pounds annually to his widow, till the success of her sons in India enabled them to interpose, and take-not without remonstrance-that pious duty on themselves. The venerable Mrs. Burns lives* in the house where her eminent husband died: all around her has an air of comfort, and she has been enabled to save a small sum out of her annual income: her brother, a London merchant of much respectability, has long interested himself in her affairs: and her brother in-law, Gilbert, died lately, after having established his family successfully in the world.

The citizens of my native Dumfries feel the honour which the Poet's ashes confer on them: Mill-hole-brae has been named Burns-street: the walks are reverenced where he loved to muse; and this grave may be traced by the well-trodden pathways which pass the unnoticed tombs of the learned, the pious, the brave, and the fardescended, and lead to that of the inspired Peasant. Honours have elsewhere been liberally paid to his name: a fair monument is raised to him on the Doon: a noble statue, from the hand of Flaxman, stands in Edinburgh; and Burns-clubs celebrate his birth-day in the chief towns and cities of Britain. On the banks of the Amazons, Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Indus, and the Ganges, his name is annually invoked and his songs sung: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Campbell, have celebrated him in verse; statues are made from his chief characters; pictures painted from his vivid delineations; and even the rafters of Alloway-kirk have been formed into ornaments for the necks of ladies, and quaighs for the hands of men. Such is the influence of genius!

The following beautiful tribute to the memory of Burns is by Mr. Roscoe :

Rear high thy bleak majestic hills,

Thy shelter'd valleys proudly spread,
And, Scotia, pour thy thousand rills,

And wave thy heaths with blossoms red:

But, ah! what poet now shall tread

Thy airy heights, thy woodland reign,

Since he, the sweetest bard, is dead,

That ever breathed the soothing strain?

Mrs. Burns died 1834.

As green thy towering pines may grow,
As clear thy streams may speed along,
As bright thy summer suns may glow,
As gaily charm thy feathery throng;
But now, unheeded is the song,

And dull and lifeless all around,
For his wild harp lies all unstrung,
And cold the hand that waked its sound.

What though thy vigorous offspring rise,
In arts, in arms, thy sons excel;
Though beauty in thy daughters' eyes,
And health in every feature dwell;
Yet who shall now their praises tell,
In strains impassion'd, fond, and free,
Since he no more the song shall swell
To love, and liberty, and thee!

With step-dame eye and frown severe
His hapless youth why didst thou view!
For all thy joys to him were dear,

And all his vows to thee were due:
Nor greater bliss his bosom knew,
In opening youth's delightful prime,
Than when thy favouring ear he drew
To listen to his chanted rhyme.
Thy lonely wastes and frowning skies
To him were all with rapture fraught;
He heard with joy the tempest rise

That waked him to sublimer thought;
And oft thy winding dells he sought,

Where wild flowers pour'd their rathe perfum

And with sincere devotion brought

To thee the summer's earliest bloom.

But ah! no fond maternal smile
His unprotected youth enjoy'd;
His limbs inured to early toil,
His days with early hardships tried!
And more to mark the gloomy void,
And bid him feel his misery,
Before his infant eyes would glide
Day-dreams of immortality.

Yet, not by cold neglect depress'd,
With sinewy arm he turn'd the soil,
Sunk with the evening sun to rest,

And met at morn his earliest smile.
Waked by his rustic pipe meanwhile
The powers of fancy came along,
And sooth'd his lengthen'd hours of toil
With native wit and sprightly song.

-Ah! days of bliss too swiftly filed,

When vigorous health from labour spring
And bland Contentment sooths the bed,
And Sleep his ready opiate brings;
And hovering round on airy wings
Float the light forms of young Desire,
That of unutterable things

The soft and shadowy hope inspire.
Now spells of mightier power prepare,
Bid brighter thantoms round him dance;
Let Flattery spread her viewless snare,
And Fame attract his vagrant glance;

Let sprightly Pleasure too advance,
Unveil'd her eyes, unclasp'd her zone,
Till lost in love's delirious trance,

He scorn the joys his youth has known.

Let Friendship pour her brightest blaze,
Expanding all the bloom of soul;
And Mirth concentre all her rays,

And point them from the sparkling bowl; And let the careless moments roll

In social pleasures unconfined,
And confidence that spurns control
Unlock the inmost springs of mind!
And lead his steps those bowers among,
Where elegance with splendour vies,
Or Science bids her favour'd throng
To more refined sensations rise:
Beyond the peasant's humbler joys,
And freed from each laborious strife,
There let him learn the bliss to prize
That waits the sons of polish'd life.

Then, whilst his throbbing veins beat high
With every impulse of delight,
Dash from his lips the cup of joy,

And shroud the scene in shades of night; And let Despair with wizard light

Disclose the yawning gulf below,

And pour incessant on his sight

Her spectred ills and shapes of woe:

And shew beneath a cheerless shed,

With sorrowing heart and streaming eyes

In silent grief where droops her head,
The partner of his early joys;

And let his infants' tender cries

His fond parental succour claim, And bid him hear in agonies

A husband's and a father's name.

'Tis done, the powerful charm succeeds;
His high reluctant spirit bends;

In bitterness of soul he bleeds,
Nor longer with his fate contends.
An idiot laugh the welkin rends

As Genius thus degraded lies;
Till pitying Heaven the veil extends
That shrouds the Poet's ardent eyes.

Rear high thy bleak majestic hills,
Thy shelter'd valleys proudly spread,
And, Scotia, pour thy thousand rills,
And wave thy heaths with blossoms red;
But never more shall poet tread

Tny airy heights, thy woodland reign,
Since he, the sweetest bard, is dead

That ever breathed the soothing strain.

POEMS,

CHIEFLY SCOTTISH.

PREFACE

TO THE FIRST EDITION.

THE following trifles are not the production of the poet, who, with all the advantages of learned art, and perhaps amid the elegances and idlenesses of upper life, looks down for a rural theme, with an eye to Theocritus or Virgil. To the Author of this, these and other celebrated names, their countrymen, are, at least in their original language, a fountain shut up, and a book sealed. Unacquainted with the necessary requisites for commencing poet by rule, he sings the sentiments and manners he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him, in his and their native language. Though a rhymer from his earliest years, at least from the earliest impulses of the softer passion, it was not till very lately that the applause, perhaps the partiality, of friendship, wakened his vanity so far as to make him think any thing of his worth shewing; and none of the following works were composed with a view to the press. To amuse himself with the little creations of his own fancy, amid the toil and fatigues of a laborious life; to transcribe the various feelings, the loves, the griefs, the hopes, the fears, in his own breast; to find some kind of counterpoise to the struggles of a world, always an alien scene, a task uncouth to the poetical mind-these were his motives for courting the Muses, and in these he found Poetry to be its own reward.

Now that he appears in the public character of an Author, he does it with fear and trembling. So dear

B

is fame to the rhyming tribe, that even he, an obscure, nameless Bard, shrinks aghast at the thought of being branded as-an impertinent blockhead, obtruding his nonsense on the world; and, because he can make a shift to jingle a few doggerel Scottish rhymes together, looking upon himself as a Poet of no small consequence forsooth!

It is an observation of that celebrated poet, Shenstone, whose divine Elegies do honour to our lan guage, our nation, and our species, that Humility has depressed many a genius to a hermit, but never raised one to fame!' If any critic catches at the word genius, the Author tells him, once for all, that he cer tainly looks upon himself as possessed of some poetic abilities, otherwise his publishing in the manner he has done, would be a manoeuvre below the worst character, which, he hopes, his worst enemy will ever give him. But to the genius of a Ramsay, or the glorious dawnings of the poor, unfortunate Fergusson, he, with equal, unaffected sincerity, declares, that even in his highest pulse of vanity, he has not the most distant pretensions. These two justly admired Scottish Poets he has often had in his eye in the following pieces; but rather with a view to kindle at their flame, than for servile imitation.

To his Subscribers, the Author returns his most sincere thanks-not the mercenary bow, over a counter-but the heart-throbbing gratitude of the Bard, conscious how much he owes to benevolence and friendship, for gratifying him, if he deserves it, in that dearest wish of every poetic bosom-to be distinguished. He begs his readers, particularly the learned and the polite, who may honour him with a perusal, that they will make every aliowance for education and circumstances of life; but if, after a fair, candid, and impartial criticism, he shall stand convicted of dullness and nonsense, let him be done by as he would in that case do by others—let him be condemned, without mercy, to contempt and oblivion.