exhausted in reflection every topic of comfort. A heart at ease would have been charmed with my sentiments and reasonings, but as to myself, I was like Judas Iscariot preaching the gospel. Still there are two great pillars that bear us up amid the wreck of misfortune and misery. The one is composed of a certain noble, stubborn something in man, known by the names of Courage, Fortitude, Magnamity. 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 mindif I may be allowed the expression-which connect us with and link 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!"

In the winter of 1795 and 1796, Burns' mind ran on the rocks of despair, and although he had been temporarily promoted to the place of acting supervisor, his bodily ailments of indigestion and acute rheumatism undermined his whole constitution and run him into remorseful fits of dejection and complaint.

He unburdens his mind to Mrs. Dunlop in this fashion: "What a transient business is life! Very lately I was a boy; but the other day I was a young man; and already I begin to feel the rigid fibre and stiffening joints of old age coming fast over my frame. With all the follies of youth, and, I fear a few vices of manhood, still I congratulate myself on having had, in early days, religion strongly impressed on my mind."

In January, 1796, Burns, with all his physical ills, could

not resist the temptation of attending a jovial party at the Globe Tavern, and in going home about two o'clock in the morning, stumbled and fell asleep for awhile, and when someone aroused him, the chill of the open air had penetrated to his bones and put another nail in the coffin of his blasted hopes.

On the 31st of January, 1796, he writes again to his never failing friend, Mrs. Dunlop:

"I have lately drunk deep of the cup of affliction. The autumn robbed me of my only daughter and darling child, and that at a distance, too, and so rapidly as to put it out of my power to pay the last duties to her. I had scarcely begun to recover from that shock, when I became myself the victim of a most severe rheumatic fever, and long the die spun doubtful; until after many weeks of a sick bed, it seems to have turned up life, and I am beginning to crawl across my room, and once indeed have been before my own door in the street."

Just before Burns wrote his last love song to Charlotte Hamilton, he composed the following to Jessie Lewers, his faithful housekeeper and nurse of himself and family:

MY QUEEN.

"Oh! wert thou in the cold blast,

On yonder lea, on yonder lea,

My plaidie to the angry air

Would shelter thee, would shelter thee;

Or did misfortune's bitter storms

Around thee blow, around thee blow,

Thy shield should be my bosom

To share it all, to share it all.

Or were I in the wildest waste,

So bleak and bare, so bleak and bare,

The desert were a paradise,

If thou wert there, if thou wert there;
Or were I monarch of the globe,

With thee to reign, with thee to reign,
The brightest jewel in my crown

Would be my queen, would be my queen.'

Burns was certainly profuse and promiscuous in lavishing his love songs on a variety of the female kind, and whether the bonnie belles came from the lowlands of the heather wilds, or castle halls of the highlands, made no difference, for he imagined all women fascinating, entrancing and beautiful! Just like a romantic poet!

On the 4th of July, 1796, in a physical and mental dilapidation, he wrote thus to Johnson, the music publisher of Edinburgh:

"Many a merry meeting your music museum has given us, and possibly it may give us more, though, alas! I fear not. This protracting slow, consuming illness will, I doubt much, my ever dear friend, arrest my sun before he has reached his middle career, and will turn over this poet to far more important concerns than studying the brilliancy of wit or the pathos of poetic sentiments."

On the day he wrote these lines he left Dumfries for the village of Brow, on the Solway shore, to try the effect of seabathing; and he went alone to this last resort for expected relief. His faithful wife did not accompany the poet, for she was nearing the days of confinement for a new heir to the Burns intellectual estate!

Mrs. Walter Riddel, his farmer friend, happened to be summering at Brow for her health, and when she learned that Burns was there, she sent her carriage to bring him to her house for dinner and a social chat. She says, in an interview about the poet, "I was struck with his appearance

on entering the room. The stamp of death was imprinted on his features. He seemed already touching the brink of eternity. His first salutation was, 'Well, Madam, have you any commands for the other world?' I replied, that it seemed a doubtful case which of us should be there soonest, and that I hoped he would yet live to write my epitaph. He looked in my face with an air of great kindness and expressed his concern at seeing me look so ill, with his accustomed sensibilities.

"We had a long and serious conversation about his present situation and the approaching termination of all his earthly prospects. He spoke of his death without any of the ostentation of philosophy, but with firmness as well as feeling, as an event likely to happen very soon, and which gave him concern chiefly from leaving his four children so young and unprotected, and his wife hourly expecting a fifth. He mentioned with seeming pride and satisfaction the promising genius of his eldest son, and the flattering marks of approbation he had received from his teachers, and dwelt particularly on his hopes of that boy's future conduct and merit.

His anxiety for his family seemed to hang heavy on him, and the more perhaps from the reflection that he had not done them all the justice he was so well qualified to do.

Passing from this subject, he showed great concern about the care of his literary fame and particularly the publication of his posthumous works. He said he was well aware that his death would create some noise and that every scrap of his writing would be revived against him to the injury of his future reputation; that his letters and verses, written with unguarded and improper freedom, and which he earnestly wished to have buried in oblivion, would be handed about by idle vanity or malevolence, when no dread of his resent

ment would restrain them, or prevent the censures of shrilltongued malice, or the insidious sarcasms of envy, from pouring forth all their venom to blast his fame.

He lamented that he had written many epigrams on persons against whom he entertained no enmity, and whose characters he would be sorry to wound; and many indifferent practical pieces, which he feared would now, with all their imperfections on their head, be thrust upon the world. On this occasion he deeply regretted having deferred to put his papers in a state of arrangement, as he was now incapable of the exertion.

I had seldom seen his mind greater or more collected. There was frequently a considerable degree of vivacity in his sallies, and they would probably have had a greater share, had not the concern and dejection, I could not disguise, damped the spirit of pleasantry he seemed not unwilling to indulge.

We parted on the evening of the 5th of July, 1796; the next day I saw him again, and we parted to meet no more!"

This is a sad and mournful picture of the physical and mental condition of the great ploughman poet, as the ebbing tide of life was rapidly bearing him away over the ocean of years, into the unfathomable gulf of eternity!

Burns lingered about Brow and the bathing shore two weeks longer, and harassed about pressing debts and current expenses. Life became more miserable day by day, like the rise and fall of a fading candle light, flickering into final darkness.

He wrote to several of his friends for financial assistance, and among his notes we find the following to Mr. Thompson, the music publisher, dated the 12th of July, 1796:

"After all my boasted independence, cursed necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds.