Go teach them to tremble, fell tyrant! but know
No terrors hast thou to the brave!

Thou strikest the dull peasant, he sinks in the dark,
Nor saves even the wreck of a name;

Thou strikest the young hero, a glorious mark,
He falls in the blaze of his fame!

In the field of proud honor, our swords in our hands
Our cause and our country to save—

While victory shines on life's last ebbing sands,
Oh! who would not rest with the brave!"

In one of the despairing, groaning moments of Burns, when spurred by the ghost of memory, he dashed off this poem:

TO MARY IN HEAVEN.

"Thou lingering star with lessening ray,
Thou lovest to greet the early morn,

Again thou usherest 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?

Hearest thou the groans that rend his breast!

That sacred hour can I forget,

Can I forget the hallowed grave,
Where by the winding Ayr we met
To live one day of parting love!

Eternity will not efface

Those records dear of transports past;
Thy image at our last embrace,

Ah! little thought we, 'twas our last!

Ayr gurgling, kissed 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 memory wakes,
And fondly broods with wiser care!
Time but the impression deeper makes
As streams their channels deeper wear."

During the last three years of his life around the taverns, streets, roads, fields and forests of Dumfries, Burns took part in the political wranglings among the contending parties, and when under the influence of the wine-cup, with jovial companions, gave free vent to his liberal, and even it is said, revolutionary opinions.

As he held his small office under the Tory government, it was not strange that during the election campaigns his words of independence were tortured by Dumfries' Tory politicians into a case of disloyalty against the government.

Burns had a great habit of boasting of his "rock of independence," when even half starved in his wandering way for a precarious living. His poetic theory was all right, but

Independence without money

Is a frail and broken reed,
For a bee without its honey
Will soon die for want of feed!

To the charges of personal and official disloyalty, Burns wrote the following letter in his own defense to the Excise Board:

"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 hope have been found in the man.

Reason of no less weight than the support of a wife and children have pointed out my present occupation as the only eligible line of life within my reach. Still my honest fame is my dearest concern, and a thousand times have I trembled at the idea of the degrading epithets that malice or misrepresentation may affix to my name.

Often in blasting anticipation have I listened to some future hackney scribbler, with the heavy malice of savage stupidity, exulting by asserting that Burns, notwithstanding the Fanfarannade of independence to be found in his works, and after having been held up to public view, and to public estimation, as a man of some genius, yet quite destitute of resources within himself to support his borrowed dignity, dwindled into a paltry exciseman and slunk out the rest of his insignificant existence in the meanest of pursuits among

the lowest of mankind.

In your illustrious hands, sir, permit me to lodge my strong disavowal and defiance of such slanderous falsehoods. Burns was a poor man from his birth and an exciseman from necessity; but, I will say it! the sterling of his honest worth, poverty could not debase, and his independent Scotch spirit oppression might bend, but could not subdue!"

The manly independence spoken of in this letter was no doubt the cause of the refusal of official promotion for Burns, and it is even a wonder that the Tory administration allowed him to retain the small place of a common whiskey gauger.

Dire necessity alone caused him to seek the humiliating occupation, and the cry of a wife and three children often prevented his proud soul from flinging to the dogs of scandal this lean bone of patronage!

It seems cruel, in the plan of Dame Nature, that she gives to the poet, above all her other children, the great gift of soul poetry, and at the same time takes from him the sense of any financial wisdom, leaving him a beautiful wreck on the shores of commercial failure!

Poor Burns never knew the trick
That Wealth can turn without a flaw,
And with the aid of cunning courts
May smile and rob within the law!

Through the summer and fall of 1795, Burns found his physical powers in gradual decay, and with the pangs of indigestion, headache, fever, rheumatism, fainting spells and sleeplessness, he often went out in the evening among the "boys" of Dumfries, to seek solace in social conversation and forgetfulness in the flowing bowl of Bacchus.

Constant worldly cares, combined with remorse and disappointment in not receiving official promotion, lent speed to his zigzag journey to the tomb.

Through the winter and spring of 1796, a settled gloom pervaded his usual brave spirit, and he was scarcely able to attend to his gauging duty about the taverns and whiskey stores of Dumfries.

A tremulous gait and pale countenance characterized his movements about the town, and his personal friends advised him to drop all work and go to the sea shore for recuperation and relief.

The flowers and birds of May brought Burns no consolation, and even the mystic Muse seldom paid a visit to his lonely life.

Yet as love inspired his first song “HANDSOME NELL” --so love inspired his last song, composed a few weeks before he died, to the early remembrance of Charlotte Hamilton:

"FAIREST MAID ON DEVON BANKS."

Full well thou knowest I love thee dear,
Could thou to malice lend an ear,

Oh, did not love exclaim-"Forbear,"
Nor use a faithful lover so?

CHORUS:

Fairest Maid on Devon Banks,
Crystal Devon, winding Devon,
Wilt thou lay that frown aside,
And smile as thou were wont to do?

Then come, thou fairest of the fair,
Those wonted smiles, O, let ine share,
And by thy beauteous self I swear,

No love but thine my heart shall know!

And this last wail for love was from the soul of a Poet on the verge of the grave, tortured by physical and mental pains, with a family in dire poverty!

Inconsistency! thou art a Poet!

A few months before he died, Burns wrote the following noble letter to his old Edinburgh friend, Alexander Cunningham:

"Canst thou minister to a mind diseased? Canst thou speak peace and rest to a soul tossed on a sea of troubles, without one friendly star to guide her course, and dreading that the next surge may overwhelm her?

Of late, a number of domestic vexations and some pecuniary share in the ruin of these times, losses which, though trifling, were what I could ill bear, have so irritated me, that my feelings at times could only be envied by a reprobate spirit listening to the sentence that dooms it to perdition.

Are you deep in the language of consolation? I have