The Birks [birches] of Aberfeldy' he speaks to his lover of 'Summer
+blinking on flowery braes' and 'Playing o'er the crystal streamlets;' and
+the 'Blythe singing o' the little birdies' and 'The braes o'erhung wi'
+fragrant woods' and 'The hoary cliffs crowned wi' flowers;' and 'The
+streamlet pouring over a waterfall.' Love and Nature were united in his
+heart.
+
+In 'Blythe was She' he describes the lady by saying she was like beautiful
+things:
+
+  Her looks were like a flower in May.
+
+  Her smile was like a simmer morn;
+
+  Her bonnie face it was as meek
+  As any lamb upon a lea;
+
+and the 'ev'ning sun.'
+
+Her step was
+
+  As light's a bird upon a thorn.
+
+He wrote 'O' a' the Airts the Wind can Blaw' about Jean Armour after they
+were married, while he was building their home on Ellisland. He says in
+this exquisite song:
+
+  By day and night my fancy's flight
+    Is ever wi' my Jean.
+
+  I see her in the dewy flowers,
+    I see her sweet and fair;
+  I hear her in the tunefu' birds,
+    I hear her charm the air:
+  There's not a bonnie flower that springs
+    By fountain, shaw, or green;                    woodland
+  There's not a bonnie bird that sings,
+    But minds me o' my Jean.
+
+To Jean he wrote again:
+
+  It is na, Jean, thy bonnie face,
+    Nor shape that I admire;
+  Although thy beauty and thy grace
+    Might weel awake desire.
+  Something in ilka part o' thee
+    To praise, to love, I find;
+  But dear as is thy form to me,
+    Still dearer is thy mind.
+
+In 'Delia--an Ode,' he uses the 'fair face of orient day,' and 'the tints
+of the opening rose' to suggest her beauty, and 'the lark's wild warbled
+lay' and the 'sweet sound of the tinkling rill' to suggest the sweetness
+of her voice.
+
+In 'I Gaed a Waefu' Gate Yestreen' he says:
+
+  She talked, she smiled, my heart she wiled;
+    She charmed my _soul_, I wist na how.
+
+It was the soul of Burns that responded to love. Neither Alison Begbie nor
+Mary Campbell excelled in beauty, and no one acquainted with their high
+character could have had the temerity to suggest that love for them was
+'the love of the flesh.' His beautiful poems to Jean Armour place his love
+for her on a high plane. He was a man of strong passion, but passion was
+not the source of his love.
+
+In 'Aye sae Bonnie, Blythe and Gay' he says:
+
+  She's aye sae neat, sae trim, sae light, the graces round her hover,
+  Ae look deprived me o' my heart, and I became her lover
+
+'Ilka bird sang o' its love' he makes Miss Kennedy say in 'The Banks o'
+Doon.' As the birds ever sang love to Burns, he naturally makes them sing
+love to all hearts.
+
+In 'The Bonnie Wee Thing' he gives high qualifications for love kindling:
+
+  Wit, and grace, and love, and beauty
+    In ae constellation shine;
+  To adore thee is my duty,
+    Goddess o' this soul o' mine.
+
+In 'The Charms of Lovely Davies' he says:
+
+  Each eye it cheers when she appears,
+    Like Phoebus in the morning,
+  When past the shower, and ev'ry flower
+    The garden is adorning.
+
+The last three poems from which quotations have been made were written
+about two ladies whose lovers had been untrue to them: the first about
+Miss Kennedy, a member of one of the leading Ayrshire families; the other
+two about Miss Davies, a relative of the Glenriddell family.
+
+In a letter to Miss Davies he said:
+
+'Woman is the blood-royal of life; let there be slight degrees of
+precedency among them, but let them all be sacred. Whether this last
+sentiment be right or wrong, I am not accountable; it is an original
+component feature of my mind.'
+
+Burns was not in love with either Miss Kennedy or Miss Davies, but he
+explains the writing of the songs to Miss Davies, in a letter enclosing
+'Bonnie Wee Thing,' by saying, 'When I meet a person of my own heart I
+positively can no more desist from rhyming on impulse than an AEolian harp
+can refuse its tones to the streaming air.'
+
+One of his most beautiful poems is 'The Posie,' which he planned to pull
+for his 'Ain dear May.'
+
+  The primrose I will pu', the firstling o' the year,
+  And I will pu' the pink, the emblem o' my dear,
+  For she's the pink o' womankind, and blooms without a peer.
+
+  I'll pu' the budding rose, when Phoebus peeps in view,
+  For it's like a baumy kiss o' her sweet, bonnie mou';
+  The hyacinth's for constancy, wi' its unchanging blue.
+
+  The lily it is pure, and the lily it is fair,
+  And in her lovely bosom I'll place the lily there;
+  The daisy's for simplicity and unaffected air.
+
+  The woodbine I will pu', when the e'ening star is near,
+  And the diamond draps o' dew shall be her een sae clear;
+  The violet's for modesty, which weel she fa's to wear.
+
+  I'll tie the posie round wi' the silken band o' luve,
+  And I'll place it in her breast, and I'll swear by a' above
+  That to my latest draught o' life the band shall ne'er remove,
+  And this will be a posie to my ain dear May.
+
+In 'Lovely Polly Stewart' he says:
+
+  O lovely Polly Stewart,
+    O charming Polly Stewart,
+  There's ne'er a flower that blooms in May
+    That's half so fair as thou art.
+
+  The flower it blaws, it fades, it fa's,
+    And art can ne'er renew it;
+  But worth and truth, eternal youth
+    Will gie to Polly Stewart.
+
+In 'Thou Fair Eliza' he says:
+
+  Not the bee upon the blossom,
+    In the pride o' sinny noon;
+  Not the little sporting fairy,
+    All beneath the simmer moon;
+  Not the minstrel, in the moment
+    Fancy lightens in his e'e,
+  Kens the pleasure, feels the rapture,
+    That thy presence gies to me.
+
+In 'My Bonie Bell' he writes:
+
+  The smiling spring comes in rejoicing,
+    The surly winter grimly flies;
+  Now crystal clear are the falling waters,
+    And bonie blue are the sunny skies.
+  Fresh o'er the mountains breaks forth the morning,
+    The evening gilds the ocean's swell;
+  All creatures joy in the sun's returning,
+    And I rejoice in my Bonie Bell.
+
+'Sweet Afton' was suggested by the following: 'I charge you, O ye
+daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not, nor awaken my love--my dove, my
+undefiled! The flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of
+birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land.'
+
+In descriptive power and in fond and reverent love no poem of Burns, or
+any other writer, surpasses Sweet Afton. Authorities have been divided in
+regard to the person who was the Mary of Sweet Afton. Currie and Lockhart
+declined to accept the statement of Gilbert Burns that it was Highland
+Mary. Chambers and Douglas, the most illuminating and reliable of the
+early biographers of Burns, agree with Gilbert. One of Mrs Dunlop's
+daughters stated that she heard Burns himself say that Mary Campbell was
+the woman whose name he used to represent the lover for whom he asked such
+reverent consideration. He had no lover at any period of his life on the
+Afton. He had but one lover named Mary, and she stirred him to a degree of
+reverence that toned the music of his love to the end of his life. Mary
+Campbell was alive to Burns in a truly realistic sense when he wrote the
+sacred poem 'Sweet Afton.'
+
+In 'O were my Love yon Lilac Fair' he assumes that his love might be
+
+                      A lilac fair,
+    Wi' purpling blossoms in the spring,
+  And I a bird to shelter there,
+    When wearied on my little wing.
+
+In the second verse he says:
+
+  O gin my love were yon red rose        if
+    That grows upon the castle wa';
+  And I mysel' a drop o' dew,
+    Into her bonie breast to fa'!
+
+Could imagination kindle more pure ideals to reveal love than these? In
+'Bonie Jean--A Ballad' he gives two delightful pictures of love:
+
+  As in the bosom of the stream
+    The moonbeam dwells at dewy e'en;
+  So trembling, pure, was tender love
+    Within the breast of Bonie Jean.
+
+     *       *       *       *       *
+
+  The sun was sinking in the west,
+    The birds sang sweet in ilka grove;             every
+  His cheek to hers he fondly laid,
+    And whispered thus his tale of love.
