The Works of Robert Burns: With an Account of His Life, and a Criticism on His Writings; to which are Prefixed, Some Observations on the Character and Condition of the Scottish Peasantry, Volume 2

Front Cover
F. Lucas, jun. and J. Cushing, 1815

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 141 - Man, this is one of the most extraordinary, that he shall go on from day to day, from week to week, from month to month.
Page 212 - Farewell thou fair day, thou green earth, and ye skies, Now gay with the broad setting sun ! Farewell loves and friendships, ye dear, tender ties, Our race of existence is run ! Thou grim king of terrors, thou life's gloomy foe, Go, frighten the coward and slave ; Go, teach them to tremble, fell tyrant ! but know, No terrors hast thou to the brave! Thou strik'st the poor...
Page 234 - The fates and characters of the rhyming tribe often employ my thoughts when I am disposed to be melancholy. There is not, among all the martyrologies that ever were penned, so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets. In the comparative view of wretches, the criterion is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a being of our kind, give him a stronger imagination and a more delicate sensibility, which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable...
Page 106 - Leith, Fu' loud the wind blaws frae the Ferry, The ship rides by the Berwick-law, And I maun leave my bonnie Mary. The trumpets sound, the banners fly, The glittering spears are ranked ready; The shouts o' war are heard afar, The battle closes thick and bloody; But it's not the roar o...
Page 9 - ... and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees, and raving over the plain. It is my best season for devotion : my mind is wrapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to Him, who, in the pompous language of the Hebrew bard, ' walks on the wings of the wind.
Page 110 - I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of grey plovers in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry.
Page 109 - Bagdat, in order to pass the rest of the day in meditation and prayer. As I was here airing myself on the tops of the mountains, I fell into a profound contemplation on the vanity of human life ; and passing from one thought to another,
Page 110 - Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the jEolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident; or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod ? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities : a God that made all things, man's immaterial and immortal nature, and a world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave.
Page 109 - ... routine of life and thought, which is so apt to reduce our existence to a kind of instinct, or even sometimes, and with some minds, to a state very little superior to mere machinery. This day...
Page 152 - Mary! dear departed shade! Where is thy place of blissful rest? Seest thou thy lover lowly laid? Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast?

Bibliographic information