And near the thorn, aboon the well, The doubling storm roars through the woods; Thro' ika bore the beams were glancing, And loud resounded mirth and dancing. Sweet Theweret, pledge o' muckle love. November hipples o'er the lea, Fragment of a MS. Poem by Robert Burns FROM "ADDRESS TO THE DEIL." O thou! whatever title suit thee, Spairges about the brunstane cootie, Hear me, auld Hangie, for a wee, To skelp an' scaud poor dogs like me, Great is thy pow'r, an' great thy fame; An' faith thou's neither lag nor lame, Whiles, ranging like a roarin' lion, Whyles, in the human bosom pryin', I've heard my reverend grannie say, Ye fright the nightly wand'rer's way, When twilight did my grannie summon, Or, rustlin', thro' the boortries comin', Ae dreary, windy, winter night, The stars shot down wi' sklentin' light, Wi' you, mysel', I gat a fright, Ayont the lough ; Ye, like a rash-bush stood in sight, The cudgel in my nieve did shake, Each bristl'd hair stood like a stake, When wi' an eldritch stour, quaick—quaickAmang the springs, Awa ye squatter'd like a drake, On whistling wings. WHISTLE AND I'LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD. Oh whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad, But warily tent, when ye come to court me, As to Your book is. I hear, on the road to reach me.frunting of Poetry, when you prepare it for the Press, you have only to spell it right, & place the capital leurs firefully as to the punctuation, the inters do that themselves. 29 I have a copy of Tam of Shanter ready to send you well. Rob Burns Extract from Letter from Burns to Mrs. Dunlop JOHN ANDERSON, MY JO. John Anderson, my jo, John, We clamb the hill thegither; And many a canty day, John, We've had wi' ane anither. Now we maun totter down, John, But hand in hand we'll go : And sleep thegither at the foot, We have spoken of Burns as he comes to us in the sequence of the great poets of Britain. In Scottish poetry he takes a somewhat different place. Here he seems not one in a chain, but the supreme artist to whom all others are merely subsidiary. Scotch Doric verse appears to us Scotch Doric like a single growth, starting from the rich foliage of Dunbar and his compeers, Verse. The Poets of the Eighties. up the slender stem of Alexander Scott, of Sempills, of Montgomery, of Allan Ramsay, of the song-writers of the eighteenth century, swelling into the fine opening bud of Fergusson, only to break into the single aloe-blossom of the perfect Burns. All local Scottish verse, from the early sixteenth century until to-day, presupposes Burns; it all expands towards him or dwindles from him. If his works were entirely to disappear, we could re-create some idea of his genius from the light that led to it and from the light that withdraws from it. This absolute supremacy of Burns, to perfect whose amazing art the Scottish race seemed to suppress and to despoil itself, is a very remarkable phenomenon. Burns is not merely the national poet of Scotland; he is, in a certain sense, the country itself all elements of Scotch life and manners, all peculiarities of Scotch temperament and conviction, are found embroidered somewhere or other on Burns's variegated singing-robes. It is obvious that these four great poets of the eighties are not merely great" in very various degree, but are singularly unlike one another. Cowper so literary, Crabbe so conventional, Blake so transcendental, Burns so spontaneous and passionate-there seems no sort of relation between them. The first two look backward resolutely, the third resolutely upward, the fourth broadly stretches himself on the impartial bosom of nature, careless of all rules and conventions. It appears impossible to bring them into line, to discover a direction in which all four can be seen to move together. But in reality there is to be discovered in each of them a protest against rhetoric which was to be the keynote of revolt, the protest already being made by Goethe and Wieland, and so soon to be echoed by Alfieri and André Chenier. There was in each of the four British poets, who illuminated this darkest period just before the dawn, the determination to be natural and |