+
+In 'Phillis the Fair' he writes:
+
+  While larks, with little wing, fann'd the pure air,
+  Tasting the breathing spring, forth did I fare;
+      Gay the sun's golden eye
+      Peep'd o'er the mountains high;
+  Such thy morn! did I cry, Phillis the fair.
+
+  In each bird's careless song glad did I share;
+  While yon wild-flow'rs among, chance led me there!
+      Sweet to the op'ning day,
+      Rosebuds bent the dewy spray;
+  Such thy bloom! did I say, Phillis the fair.
+
+In 'By Allan Stream' he describes the glories of Nature, but gives them
+second place to the joys of love:
+
+  The haunt o' spring's the primrose-brae,
+    The summer joys the flocks to follow;
+  How cheery thro' her short'ning day
+    Is autumn in her weeds o' yellow;
+  But can they melt the glowing heart,
+    Or chain the soul in speechless pleasure?
+  Or thro' each nerve the rapture dart,
+    Like meeting her, our bosom's treasure?
+
+In 'Phillis, the Queen o' the Fair' he uses many beautiful things to
+illustrate her charms:
+
+  The daisy amused my fond fancy,
+    So artless, so simple, so wild:
+  Thou emblem, said I, o' my Phillis--
+    For she is Simplicity's child.
+
+  The rosebud's the blush o' my charmer,
+    Her sweet, balmy lip when 'tis prest:
+  How fair and how pure is the lily!
+    But fairer and purer her breast.
+
+  Yon knot of gay flowers in the arbour,
+    They ne'er wi' my Phillis can vie:
+  Her breath is the breath of the woodbine,
+    Its dew-drop o' diamond her eye.
+
+  Her voice is the song o' the morning,
+    That wakes thro' the green-spreading grove,
+  When Phoebus peeps over the mountains
+    On music, and pleasure, and love.
+
+  But beauty, how frail and how fleeting!
+    The bloom of a fine summer's day;
+  While worth, in the mind o' my Phillis,
+    Will flourish without a decay.
+
+In 'My Love is like a Red, Red Rose' he uses exquisite symbolism:
+
+  My luve is like a red, red rose
+    That's newly sprung in June;
+  My luve is like a melodie
+    That's sweetly play'd in tune.
+
+  As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
+    So deep in luve am I;
+  And I will luve thee still, my dear,
+    Till a' the seas gang dry.
+
+In the pastoral song, 'Behold, my Love, how Green the Groves,' he says in
+the last verse:
+
+  These wild-wood flowers I've pu'd to deck
+    That spotless breast o' thine;
+  The courtier's gems may witness love,
+    But never love like mine.
+
+In the dialogue song 'Philly and Willy,'
+
+  _He says_,
+          As songsters of the early spring
+          Are ilka day more sweet to hear,          each
+          So ilka day to me mair dear
+            And charming is my Philly.
+
+  _She replies_,
+          As on the brier the budding rose
+          Still richer breathes and fairer blows,
+          So in my tender bosom grows
+            The love I bear my Willy.
+
+In 'O Bonnie was yon Rosy Brier' he says:
+
+  O bonnie was yon rosy brier
+    That blooms so far frae haunt o' man;
+  And bonnie she, and ah, how dear!
+    It shaded frae the e'ening sun.
+
+  Yon rosebuds in the morning dew,
+    How pure amang the leaves sae green;
+  But purer was the lover's vow
+    They witnessed in their shade yestreen.
+
+  All in its rude and prickly bower,
+    That crimson rose, how sweet and fair.
+  But love is far a sweeter flower,
+    Amid life's thorny path o' care.
+
+In 'A Health to Ane I Loe Dear'--one of his most perfect love-songs--he
+says:
+
+  Thou art sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet,
+      And soft as their parting tear.
+
+     *       *       *       *       *
+
+  'Tis sweeter for thee despairing
+      Than aught in the world beside.
+
+In 'My Peggy's Charms,' describing Miss Margaret Chalmers, Burns confines
+himself mainly to her mental and spiritual charms. This was clearly a
+distinctive characteristic of nearly the whole of his love-songs. No other
+man ever wrote so many pure songs without suggestion of the flesh as did
+Robert Burns.
+
+  My Peggy's face, my Peggy's form,
+  The frost of hermit age might warm;
+  My Peggy's worth, my Peggy's mind,
+  Might charm the first of human kind.
+
+  I love my Peggy's angel air,
+  Her face so truly, heavenly fair.
+  Her native grace, so void of art;
+  But I adore my Peggy's heart.
+
+  The tender thrill, the pitying tear,
+  The generous purpose, nobly dear;
+  The gentle look that rage disarms--
+  These are all immortal charms.
+
+In his 'Epistle to Davie--A Brother Poet' Burns, after detailing the many
+hardships and sorrows of the poor, forgets the hardships, and recalls his
+blessings:
+
+  There's a' the pleasures o' the heart,
+    The lover and the frien';
+  Ye hae your Meg, your dearest part,
+    And I my darling Jean.
+
+  It warms me, it charms me,
+    To mention but her name;
+  It heats me, it beets me,                         kindles
+    And sets me a' on flame.
+
+  O all ye powers who rule above!
+  O Thou whose very self art love!
+    Thou know'st my words sincere!
+  The life-blood streaming through my heart,
+  Or my more dear immortal part
+    Is not more fondly dear!
+  When heart-corroding care and grief
+    Deprive my soul of rest,
+  Her dear idea brings relief
+    And solace to my breast.
+      Thou Being, All-Seeing,
+        O hear my fervent prayer;
+      Still take her, and make her
+        Thy most peculiar care.
+
+Three years after the death of Highland Mary, Burns remained out in the
+stackyard on Ellisland farm and composed 'To Mary in Heaven.' Nothing
+could more strikingly prove the sincerity, the permanence, the purity, and
+the sacredness of the white-souled love of Burns than this poem:
+
+  Thou ling'ring star, with less'ning ray,
+    That lov'st to greet the early morn,
+  Again thou usher'st in the day
+    My Mary from my soul was torn.
+  O Mary! dear departed shade!
+    Where is thy place of blissful rest?
+  See'st thou thy lover lowly laid?
+    Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast?
+
+  That sacred hour can I forget?
+    Can I forget that hallow'd grove
+  Where, by the winding Ayr, we met
+    To live one day of parting love?
+  Eternity can not efface
+    Those records dear of transports past;
+  Thy image at our last embrace;
+    Ah! little thought we 'twas our last!
+
+  Ayr, gurgling, kiss'd his pebbled shore,
+    O'erhung with wild-woods, thickening green;
+  The fragrant birch and hawthorn hoar
+    Twined amorous round the raptured scene:
+  The flowers sprang wanton to be prest,
+    The birds sang love on every spray;
+  Till too, too soon, the glowing west,
+    Proclaimed the speed of winged day.
+
+  Still o'er these scenes my mem'ry wakes,
+    And fondly broods with miser-care;
+  Time but th' impression stronger makes,
+    As streams their channels deeper wear.
+  My Mary, dear departed shade!
+    Where is thy place of blissful rest?
+  See'st thou thy lover lowly laid?
+    Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast?
+
+The general themes of this sacred poem, written three years after Mary
+Campbell's death, are the preponderating themes of his love-songs. No
+love-songs ever written have so little of even embracing and kissing as
+the love-songs of Burns, except the sonnets of Mrs Browning.
+
+It is worthy of note that Mary Campbell was not a beauty--her attractions
+were kindness, honesty, and unselfishness; yet, though happily married
+himself, he loved her, three years after her death, as profoundly as when
+they parted on the Fail, more than three years before he wrote the poem.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+BURNS A PHILOSOPHER.
+
+
+The fine training by their father developed the minds of both Robert and
+Gilbert Burns as original, independent thinkers, chiefly in regard to
+religious, ethical, and social problems. Professor Dugald Stewart, of
+Edinburgh University, expressed the opinion that 'the mind of Burns was so
+strong and clear that he might have taken high rank as a thinker in any
+department of human thought; probably attaining as high rank in any other
+department as he achieved as a poet.' The quotations given from his
+writings in the preceding pages prove that he was a philosopher of unusual
+power in regard to Religion, Democracy, and Brotherhood.
