elevation of the finest poetry, guided their transitions by her solemnising power, inspired their appeals to conscious night and nature, and subdued down to the beautiful and pathetic, the expression of what had else been agony and despair. Twenty pounds would enable him to leave Scotland, and take him to Jamaica; and to raise them, it occurred to Robert Burns to publish his poems by subscription! "I was pretty confident my poems would meet with some applause; but at the worst, the roar of the Atlantic would deafen the voice of censure, and the novelty of West Indian scenes make me forget neglect. I threw off six hundred copies, of which I got subscriptions for about three hundred and sixty. My vanity was highly gratified by the reception I met with from the public; and besides, I pocketed, all expenses deducted, near twenty pounds. This sum came very seasonably, as I was thinking of indenturing myself for want of money to procure my passage. As soon as I was master of nine guineas, the price of wafting me to the torrid zone, I took a steerage passage in the first ship that was to sail for the Clyde, 'For hungry ruin had me in the wind.'" The ship sailed; but Burns was still at Mossgiel, for his strong heart could not tear itself away from Scotland, and some of his friends encouraged him to hope that he might be made a gauger! -In a few months, he was about to be hailed by the universal acclamation of his country a great National Poet. But the enjoyment of his fame all round his birth-place, "the heart and the main region of his song," intense as we know it was, though it assuaged, could not still the troubles of his heart; his life, amidst it all, was as hopeless as when it was obscure; "his chest was on its road to Greenock, where he was to embark in a few days for America," and again he sung "Farewell old Coila's hills and dales, Farewell my friends! farewell my foes! when a few words from a blind old man to a country clergy man kindled within him a new hope, and set his heart on fire; and while "November winds blew loud wi' angry sugh," "I posted away to Edinburgh without a single acquaintance, or a single letter of introduction. The baneful star that had so long shed its blasting influence on my zenith, for once made a revolution to the Nadir." At first, Burns was stared at with such eyes as people open wide who behold a prodigy; for though he looked the rustic, and his broad shoulders had the stoop that stalwart men acquire at the plough, his swarthy face was ever and anon illumined with the look that genius alone puts off and on, and that comes and goes with a new interpretation of imagination's winged words. For a week or two he had lived chiefly with some Ayrshire acquaintances, and was not personally known to any of the leading men. But as soon as he came forward, and was seen and heard, his name went through the city, and people asked one another, "Have you met Burns?" His demeanour among the Magnates was not only unembarrassed but dignified, and it was at once discerned by the blindest that he belonged to the aristocracy of nature. "The idea which his conversation conveyed of the power of his mind, exceeded, if possible, that which is suggested by his writings. Among the poets whom I have happened to know I have been struck, in more than one instance, with the unaccountable disparity between their general talents, and the occasional aspirations of their more favoured moments. But all the faculties of Burns's mind were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous; and his predilections for poetry were rather the result of his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted to that species of composition." Who those poets were, of occasional inspiration and low general talents, and in conversation felt to be of the race of the feeble, Dugald Stewart had too much delicacy to tell us; but if Edinburgh had been their haunt, and theirs the model of the poetical character in the judgment of her sages, no wonder that a new light was thrown on the Philosophy of the Human Mind by that of Robert Burns. For his intellectual faculties were of the highest order, and though deferential to superior knowledge, he spoke on all subjects he understood, and they were many, with a voice of determination, and when need was, of command. It was not in the debating club in Tarbolton alone, about which so much nonsense has been prosed, that he had learned eloquence; he had been long giving chosen and deliberate utterance to all his bright ideas and strong emotions; they were all his own, or he had made them his own by transfusion; and so, therefore, was his speech. Its fount was in genius, and therefore could not run dry—a flowing spring that needed neither to be fanged nor pumped. As he had the power of eloquence, so had he the will, the desire, the ambition to put it forth; for he rejoiced to carry with him the sympathies of his kind, and in his highest moods he was not satisfied with their admiration without their love. There never beat a heart more alive to kindness. To the wise and good how eloquent his gratitude! to Glencairn, how imperishable ! This exceeding tenderness of heart often gave such pathos to his ordinary talk, that he even melted commonplace people into tears! Without scholarship, without science, with not much of what is called information, he charmed the first men in a society equal in all these to any at that time in Europe. The scholar was happy to forget his classic