INTRODUCTION. Burns in many respects was the most remarkable literary philosopher of the eighteenth century. He sprung from the sour soil of Scotland, where sand, thistle, heather and rustic brawling streams were his close companions. In mind and body Dame Nature made Burns great, and his keen, elemental love of liberty came from the brains of his Celtic ancestors. The clods of the valley, the flowers of the fields, the trees, rocks, rivers, lakes, hills and mountains, spoke to his soul in zephyr or stormy language and glorified all he wrote with the true and everlasting stamp of honest nature! Burns had a magical and mystical memory, brilliant with the coruscations of his sparkling soul, lighting up even his midnights of poverty with the glare of promised pleasure. He was ever roasting on the griddle of expectation instead of resting on the rocking chair of realization ! I do not know of any poet in either ancient or modern times that can be truthfully compared with Burns, as he occupies a whole class himself and fills the bill in his own way! Homer, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Goldsmith and Hugo had many advantages of school and social education that never fell to the lot of Burns. His parents were too poor to give him the advantages of a good country or town school, or the benefit of a classical college education. William Burns, the father, and Agnes Burns, the mother, taught their first born, Robert, the moral lessons of the old family Bible and the puritanical creed of Knox and Calvin, who believed that personal grief was the proper way to worship God, frowning constantly at any ebullitions of joy or pleasure among the poor slavery peasantry, who barely existed under the lash of these sacerdotal tyrants! The only religion and creed that ever entered the heart or soul of Robert Burns was found in the silent and sure teachings of Nature, and not in the dogmas of vain man, where pagan and Christian priests promulgated the eternal fires of damnation to frighten the poor slaves they manipulated for personal pelf and power! This independence of soul opinion generated a secret enmity against the ploughman-poet by the orthodox clergy and landed aristocrats of Scotland, who were glad in their hearts, that poverty and death ended the career of a man who loved liberty, equality and reason! The personal prose letters written by Burns the last fifteen years of his life to various men and women, and particularly those to the gentle-woman, Mrs. Dunlop, should have been kept eternally from the eye of the heartless public that delight in the display of "dirty linen" on the clothes-line of their neighbors, but cry and squeel when noticed in their own back yard! The letters only show blasted hopes, depressing doubts, ruined reason, sudden remorse and the frantic patriotism of an innocent poet, who knew not the practical wiles of the world or the cunning chicanery of the great! During the last four or five years of his life around Dumfries, the harp strings of his hope were warped and broken, never again to be attuned to the melody of social success or financial fruition. His tired and broken spirit went out on the sunset beams of the Scotch mountains, and yet the radiance and sound of his native songs shine and ring down the rolling years with a beauty that will never fade, and a glory that will never die! "Let me write the songs of a country, and I care not who makes her laws!" The teachers, poets, philosophers and prophets of the world have never been appreciated in their day and age, but on the contrary, when they uttered words of wisdom and performed acts of truth, they were treated to poverty, imprisonment, the stake, the scaffold and crucifixion! I shall not dwell particularly on the social eccentricity, country courtship and matrimonial venture of Burns, as they have no part in the scope of the intellectuality of a poet, and if any of my readers expect a recitation of scandal remembrance, they can hunt up some hyena author who throws stones at sin and secretly indulges in the human weakness he rebukes! The true poet, profound or ethereal, is like a wandering spirit, shot out of a celestial orb into a strange planet where his soaring and sensitive nature wears out his weary wings, battling against the sordid creatures that stare in amazement at the brilliant colors of his plumage. The poet is ever a discerning philosopher, constantly communing with nature, seeing in the flowery fields, roaring forests, dashing cataracts, mountain crags, stormy seas, flashing sun and twinkling stars, emblems of mysterious Omnipotence and sure memorials of the Creator. The bard emblazons and glorifies the rude materials of life by his burning imagination, and while scattering the sweet flowers of thought, lends a fragrance to sterile nature and spreads a perfume over the cold ashes of remembrance. The music of the poet's soul is coined into words and phrases of truth and love that out-last pyramids and dynasties, singing mellifluous melodies with the entrancing Muses that ever continue to circle around the Olympian heights of hope, beauty, wisdom and sublimity! The poet is a rule unto himself and will not be confined by the narrow society laws of a gad-grind, sordid generation. He lives in the land of Bohemia, and while oscillating between Bacchus and Venus, he manages someway to swing through the world, leaving his volcanic thoughts as sappers and miners of civilization, while his songs shall sound through the rolling ages and irradiate the pathway of millions yet. unborn, to a higher and brighter life, where angels ever sing and the light of heaven shines eternal. The poet, more than any other human being, leads a dual life, and his objective and subjective worlds are largely creations of his own fancy, where the glinting, mysterious inspirations of his celestial soul are phenomenal, hypnotizing mankind with the glittering fruits of his genius. Some day, the poet is found dead in a little corner of the globe, with his bright wings folded forever, his impulsive warm heart and classic face furrowed with the wrinkles of uncongenial elements that have left him a wreck on the shores of time. Over the cold ashes of the dead poet the world will gather with mournful mien and sigh at the grave of buried genius. Yesterday he suffered for sympathy and bread, today a funeral train honors his memory, tomorrow a monument will point posterity to a prodigy of celestial aspirations, whose songs shall warm and thrill the heart of mankind adown the crowding ages! WHEN I AM DEAD. When I am dead, let no vain pomp display When I am dead, let strangers pass me by, That brought my wandering life to praise or shame, When I am dead, the vile assassin tongue When I am dead, what matters to the crowd, When I am dead, some sage for self-renown Burns' sensitive soul thought, saw and felt Poetry in the glow of the rising and setting sun, in the harvest moon and sparkling stars flashing through midnight space, in the roar of the stormy, rumbling thunder and zigzag lightning, in the cooling breath of the zephyr, in the murmuring winds of the summer sea, in the roaring ocean and dashing waves against rocky headlands, in the sheen of icy crags pinnacled in sunlit glory, in the morning mist rising over the heather enmeshed in golden beams, in the blush and perfume of the wild rose bediamoned with the dews of the dawn and purity of the |