+
+Lockhart said, speaking of the ranking of Burns as a thinker, compared
+with the best trained minds in Edinburgh: 'Even the stateliest of these
+philosophers had enough to do to maintain the attitude of equality when
+brought into contact with Burns's gigantic understanding.'
+
+Many of his poems are ornamented and increased in value by flashes of
+philosophic thought. His 'Epistle to a Young Friend' is a series of
+philosophical statements for human guidance.
+
+  Ye'll find mankind an unco squad,                 strange
+    And muckle they may grieve ye,                  much
+
+  I'll no say men are villains a';
+    The real hardened wicked,
+  Wha hae nae check but human law,
+    Are to a few restricket;                        restricted
+
+  But, och! mankind are unco weak,                  very
+    An' little to be trusted;
+  If self the wavering balance shake
+    It's rarely right adjusted.
+
+He takes a kindly view, that men as a whole are not so bad as pessimists
+would have us believe; that there are comparatively few that have no
+respect for the Divine Law, and are kept in check only by the fear of
+human law; but mourns because most men yet think more of self than of
+their neighbours, to whom they may be of service, and sees that, where our
+relations with our fellow-men are not satisfactorily balanced, the
+destroyer of harmony is universally selfishness in one form or another.
+
+  The fear o' Hell's a hangman's whip
+    To haud the wretch in order.
+
+Even yet this is advanced philosophy, that fear, being a negative motive,
+cannot kindle human power or lead men to higher growth. So far as it can
+influence the human soul, its effect must be to depress it. Not only the
+fear of hell, but fear of anything, is an agency of evil. Some day a
+better word than fear will be used to express the proper attitude of human
+souls towards God.
+
+  But where you feel your honour grip
+    Let that aye be your border.
+
+What you think of yourself matters more to you than what others think of
+you. Let honour and conscience be your guide, and go not beyond the limits
+they prescribe. Stop at the slightest warning honour gives,
+
+  And resolutely keep its laws,
+    Uncaring consequences.
+
+In regard to religious matters, he gave his young friend sage advice:
+
+  The great Creator to revere
+    Must sure become the creature;
+  But still the preaching cant forbear,
+    And ev'n the rigid feature.
+
+The soul's attitude to the Creator is a determining factor in deciding its
+happiness and growth. Reverence should not mean solemnity and awe.
+Reverence based on dread blights the soul and dwarfs it. True reverence
+reaches its highest when its source is joy; then it becomes productive of
+character--constructively transforming character. The formalism of
+'preaching cant' robs religion of its natural attractiveness, especially
+to younger people; the 'rigid feature' turns those who would enjoy
+religion from association with those who claim to be Christians, and yet,
+especially when they speak about religion, look like melancholy and
+miserable criminals whose final appeal for pardon has been refused.
+Burns's philosophy would lift the shadows of frightfulness from religion
+and let its joyousness be revealed.
+
+  An Atheist's laugh's a poor exchange
+    For Deity offended.
+
+  A correspondence fixed wi' heaven
+    Is sure a noble anchor.
+
+To Burns, the relationship of the soul to God was of first importance. He
+cared little for man's formalisms, but personal connection with a loving
+Father he regarded as the supreme source of happiness. Only a reverent
+and philosophic mind would think of prayer as 'a correspondence with
+heaven.'
+
+Burns holds a high rank as a profound philosopher of human life, of human
+growth, and of human consciousness of the Divine, as the vital centre of
+human power.
+
+Burns was a philosopher in his recognition that productive work is
+essential to human happiness and progress.
+
+In 'The Twa Dogs' he makes Caesar say:
+
+  But human bodies are sic fools,
+  For a' their colleges and schools,
+  That when nae real ills perplex them,
+  They mak enow themselves to vex them;
+  An' ay the less they hae to sturt them,           trouble
+  In like proportion less will hurt them.
+
+     *       *       *       *       *
+
+  But gentleman, and ladies warst,
+  Wi' ev'n-down want o' wark are curst.
+
+Burns had real sympathy for the idle rich. He saw that idleness leads to
+many evils, and that probably the worst evils, those that produce most
+unhappiness, are those that result from neglecting to use, or misusing,
+powers that, if wisely used, would produce comfort and happiness for
+ourselves as well as for others. He believed that every man and woman
+would be happier if engaged in some productive occupation, and that those
+who do not use their hands to produce for themselves and their fellows are
+'curst wi' want o' wark.'
+
+This belief is based on an old and very profound philosophy, that is not
+even yet understood as widely and as fully as it should be: the philosophy
+first expounded by Plato, and afterwards by Goethe and Ruskin, that 'all
+evil springs from unused, or misused, good.' Whatever element is highest
+in our lives will degrade us most if misused. The best in the lives of the
+idle sours and causes deterioration instead of development of character,
+and breeds discontent and unhappiness, so that days are 'insipid, dull and
+tasteless,' and nights are 'unquiet, lang and restless.'
+
+Burns showed that he understood this revealing philosophy in 'The Vision.'
+In this great poem he assumes that Coila, the genius of Kyle, his native
+district in Ayrshire, appeared to him in a vision, and revealed a clear
+understanding of the epoch events of his past life and their influence on
+his development, and gave him advice to guide him for the future. In one
+verse he says:
+
+  I saw thy pulse's maddening play
+  Wild send thee pleasure's devious way,
+  Misled by fancy's meteor-ray,
+        By passion driven;
+  But yet the light that led astray
+        Was light from heaven.
+
+He was attacked and criticised severely for the statement contained in the
+last two lines. The statement is but philosophic truth that his critics
+did not understand. Fancy and passion are elements of power given from
+heaven. Properly used they become important elements in human happiness
+and development. Improperly used they produce unhappiness and degradation.
+
+Burns understood clearly the philosophic basis of modern education, the
+importance of developing the individuality, or selfhood, or special power
+of each child. The poem he wrote to his friend Robert Graham of Fintry,
+beginning:
+
+  When Nature her great masterpiece designed
+  And framed her last, best work, the human mind,
+  Her eye intent on all the mazy plan,
+  She formed of various parts the various man,
+
+is a philosophical description of how Nature produced various types of
+men, giving to each mind special powers and aptitudes. The thought of the
+poem is the basis of all modern educational thought: the value of the
+individuality of each child, and the importance of developing it.
+
+He expresses very beautifully the philosophy of the ephemeral nature of
+certain forms of pleasure in eight lines of 'Tam o' Shanter':
+
+  But pleasures are like poppies spread,
+  You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
+  Or as the snowfall in the river,
+  A moment white, then melts forever;
+  Or like the borealis race,
+  That flit e'er you can point their place;
+  Or like the rainbow's lovely form,
+  Evanishing amid the storm.
+
+Burns understood the philosophy of the simple life in the development of
+character and happiness.
+
+In 'The Cotter's Saturday Night,' after dilating on the glories of simple,
+reverent religion, as compared with 'Religion's Pride,'
+
+    In all the pomp of method and of art,
+  When men display to congregations wide
+    Devotion's every grace except the heart,
+
+he prays for the young people of Scotland--
+
+  Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil
+    Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content;
+  And O! may Heaven their simple lives prevent
+    From luxury's contagion, weak and vile!
+  Then, howe'er crowns and coronets be rent,
+    A virtuous populace may rise the while,
+  And stand a wall of fire around their much-loved isle.
+
+He understood the value of simplicity in life as well as in religion, and
+expressed it in admirable form.
+
+'The Address to the Unco Guid' has a kindly philosophic sympathy running
+like a stream of light through it; the profound sympathy of the Master who
+searched for the one stray lamb, and who suggested that he who was without
+sin should cast the first stone. The last verse especially contains a
+sublime human philosophy, that if studied till understood, and then
+practised, would work a greatly needed change in the attitude of the rest
+of humanity towards the so-called wayward. It is one of the strange
+anomalies of life that, generally, professing Christian women have in the
+past been the last to come with Christian sympathy of an affectionate, and
+sisterly, and respectful quality to take an erring sister in their arms to
+try to prove that she still possessed their esteem, and to rekindle faith
+in her heart.
+
+His poem to Mrs Dunlop on 'New Year's Day, 1790;' 'A Man's a Man for a'
+That;' 'A Winter Night;' 'Sketch in Verse;' and 'Verses written in
+Friar's Carse Hermitage,' all show him to have been a philosophic student
+of human nature.
+
+A few quotations from letters to his friends will show his philosophical
+attitude to general matters, as the quotations from his letters showed the
+clearness and trueness of his philosophy regarding religion, democracy,
+and brotherhood.
+
+Burns saw man's duty to his fellows and to himself in this life.
+
+In a letter to Robert Ainslie, Edinburgh, 1788, he wrote: 'I have no
+objection to prefer prodigality to avarice, in some few instances; but I
+appeal to your observation, if you have not met, and often met, with the
+same disingenuousness, the same hollow-hearted insincerity, and
+disintegrative depravity of principle, in the hackneyed victims of
+profusion, as in the unfeeling children of parsimony. I have every
+possible reverence for the much-talked-of world beyond the grave, and I
+wish that which piety believes, and virtue deserves, may be all matter of
+fact. But in all things belonging to, and terminating in, the present
+scene of existence, man has serious business on hand. Whether a man shall
+shake hands with welcome in the distinguished elevation of respect, or
+shrink from contempt in the abject corner of insignificance; whether he
+shall wanton under the tropic of plenty, or at least enjoy himself in the
+comfortable latitudes of easy convenience, or starve in the arctic circle
+of poverty; whether he shall rise in the manly consciousness of a
+self-approving mind, or sink beneath a galling load of regret and
+remorse--these are alternatives of the last moment.'
+
+Since the time of Burns men and women, both in the churches and out of
+them, have learned to set more store on the importance of living truly on
+the earth, and have ceased to a large extent to think only of a life to
+come after death. Men and women are now trying in increasing numbers to
+make it more heavenly here.
+
+Burns taught a sound philosophy of contentment as a basis for happiness.
+
+He wrote to Mr Ainslie in 1789: 'You need not doubt that I find several
+very unpleasant and disagreeable circumstances in my business [that of a
+gauger], but I am tired with and disgusted at the language of complaint at
+the evils of life. Human existence in the most favourable situations does
+not abound with pleasures, and has its inconveniences and ills;
+capricious, foolish man mistakes these inconveniences and ills, as if they
+were the peculiar property of his own particular situation; and hence
+that eternal fickleness, that love of change, which has ruined, and daily
+does ruin, many a fine fellow, as well as many a blockhead; and is almost
+without exception a constant source of disappointment and misery. So far
+from being dissatisfied with my present lot, I earnestly pray the Great
+Disposer of events that it may never be worse, and I think I can lay my
+hand on my heart and say "I shall be content."'
+
+Good, sound philosophy of contentment! Not the contentment that does not
+try to improve life's conditions, but the wise contentment that recognises
+the best in present conditions, instead of foolishly resenting what it
+cannot change.
+
+Burns taught the philosophy of good citizenship.
+
+In 1789 he wrote to Mr Ainslie: 'If the relations we stand in to King,
+country, kindred, and friends be anything but the visionary fancies of
+dreaming metaphysicians; if religion, virtue, magnanimity, generosity,
+humanity, and justice be aught but empty sounds; then the man who may be
+said to live only for others, for the beloved, honourable female whose
+tender, faithful embrace endears life, and for the helpless little
+innocents who are to be the men and women, the worshippers of his God,
+the subjects of his King, and the support, nay the very vital existence,
+of his country in the ensuing age, is the type of truest manhood.'
+
+This quotation from a letter written to a warm, personal friend from whom
+he was not seeking any favours gives an insight into a rational mind loyal
+to God, loyal to his king, loyal to his country, and lovingly loyal to his
+wife and family.
+
+In a letter to the Right Rev. Dr Geddes, a Roman Catholic Bishop resident
+in Edinburgh, a very kind friend to Burns, he wrote, 1789: 'I am conscious
+that wherever I am, you do me the honour to interest yourself in my
+welfare. It gives me pleasure to inform you that I am here at last [at
+Ellisland], stationary in the serious business of life, and have now not
+only the retired leisure, but the hearty inclination to attend to those
+great and important questions: What I am? Where I am? For what I am
+destined? Thus with a rational aim and method in life, you may easily
+guess, my reverend and much honoured friend, that my characteristical
+trade is not forgotten; I am, if possible, more than ever an enthusiast to
+the Muses. I am determined to study Man and Nature, and in that view,
+incessantly to try if the ripening and corrections of years can enable me
+to produce something worth preserving.'
+
+Bishop Gillis, a Roman Catholic Bishop who lived more than sixty years
+after the death of Burns, said, in reference to the letter from which this
+quotation was made: 'If any man, after perusing this letter, will still
+say that the mind of Burns was beyond the reach of religious influence,
+or, in other words, that he was a scoffer at revelation, that man need not
+be reasoned with, as his own mind must be hopelessly beyond the reach of
+argument.'
+
+In a letter to his friend Cunningham he wrote, 1789: 'What strange beings
+we are! Since we have a portion of conscious existence equally capable of
+enjoying pleasure, happiness, and rapture, or of suffering pain,
+wretchedness, and misery, it is surely worthy of inquiry whether there be
+not such a thing as a science of life; whether method, economy, and
+fertility of expedients be not applicable to enjoyment, and whether there
+be not a want of dexterity in pleasure which renders our little scantling
+of happiness still less; and a profuseness and intoxication in bliss which
+leads to satiety, disgust, and self-abhorrence.
+
+'There is not a doubt but that health, talents, character, decent
+competency, respectable friends, are real, substantial blessings; and yet
+do we not daily see those who enjoy many, or all, of these good things,
+and _notwithstanding_ contrive to be as unhappy as others to whose lot few
+of them have fallen? I believe one great source of this mistake or
+misconduct is owing to a certain stimulus, with us called ambition, which
+goads us up the hill of life--not as we ascend other eminences, for the
+laudable curiosity of viewing an extended landscape, but rather for the
+dishonest pride of looking down on others of our fellow-creatures,
+seemingly diminutive in other stations, &c.'
+
+His philosophy clearly recognised the evils of unduly centring our minds
+and hearts on pleasure, and thus not only robbing ourselves of
+development, and humanity of the advantage of the many things we might do
+in our overtime devoted to pleasure, but destroying our interest in the
+things that were intended to give us happiness.
+
+He also recognised fully the evils of selfish ambition which aims at
+attaining higher positions than others; which climbs, not to get into
+purer air to see more widely our true relationships to our fellow-men, but
+for the degrading satisfaction of being able to look down with a
+hardening pride that separates humanity into groups instead of uniting all
+men in brotherhood. A man whose heart and mind are engrossed by base
+material aims cannot grow truly, and he loses the advantages that should
+have come to him from the elements of blessing he possesses by misusing
+them for selfish ends.
+
+In another letter he wrote: 'All my fears and cares are of this world; if
+there is another, an honest man has nothing to fear from it. I hate a man
+that wishes to be a Deist; but, I fear, every fair, unprejudiced inquirer
+must in some degree be a sceptic. It is not that there are any very
+staggering arguments against the immortality of man, but, like
+electricity, phlogiston, &c., the subject is so involved in darkness that
+we want data to go upon.'
+
+His philosophy left him no fears for what comes after death. He had deep
+faith in the justice of God. 'I believe,' he said, 'that God perfectly
+understands the being He has made.' Believing this, and believing also
+that God is just, he feared not the future. Burns, as he said to Mrs
+Dunlop, was 'in his idle moments sometimes a little sceptical.' But they
+were only moments. He knew there were problems he could not solve, and so,
+as he wrote to Dr Candlish, 'he was glad to grasp revealed religion.' A
+thoughtful man requires more faith in revealed religion than a man who
+does not really think, but only thinks he is thinking, when other people's
+thoughts are running through his head. Burns needed strong faith, and he
+had it even about religious matters he could not explain. 'The necessities
+of my own heart,' as he wrote to Mrs Dunlop, 'gave the lie to my cold
+philosophisings.' His 'Ode to Mrs Dunlop on New Year's Day, 1790,' said:
+
+  The voice of Nature loudly cries,
+  And many a message from the skies,
+  That something in us never dies.
+
+He accepted by faith the 'messages from the skies,' and in his soul
+harmonised the messages with the 'Voice of Nature,' even though his
+philosophic mind searched for proof of problems he could not solve.