lore, as he listened, for the first time, to the noblest sentiments flowing from the lips of a rustic, sometimes in his own Doric divested of all offensive vulgarity, but oftener in language which, in our northern capital, was thought pure English, and comparatively it was so, for in those days the speech of many of the most distinguished persons would have been unintelligible out of Scotland, and they were proud of excelling in the use of their mother tongue. The philosopher wondered that the peasant should comprehend intuitively truths that had been established, it was so thought, by reasoning demonstrative or inductive; as the illustrious Stewart, a year or two afterwards wondered how clear an idea Burns the Poet had of Alison's True Theory of Taste. True it is that the great law of association has by no one been so beautifully stated in a single sentence as by Burns: "That the martial clangor of a trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime than the twingle-twangle of a Jew's harp; that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stalk of the burdock; and that from something innate and independent of all associations of ideas-these I had set down as irrefragable orthodox truths, until perusing your book shook my faith." The man of wit -ay, even Harry Erskine himself-and a wittier than he never charmed social life-was nothing loth, with his delightful amenity, to cease for a while the endless series of anecdotes so admirably illustrative of the peculiarities of nations, orders, or individuals, and almost all of them created or vivified by his own genius, that the most accomplished companies might experience a new pleasure from the rich and racy humour of a natural converser fresh from the plough. And how did Burns bear all this, and much besides even more trying? For you know that a duchess declared that she had never before in all her life met with a man who so fairly carried her off her feet. Hear Professor Stewart: "The attentions he received during his stay in town, from all ranks and descriptions of persons, were such as would have turned any head but his own. I cannot say that I could perceive any unfavourable effect which they left on his mind. He retained the same simplicity of manners and appearance which had struck me so forcibly when I first saw him in the country; nor did he seem to feel any additional self-importance from the number and rank of his new acquaintance.' In many passages of his letters to friends who had their fears, Burns expressed entire confidence in his own self-respect, and in terms the most true and touching; as, for example, to Dr Moore: "The hope to be admired for ages is, in by far the greater part of those who even were authors of repute, an unsubstantial dream. For my part, my first ambition was, and still is, to please my compeers, the rustic inmates of the hamlet, while ever-changing language and manners shall allow me to be relished and understood." And to his venerated friend Mrs Dunlop he gives utterance, in the midst of his triumphs, to dark forebodings, some of which were but too soon fulfilled! "You are afraid that I shall grow intoxicated with my prosperity as a poet. Alas! Madam, I know myself and the world too well. I assure you, Madam, I do not dissemble, when I tell you I tremble for the consequences. The novelty of a poet in my obscure situation, without any of those advantages which are reckoned necessary for that character, at least at this time of day, has raised a partial tide of public notice, which has borne me to a height where I am feeling absolutely certain my abilities are inadequate to support me; and too surely do I see that time, when the same tide will leave me, and recede, perhaps, as far below the mark of truth. I do not say this in ridiculous affectation of selfabasement and modesty. I have studied myself, and know what ground I occupy; and however a friend or the world may differ from me in that particular, I stand for my own opinion in silent resolve, with all the tenaciousness of property. I mention this to you once for all, to disburthen my mind, and I do not wish to hear or say more about it. But 'When proud fortune's ebbing tide recedes,' you will bear me witness, that, when my bubble of fame was at the highest, I stood, unintoxicated with the inebriating cup in my hand, looking forward with rueful resolve to the hastening time when the blow of Calumny should dash it to the ground with all the eagerness of vengeful triumph." Such equanimity is magnanimous; for though it is easy to declaim on the vanity of fame, and the weakness of them who are intoxicated with its bubbles, the noblest have still longed for it, and what a fatal change it has indeed often wrought on the simplicity and sincerity of the most gifted spirits! There must be a moral grandeur in his character who receives sedately the unexpected, though deserved ratification of his title to that genius whose empire is the inner being of his race, from the voice of his native land uttered aloud through all her regions, and harmoniously combined of innumerable tones all expressive of a great people's pride. Make what deductions you will from the worth of that "All hail!" and still it must have sounded in Burns's ears as a realisation of that voice heard by his prophetic soul in "The Vision." "ALL HAIL! MY OWN INSPIRED BARD! Robert Burns was not the man to have degraded himself everlastingly, by one moment's seeming slight or neglect of |