+
+In a letter to Peter Hill, 1790, he wrote: 'Mankind are by nature
+benevolent creatures, except in a few scoundrelly instances. I do not
+think that avarice for the good things we chance to have is born with us;
+but we are placed here among so much nakedness and hunger and poverty and
+want, that we are under a damning necessity of studying selfishness in
+order that we may EXIST. Still there are in every age a few souls that all
+the wants and woes of life cannot debase into selfishness, or even give
+the necessary alloy of caution and prudence. If ever I am in danger of
+vanity, it is when I contemplate myself on this side of my disposition and
+character. God knows I am no saint; I have a whole host of follies and
+sins to answer for, but if I could (and I believe I do, as far as I can),
+I would 'wipe away all tears from all eyes.'
+
+Burns was not self-righteous. He moralises in this quotation not as one of
+the 'unco guid,' but as a man on what he thought was one of life's most
+perplexing problems, poverty. He saw the problem more keenly than most men
+see it yet. It was not the poverty of Burns himself that, as Carlyle
+believed, made him write and work for freedom and justice for the
+labouring-classes. It is quite true, however, that one of his reasons for
+pleading for democracy was the poverty among the peasantry of his time. He
+saw the injustice of conditions, and admitted in his poem to Davie, a
+brother poet, that
+
+  It's hardly in a body's power
+  To keep at times from being sour,
+    To see how things are shared.
+
+Burns recommended the philosophy of right, not expediency in public as
+well as private matters.
+
+He wrote a letter to Mrs Dunlop in 1790, in which he said: 'I believe, in
+my conscience, such ideas as, "my country; her independence; her honour;
+the illustrious names that mark the history of my native land," &c.--I
+believe these, among your _men of the world_; men who, in fact, guide, for
+the most part, and govern our world, are looked on as so many
+modifications of wrong-headedness. They knew the use of bawling out such
+terms to rouse or lead the Rabble; but for their own private use, with
+almost all the _able statesmen_ that ever existed, or now exist, when they
+talk of right and wrong, they only mean proper and improper; and their
+measure of conduct is not what they ought, but _what they dare_. For the
+truth of this, I shall not ransack the history of nations, but appeal to
+one of the ablest judges of men, and himself one of the ablest men that
+ever lived--the celebrated Earl of Chesterfield. In fact a man that could
+thoroughly control his vices, whenever they interfered with his interest,
+and who could completely put on the appearance of every virtue as often as
+it suited his purposes, is, on the Stanhopian plan, _the perfect man_, a
+man to lead nations. But are great abilities, complete without a flaw, and
+polished without a blemish, the standard of human excellence? This is
+certainly not the staunch opinion of _men of the world_; but I call on
+honour, virtue, and worth to give the Stygian doctrine a loud negative!
+However, this must be allowed, that, if you abstract from man the idea of
+an existence beyond the grave, then the true measure of human conduct is
+_proper and improper_; virtue and vice, as dispositions of the heart, are,
+in that case, of scarcely the same import and value to the world at large
+as harmony and discord in the modifications of sound; and a delicate sense
+of honour, like a nice ear for music, though it may sometimes give the
+possessor an ecstasy unknown to the coarser organs of the herd, yet,
+considering the harsh gratings and inharmonic jars in this ill-tuned state
+of being, it is odds but the individual would be as happy, and certainly
+would be as much respected by the true judges of society, as it would then
+stand, without either a good ear or a good heart....
+
+'Mackenzie has been called "the Addison of the Scots," and, in my opinion,
+Addison would not be hurt at the comparison. If he has not Addison's
+exquisite humour, he as certainly outdoes him in the tender and the
+pathetic. His _Man of Feeling_--but I am not counsel-learned in the laws
+of criticism--I estimate as the first performance of the kind I ever saw.
+From what book, moral or even pious, will the susceptible young mind
+receive impressions more congenial to humanity and kindness, generosity
+and benevolence--in short, more of all that ennobles the soul to herself,
+or endears her to others, than from the simple, affecting tale of poor
+Harley?
+
+'Still, with all my admiration of Mackenzie's writings, I do not know if
+they are the fittest reading for a young man who is about to set out, as
+the phrase is, to make his way into life. Do you not think, Madam, that
+among the few favoured of heaven in the structure of their minds (for such
+there certainly are) there may be a purity, a tenderness, a dignity, and
+elegance of soul, which are of no use, nay, in some degree absolutely
+disqualifying, for the truly important business of making a man's way into
+life?'
+
+Burns understood the underlying philosophy of sensitiveness.
+
+In a letter to Miss Craik, 1790, he wrote: 'There is not among the
+martyrologies ever penned so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets.
+In the comparative view of wretches, the criterion is not what they are
+doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a being of our
+kind, give him a stronger imagination and a more delicate sensibility,
+which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable set of passions
+than are the usual lot of man; implant in him an irresistible impulse to
+some idle vagary, such as arranging wild flowers in fantastical nosegays,
+tracing the grasshopper to his haunt by his chirping song, watching the
+frisks of the little minnows in the sunny pool, or hunting after the
+intrigues of wanton butterflies--in short, send him adrift after some
+pursuit which shall eternally mislead him from the paths of lucre, and yet
+curse him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that
+lucre can purchase; lastly, fill up the measure of his woes by bestowing
+on him a spurning sense of his own dignity, and you have created a wight
+nearly as miserable as a poet. To you, Madam, I need not recount the fairy
+pleasures the Muse bestows to counterbalance this catalogue of evils.
+Bewitching poesy is like bewitching woman: she has in all ages been
+accused of misleading mankind from the counsels of wisdom and the paths of
+prudence, involving them in difficulties, baiting them with poverty,
+branding them with infamy, and plunging them in the whirling vortex of
+ruin; yet, where is the man but must own that all our happiness on earth
+is not worth the name--that even the holy hermit's solitary prospect of
+paradisaical bliss is but the glitter of a northern sun rising over a
+frozen region, compared with the many pleasures, the nameless raptures
+that we owe to the lovely Queen of the heart of Man!'
+
+He based the last two lines in his 'Poem on Sensibility' on this
+philosophy:
+
+  Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure,
+    Thrill the deepest notes of woe.
+
+His 'Parting Song to Clarinda' reveals in the four lines, said by Sir
+Walter Scott 'to contain the essence of a thousand love-tales,' how
+deepest love may bring darkest sorrow:
+
+  Had we never loved sae kindly,
+  Had we never loved sae blindly,
+  Never met--or never parted,
+  We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
+
+In a letter to Crawford Tait, Esq., Edinburgh, 1790, requesting a
+sympathetic interest on behalf of a young man from Ayrshire, he says: 'I
+shall give you my friend's character in two words: as to his head, he has
+talents enough, and more than enough, for common life; as to his heart,
+when Nature had kneaded the kindly clay that composes it, she said, "I can
+no more."
+
+'You, my good Sir, were born under kinder stars; but your fraternal
+sympathy, I well know, can enter into the feelings of the young man who
+goes into life with the laudable ambition to _do_ something, and to _be_
+something among his fellow-creatures; but whom the consciousness of
+friendless obscurity presses to the earth, and wounds to the soul!
+
+'Even the fairest of his virtues are against him. That independent spirit,
+and that ingenuous modesty--qualities inseparable from a noble mind--are,
+with the million, circumstances not a little disqualifying. What pleasure
+is in the power of the fortunate and the happy, by their notice and
+patronage, to brighten the countenance and glad the heart of such
+depressed youth! I am not so angry with mankind for their deaf economy of
+the purse--the goods of this world cannot be divided without being
+lessened--but why be a niggard of that which bestows bliss on a
+fellow-creature, yet takes nothing from our own means of enjoyment? We
+wrap ourselves up in the cloak of our better-fortune and turn away our
+eyes, lest the wants and woes of our brother-mortals should disturb the
+selfish apathy of our souls.'
+
+Burns was a deep character student, and he was able to adjust the balance
+fairly when weighing the characteristics that count for success in public
+life, in business, and in private life. He always recommended honesty, and
+always admired that independent spirit and that ingenuous modesty
+inseparable from a noble mind. Much as he admired them, however, he
+clearly understood that these admirable qualities might prevent the
+perfect development of a soul if they made a man morbidly sensitive, or
+interfered in any way with his faith in himself.
+
+Speaking of 'independence and sensibility,' the same qualities he
+discussed in the letter quoted (to Mr Crawford Tait), he says in a letter
+to Peter Hill, Edinburgh, 1791, addressing poverty: 'By thee the man of
+sentiment, whose heart flows with independence, and melts with
+sensibility, inly pines under the neglect or writhes in bitterness of soul
+under the contumely of arrogant, unfeeling wealth.'
+
+Burns taught the just philosophy of gratitude to God.
+
+In a letter to Dr Moore, of London, he wrote, 1791: 'Whatsoever is not
+detrimental to society, and is of positive enjoyment, is of God, the
+Giver of all good things, and ought to be received and enjoyed by His
+creatures with thankful delight.'
+
+We cannot yet estimate the philosophic vision of Burns. It will grow
+clearer as century follows century. Carlyle said of him: 'We see that in
+this man was the gentleness, the trembling pity of a woman, with the deep
+earnestness, the force, and passionate ardour of a hero. Tears lie in him,
+and a consuming fire, as lightning lurks in the drop of the summer
+clouds.'
+
+So much for his heart; what says Carlyle about his mind?
+
+'Burns never studied philosophy.... Nevertheless, sufficient indication,
+if no proof sufficient, remains for us in his works; we discern the brawny
+movements of a gigantic though untutored strength; and can understand how,
+in conversation, his quick, sure insight into men and things may, 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 present to his heart. The logic of the
+senate and the forum is indispensable, but not all-sufficient; nay,
+perhaps the highest truth is that which will 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, a keen though uncultivated sense for it having existed
+in Burns. Mr Stewart, it will be remembered, wondered 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.'
+
+Carlyle's last statement is correct. He admits the great essential truth
+that Burns was a subtle philosopher. What a pity that such a man as
+Carlyle should have thought it necessary to say that Burns 'never studied
+philosophy.' The statement is incorrect, but, if it had been correct, why
+make it? and why call his mental strength 'untutored,' and his 'keen sense
+of the highest philosophy' 'uncultivated'?
+
+Did any other philosopher of the time of Burns in the universities reveal
+a more profound philosophy of human life, and make so many applications of
+it, as Robert Burns revealed in the quotations in this chapter, and in
+the chapters on Democracy, Brotherhood, and Love?
+
+Burns was a philosopher, an independent thinker, whose thought is more
+highly appreciated now than it was in the time of Carlyle.
+
+In a letter to Mrs Graham, 1791, he wrote: 'I was born a poor dog; and
+however I may occasionally pick a better bone than I used to do, I know I
+must live and die poor. But I will indulge the flattering faith that my
+poetry will considerably outlive my poverty; and without any fustian
+affectation of spirit, I can promise and affirm that it must be no
+ordinary craving of the latter that shall ever make me do anything
+injurious to the honest fame of the former. Whatever may be my
+failings--for failings are a part of human nature--may they ever be those
+of a generous heart and an independent mind.'
+
+Speaking of the moral character of Burns, Carlyle is wise and just. He
+says: 'We are far from regarding him as guilty before the world, 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
+Plebiscite of common civic reputations are pronounced, he has seemed to us
+less worthy of blame than of pity and wonder. But the world is habitually
+unjust in its judgments of such men; unjust 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 what is done
+right than on what is or is not done wrong.... What Burns did under his
+circumstances, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with astonishment
+at the natural strength and worth of his character.'
+
+Burns was naturally a student gifted with a great mind. His splendid mind
+was trained to act logically by his remarkable father, and quickened and
+illuminated by his great teacher John Murdoch. He was a great philosopher,
+not merely because he read Locke's 'Essay on the Human Understanding' when
+a boy, but because during his short life he read with joyous interest many
+books of a philosophical character, and what is of infinitely greater
+importance, he interpreted all he read with an independent mind, and
+related all truth as he understood it to human life. He could discuss even
+the principles of Spinoza, and 'venture into the daring path Spinoza
+trod.' Yet, as he told Dr Candlish, of Edinburgh, he merely 'ventured in'
+to test Spinoza's philosophy, which he soon found to be inadequate to the
+true development of the human soul, and therefore he 'was glad to grasp
+revealed religion.' Not merely as a great poetic genius, but as a profound
+philosophic teacher of religion, democracy, and brotherhood--the most
+essentially vital elements related to the highest development of the souls
+of men and women--will the real Robert Burns become known as he is more
+justly and more deeply studied.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE DEVELOPMENT OF BURNS.
+
+
+BORN 1759--DIED 1796.
+
+_6 Years Old._
+
+At six years of age he was sent to a school in a little home near Alloway
+Mill for a few months. Then the school was closed, and William Burns, his
+father, and a few neighbours engaged a remarkably fine teacher named John
+Murdoch to teach their children.
+
+
+_7 Years Old._
+
+When Burns was seven years old his father moved to Mount Oliphant farm,
+about two miles from Alloway. Robert continued to attend Murdoch's school.
+
+
+_8 Years Old._
+
+He continued to attend Murdoch's school.
+
+
+_9 Years Old._
+
+Murdoch, his beloved teacher, left Alloway. He had not only been the
+teacher of Burns, but had lent the boy books, among them being _The Life
+of Hannibal_. Burns said this book 'was the earliest I recollect taking
+any pleasure in.' Murdoch presented him with an English grammar and a book
+translated from the French, named _The School for Love_. His imagination
+during this period was kindled by many legends, ghost stories, tales, and
+songs told and sung by an old lady, Betty Davidson, who lived in the
+family home.
+
+
+_10 Years Old._
+
+Read and studied with his father, discussing freely the merits of the
+books read.
+
+
+_11 Years Old._
+
+He studied, and continued to study with enthusiasm, English grammar, and
+had become an unusually excellent scholar for his age in English. His
+father regularly taught his family after Murdoch left Alloway. A deep and
+lasting impression was made on Robert's mind during this year by a
+_Collection of Letters_, written by the leading authors of Queen Anne's
+reign.
+
+
+_12 Years Old._
+
+Worked on the farm, and read with his father at night. Wrote many letters
+to imaginary correspondents.
+
+
+_13 Years Old._
+
+He was sent for a few weeks to a school in Dalrymple to learn penmanship.
+John Murdoch was appointed teacher in the High School at Ayr. He became
+again a visitor to the Burns' home, in which he was a most welcome guest.
+He presented Pope's works to Robert. During this year Burns continued an
+imaginary correspondence with many people, and began to form a style
+moulded by the Letters of the great prose-writers of Queen Anne's time.
+
+
+_14 Years Old._
+
+Boarded with Murdoch in Ayr for a few weeks, to devote himself to a deeper
+study of English. Studied French a little, and gave a little attention to
+Latin. The best influence of his brief period with Murdoch was the
+kindling of his vision with higher ideals of life, his relationship to his
+fellow-men, and his duty to God.
+
+
+_15 Years Old._
+
+Began to take his place as an independent thinker with men, and surprised
+them by his wide knowledge and his unusual powers of expression and
+impression. Took his share in reaping the grain on the farm, and fell in
+love with his harvest mate, Nellie Kirkpatrick, who bound and shocked, or
+stooked, what he reaped. She was a good-looking girl of fourteen, who sang
+well. Burns said her love made him a poet. He composed his first poem,
+'Handsome Nell,' as a tribute to her. His love for her undoubtedly kindled
+him at the centre of his power, as a true love that is respectfully
+treated by parents always does for a youth during the adolescent period.
+
+
+_16 Years Old._
+
+He laboured hard on the farm, but was worried by his father's poverty, by
+the poorness of the soil of Mount Oliphant farm, and especially by the
+harsh and over-bearing manner in which his father was treated by the
+landlord's agent. Hard labour and possibly insufficient nourishment for a
+youth growing rapidly, coupled with his humiliation at the conduct of the
+agent, and his sorrowful sympathy, affected his health. He became
+depressed and moody, and suffered from headaches and palpitation of the
+heart. He had become acquainted with a few respectable women in Ayr, one
+of whom lent him the _Spectator_ and Pope's _Homer_. These he read and
+digested with a growing interest, and used with rapidly developing power.
+
+
+_17 Years Old._
+
+Was sent to the school of Hugh Rodger at Kirkoswald to learn mathematics,
+especially mensuration and surveying. He enjoyed the work and made rapid
+progress. He formed a friendship with William Niven, who went to the same
+school; and in order to develop his powers as an independent thinker and a
+public speaker, he and Willie organised a debating society of two, which
+met in formal debate once a week. This developed his intellectual powers
+more than the study of mathematics. His school-days in Kirkoswald came to
+a sudden ending when he met Peggy Thomson, who lived next to the school.
+His second adolescent love came unexpectedly, and with great force. He
+says Peggy Thomson's charms 'Overset his trigonometry, and set him off at
+a tangent from his studies.' He tried to study, but at the end of the week
+gave it all up and went home.
+
+His schoolmaster learned about the debates between him and Willie Niven,
+and determined to put an end to such waste of time from the study of
+mathematics. He charged Niven one day with the crime of debating, and
+demanded the subject for the next debate. Willie told him the subject for
+to-morrow was, 'Resolved that a great general is of more use to the world
+than a good merchant.' 'Nonsense,' thundered the teacher; 'everybody ought
+to know that a general is of far more importance to the world than a
+merchant.' Burns promptly said to the teacher, 'You take the general's
+side, and I will take the merchant's side, and let us see.'
+
+Burns spoke with such wide information, such fine reasoning and such
+splendid eloquence, that he soon had the boys cheering him wildly. This
+annoyed the master, and he became so angry that he dismissed the school
+for the day.
+
+Even at the early age of seventeen he had few rivals as a public speaker
+and debater. He took lessons in a dancing-school at Tarbolton, when he
+returned from Kirkoswald, to improve his social manners. During this year
+he read Thomson's works, Shenstone's works, a _Select Collection of
+English Songs_, Allan Ramsay's works, Hervey's _Meditations_, and some of
+Shakespeare's plays.
+
+
+_18 Years Old._
+
+The family moved to Lochlea farm, about four miles from Mauchline. Up to
+this time he had been an awkward and bashful youth. He began now to be
+more at ease with the opposite sex after he had been introduced to them.
+He had no real lover, however, between 17 and 21.
+
+
+_19 Years Old._
+
+About this time he made a plan for a tragedy. He never finished it, and
+preserved only a fragment, beginning, 'All devil as I am.'
+
+
+_20 Years Old._
+
+A year of work, reading, and visions that were but the bases of higher
+visions yet to come.
+
+
+_21 Years Old._
+
+He, with his brother Gilbert and five other young men, founded a debating
+club in an upstairs room of a private house in Tarbolton. He read
+persistently; held a book in his left hand at meals; and usually carried a
+book with him while walking. About this time he began to be known as a
+critic of the preaching and practices of the 'Auld Licht' preachers, and
+enjoyed shocking those who were, in his judgment, not vital, but only
+professing, Christians, who did nothing to prove the genuineness of their
+religion. In this year his heart was kindled by the first love of his
+manhood.
+
+
+_22 Years Old._
+
+He read Sterne's works, Macpherson's Ossian, and Mackenzie's _The Man of
+the World_ and _Man of Feeling_. He said 'he valued the last book more
+than any other book, except the Bible.' His mind turned to religious
+subjects very definitely at this period. He developed a deep and reverent
+affection for Alison Begbie, who was a servant on a farm not far from
+Lochlea farm. The farm was on Cessnock Water. He wrote three poems to her:
+'The Lass of Cessnock Banks,' 'Peggy Alison,' and 'Mary Morrison.' His
+letters to her reveal the two great dominant elements in his mind and
+heart at that time: a deep and respectful love, and some of the highest
+ideals of vital religion.
+
+In this year love again stirred him to write poetry. He said it became 'a
+darling walk for his mind.' 'Winter--a Dirge' belongs to this period.
+
+
+_23 Years Old._
+
+This was an eventful year. Alison Begbie had declined his offer of
+marriage. Had she married him and lived he would have had but one love
+after maturity. He ventured into business in Irvine. He says his partner
+'was a scoundrel of the first water, who made money by the mystery of
+thieving.' Their shop was burned, and he found himself not worth a
+sixpence. He read two novels, _Pamela_, and _Ferdinand, Count Fathom_, and
+_Fergusson's Poems_, which filled him with a deeper determination to write
+poetry. He wrote several religious poems this year.
+
+
+_24 Years Old._
+
+He became a Freemason in Tarbolton, and devoted a good deal of time to the
+order. He did not write much poetry. His mind was occupied by religious
+matters, and he had an impression that his life was not going to last very
+long. This idea haunted him for two or three years after his maturity. He
+contemplated death as a rest, but he continued to store his mind and think
+independently. Dr Mackenzie, who attended his father on his death-bed
+towards the end of the year, wrote, 'that on his first visit he found
+Gilbert and his father friendly and cordial, but Robert silent and
+uncompanionable, till he began discussing a medical subject, when Robert
+promptly joined in the discussion, and showed an unexpected and remarkable
+understanding of the subject.' During this year he wrote 'My Father was a
+Farmer' and 'The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie.'
+
+
+_25 Years Old._
+
+His father died in February, leaving the family very poor. Robert and
+Gilbert rented Mossgiel farm, about two miles from Mauchline, and the
+family moved there. Robert determined to be a scientific farmer. He read
+the best books he could get on agriculture; but bad seed, bad weather, and
+late harvest left the brothers only half an average crop. He continued to
+work on the farm, but evidently began to realise more clearly the kindling
+call to poetry as the special work of his life. During the next twelve
+years he produced a continuous out-pouring of wonderful poems, although
+about half of the twelve years he worked as a farmer on Mossgiel and
+Ellisland farms, and most of the rest of the time worked hard as a gauger,
+riding two hundred miles each week in the performance of his duties. In
+this year he wrote 'The Rigs of Barley,' composed in August; 'My Nannie
+O,' 'Green Grow the Rashes,' 'Man was Made to Mourn,' 'The Twa Herds,' and
+the 'Epitaph on My Ever Honoured Father.' In this year he met Jean
+Armour, and soon loved her.
+
+
+_26 Years Old._
+
+He wrote many poems during this year, the most important being 'Epistle to
+Davie, a Brother Poet,' 'Holy Willie's Prayer,' 'Death and Doctor
+Hornbook,' three long 'Epistles to John Lapraik,' 'Epistle to William
+Simpson,' 'Epistle to John Goldie,' 'Rantin', Rovin' Robin,' 'Epistle to
+Rev. John M'Math,' 'Second Epistle to Davie,' 'Farewell to Ballochmyle,'
+'Hallowe'en,' 'To a Mouse,' 'The Jolly Beggars,' 'The Cotter's Saturday
+Night,' 'Address to the Deil,' and 'The Auld Farmer's New-Year Morning
+Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie.'
+
+
+_27 Years Old._
+
+This was an eventful and productive year for Burns. Quickly following each
+other came 'The Twa Dogs,' 'The Author's Earnest Cry and Prayer,' 'The
+Ordination,' 'Epistle to James Smith,' 'The Vision,' 'Address to the Unco
+Guid,' 'The Holy Fair,' 'To a Mountain Daisy,' 'To Ruin,' 'Despondency: an
+Ode,' 'Epistle to a Young Friend,' 'Nature's Law,' 'The Brigs of Ayr,' 'O
+Thou Dread Power!' 'Farewell Song to the Banks of Ayr,' 'Lines on Meeting
+Lord Daer,' 'Masonic Song,' 'Tam Samson's Elegy,' 'A Winter Night,' 'Yon
+Wild Mossy Mountains,' 'Address to Edinburgh,' and 'Address to a Haggis,'
+with love-songs and many minor pieces.
+
+Burns had given Jean Armour a certificate of marriage, and he nearly lost
+his mental balance when, at her father's order, she consented to have it
+burned. Fortunately for him two things aided in preserving his balance:
+the publication of the Kilmarnock edition of his poems, and his love for
+Mary Campbell, 'Highland Mary.' No man ever needed a love, deep and true,
+to save him more than Burns did. He believed Jean was lost to him for
+ever. He was not a faithless but a needy lover when he found a responsive
+heart in Highland Mary. They made their marriage vows on the Fail, Sunday,
+14th May 1786. Mary went home to prepare for marriage, but caught a fever
+and died. Burns went to Edinburgh later in the year to publish a second
+edition of his poems, as the first edition had been so well received. In
+Edinburgh he was the hero of the highest and most thoroughly educated
+classes. He wrote several fine poems to Mary Campbell.
+
+
+_28 Years Old._
+
+Three thousand copies of his poems were published in April in Edinburgh,
+netting him over five hundred pounds. He made two triumphal tours--the
+Border Tour and the Highland Tour. As Mary Campbell was dead, his love was
+kindled by Clarinda, Mrs M'Lehose, with whom he conducted an intensive
+love correspondence, and to whom he wrote several beautiful love-songs. As
+she was a married woman who was separated from her husband, Burns could
+not marry her. In this year he wrote the 'Inscription for the Headstone of
+Fergusson,' 'Epistle to Mrs Scott,' 'The Bonnie Moor Hen,' 'On the Death
+of John M'Leod,' 'Elegy on the Death of James Hunter Blair,' 'The Humble
+Petition of Bruar Water,' 'Lines on the Fall of Fyers,' 'Castle Gordon,'
+'On Scaring Some Waterfowl,' 'A Rosebud by My Early Walk,' 'The Banks of
+Devon,' 'The Young Highland Rover,' 'Birthday Ode,' and many short pieces
+and love-songs, among them 'The Birks of Aberfeldy.'
+
+
+_29 Years Old._
+
+Rented Ellisland farm, on the Nith, near Dumfries. Married Jean Armour
+(second marriage to her) in April, and left her in Mauchline till he
+could build a home for her on Ellisland, which was ready in December.
+Building his new home, stocking and managing the farm, and riding fifty
+miles occasionally to his Jean, made his year so busy that he wrote little
+poetry, but exquisite love-songs. The estate of Glenriddell, owned in the
+time of Burns by Robert Riddell, bordered on Ellisland farm. Robert
+Riddell was a fine type of Scottish gentleman, and Burns and he became
+warm friends. Among the best poems of this year, not love-songs, are
+'Verses written in Friar's Carse Hermitage,' 'Epistle to Robert Graham of
+Fintry,' 'The Day Returns,' 'A Mother's Lament,' 'The Fall of the Leaf,'
+'Auld Lang Syne,' 'The Poet's Progress,' 'Elegy on the Year 1788,' and
+'Epistle to James Tennant.'
+
+
+_30 Years Old._
+
+Wrote many love-songs for Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, though busily
+engaged in farming, and, in addition, a new Psalm for the Chapel of
+Kilmarnock; a sketch in verse to Right Hon. C. J. Fox, 'The Wounded Hare,'
+'The Banks of Nith,' 'John Anderson my Joe,' 'The Kirk of Scotland's
+Alarm,' 'Caledonia,' 'The Battle of Sherramuir,' 'The Braes o'
+Killiecrankie,' 'Farewell to the Highlands,' 'To Mary in Heaven,' 'Epistle
+to Dr Blacklock,' and 'New Year's Day, 1790.'
+
+
+_31 Years Old._
+
+Found his farm 'a ruinous affair.' Accepted a position as an exciseman at
+fifty pounds a year. Had to ride two hundred miles each week. Continued
+writing love-songs for Johnson's Museum (without pay), and wrote in
+addition, 'Tam o' Shanter,' 'Lament of Mary Queen of Scots,' and 'The
+Banks of Doon.'
+
+
+_32 Years Old._
+
+Continued to write love-songs, among the most beautiful being 'Sweet
+Afton' and 'Parting Song to Clarinda.' In addition, wrote 'Lament for
+James, Earl of Glencairn,' 'On Glenriddell's Fox Breaking his Chain,'
+'Poem on Pastoral Poetry,' 'Verses on the Destruction of the Woods near
+Drumlanrig,' 'Second Epistle to Robert Graham of Fintry,' 'The Song of
+Death,' and 'Poem on Sensibility.'
+
+
+_33 Years Old._
+
+Wrote many love-songs, among them 'The Lea Rig' and 'Highland Mary.' His
+other poems were mainly election ballads. His love-songs were now written
+mainly for Thomson's _National Songs and Melodies_. He still refused pay
+for his songs.
+
+
+_34 Years Old._
+
+Still, notwithstanding his very busy life, he sent a continuous stream of
+songs to Edinburgh. Other poems of the year were 'Sonnet Written on the
+Author's Birthday,' 'Lord Gregory,' and 'Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled.'
+In this year he moved to the house in which he died, and in which Jean
+died thirty-eight years afterwards.
+
+
+_35 Years Old._
+
+In this year Burns, to supplement 'Scots, wha hae' (the greatest
+bugle-song of freedom), wrote two grand poems on Liberty: 'The Ode to
+Liberty' and 'The Tree of Liberty;' and 'Contented Wi' Little and Cantie
+Wi' Mair.' In this year he declined an offer from the London _Morning
+Chronicle_ to become a regular contributor to that paper.
+
+
+_36 Years Old._
+
+Love-songs, and election ballads in favour of his friend Mr Heron, were
+his most numerous poems this year. In addition to other minor pieces he
+wrote a fine poem to his friend, Alexander Cunningham, 'Does Haughty Gaul
+Invasion Threat,' and the most triumphant combined interpretation of
+democracy and brotherhood ever written, 'A Man's a Man for a' That.'
+
+
+_37 Years Old._
+
+Early in the year his health gave way, and he died, 21st July 1796. Though
+apparently a strong man, it is reasonable to believe that he had a
+constitutional tendency towards consumption. His father died from this
+dread disease, and his grandmother (his mother's mother) died at
+thirty-five from the same cause. Burns inherited his physical and
+intellectual powers mainly from his mother. Both by heredity and
+contagion, therefore, he was made susceptible to influences that develop
+consumption. He continued to write poetry, chiefly love-songs, during his
+illness. His last poem was written, nine days before his death, to Miss
+Margaret Chalmers, for whom he had a reverent affection.
+
+No reference has been made in this sketch of his development to the prose
+written each year. Five hundred and thirty-four of his letters have been
+published. They are written in a stately style, and most of them contain
+philosophic discussions of religion, ethics, or democracy.
+
+A shy, sensitive, retiring boy; a deep-thinking, persistently studying,
+eloquent, still shy youth; a brilliant reasoner, a thinker ranking with
+leaders in his neighbourhood, meeting each on equal terms, and easily
+proving his superiority by his remarkable knowledge of each man's special
+subject of study, and by his still more remarkable powers of independent
+thinking and clear revelation of his thought in his young manhood, but
+still at twenty-two too shy to propose to the first lover of his maturity;
+always a reverent lover of Nature, whose mind saw God in beauty, in
+dawn-gleam and eve-glow, in tree and flower, in river and mountain; he
+studied, thought, and expressed his thoughts in exquisite poetry, and,
+according to those who knew him best, in still richer and more captivating
+conversation, until at twenty-seven he stood in the midst of the most
+learned professors of Scotland and outclassed them all. No single
+professor of the galaxy of culture in which he stood, modest and
+dignified, could have spoken so wisely, so profoundly, so easily, and
+with such graceful manner and charming eloquence on _so many subjects_ as
+did Burns.
+
+It is a marvel that grows greater the more we try to understand it, that a
+boy who left school when he was nine years old, and, except for a few
+weeks, did not go to school again; and who, from nine years of age to his
+thirty-second year, was a steady farm-worker, with the exception of a
+brief interval during which he was engaged publishing his poems; and was a
+gauger from thirty-two to thirty-six, should have been able to write so
+much immortal poetry and so much instructive prose in such a short time.
+
+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. During the last few years
+of his life he walked from his home to Lincluden Abbey ruins on his
+favourite path beside the winding Nith to spend his gloaming hours alone,
+and composed there some of his masterpieces.
+
+Short was his life, but he lives on in the hearts of succeeding
+generations. He lives on, too, in his permanent influence on religion,
+freedom, and brotherhood.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+Edinburgh: Printed by W. & R. Chambers, Limited.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+[1] Dr Moore was the father of Sir John Moore, the British general who was
+killed at Corunna in the Peninsular War.
+
+[2] Her name was spelled Alison or Elison.
+
+[3] One of John Murdoch's quotations used as a headline to be copied in
+his copy-book.
+
+[4] The lovers of Burns afterwards got permission to remove the monument
+and remains of Highland Mary to a more suitable location.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Real Robert Burns, by J. L. Hughes
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