expressions could not well mingle with thoughts inspired by harmony.

In his poems, Burns supposes himself in the society of men, and indulges in reckless sentiments and unmeasured language: in his songs he imagines himself in softer company: when woman's eye is on him he is gentle, persuasive, and impassioned; he is never boisterous; he seeks not to say fine things, yet he never misses saying them; his compliments are uttered of free will, and all his thoughts flow naturally from the subject. There is a natural grace and fascination about his songs; all is earnest and from the heart: he is none of your millinery bards who deal in jewelled locks, laced garments, and shower pearls and gems by the bushel on youth and beauty. He makes bright eyes, flushing cheeks, the music of the tongue, and the pulses' maddening play, do all. Those charms he knew came from heaven, and not out of the tirewoman's basket, and would last when fashions changed. It is remarkable that the most naturally elegant and truly impassioned songs in the language were written by a ploughman-lad in honor of the rustic lasses around him.

If we regard the songs of Burns as so many pastoral pictures, we will find that he has an eye for the beauties of nature as accurate and as tasteful as the happiest landscape painter. Indeed, he seldom gives us a finished image of female loveliness without the accompaniment of blooming flowers, running streams, waving woods, and the melody of birds: this is the framework which sets off the portrait. He has recourse rarely to embellishments borrowed from art; the lighted hall and the thrilling strings are less to him than a walk with her he loves by some lonely rivulet's side, when the dews are beginning to glisten on the lilies and weigh them down, and the moon is moving not unconsciously above them. In all this we may recognize a true poet-one who felt that woman's loveliness triumphed over these fragrant accompaniments, and who regarded her still as the "blood-royal of life," the brightest part of creation.

Those who desire to feel, in their full force, the songs of Burns, must not hope it from scientific singers in the theatres. The right scene is the pastoral glen; the right tongue for utterance is that of a shepherd lass; and the proper song is that which belongs to her present feelings. The gowany glen, the nibbling sheep, the warbling birds, and the running stream, give the inanimate, while the singer herself personates the living beauty of the song. I have listened to a country girl singing one of his songs, while she spread her webs to bleach by a running stream-ignorant of her audience-with such feeling and effect as were quite overpowering.

This will keep the fame of Burns high among us; should the printer's ink dry up, ten thousand melodious tongues will preserve his songs to remote generations.

The variety, too, of his lyrics is equal to their truth and beauty. He has written songs which echo the feelings of every age and condition in life. He personates all the passions of man and all the gradations of affection. He sings the lover hastening through storm and tempest to see the object of his attachment-the swelling stream, the haunted wood, and the suspicious parents, are all alike disregarded. He paints him again on an eve of July, when the air is calm, the grass fragrant, and no sound is abroad save the amorous cry of the partridge, enjoying the beauty of the evening as he steals by some unfrequented way to the trysting thorn, whither his mistress is hastening; or he limns him on a cold and snowy night, enjoying a brief parley with her whom he loves, from a cautiously opened window, which shows her white arm and bright eyes, and the shadow perhaps of a more fortunate lover, which accounts for the marks of feet impressed in the snow on the way to her dwelling. Nor is he always sighing and vowing: some of his heroes answer scorn with scorn, are saucy with the saucy, and proud with the proud, and comfort themselves with sarcastic comments on woman and her fickleness and folly; others drop all allegiance to that fantastic idol beauty, and while mirth abounds, and "the wine-cup shines in light," find wondrous solace. He laughs at the sex one moment, and adores them the next-he ridicules and satirizes-he vows and entreats-he traduces and he defies-all in a breath. Burns was intimate with the female heart, and with the romantic mode of courtship practised in the pastoral districts of Caledonia. He was early initiated into all the mysteries of rustic love, and had tried his eloquence with such success among the maidens of the land, that one of them said, "Open your eyes and shut your ears with Rob Burns, and there's nae fear o' your heart; but close your eyes and open your ears, and you'll lose it."

Of all lyric poets he is the most prolific and various. Of one hundred and sixty songs which he communicated to Johnson's Museum, all, save a score or so, are either his composition, or amended with such skill and genius as to be all but made his own. For Thomson he wrote little short of a hundred. He took a peculiar pleasure in ekeing out and amending the old and imperfect songs of his country. He has exercised his fancy and taste to a greater extent that way than antiquarians either like or seem willing to acknowledge. Scott, who performed for the ballads of Scotland what Burns did for many of her songs, perceived this:

"The Scottish tunes and songs," he remarked, "preserved for Burns that inexpressible charm which they have ever afforded to his countrymen. He entered into the idea of collecting their fragments with the zeal of an enthusiast; and few, whether serious or humorous, passed through his hands without receiving some of those magic touches, which, without greatly altering the song, restored its original spirit, or gave it more than it previously possessed. So dexterously are those touches combined with the ancient structure, that the rifacciamento, in many instances, could scarcely have been detected without the avowal of the Bard himself. Neither would it be easy to mark his share in the individual ditties. Some he appears to have entirely rewritten; to others he added supplementary stanzas; in some he retained only the leading lines and the chorus; and others he merely arranged and ornamented." No one has ever equalled him in these exquisite imitations: he caught up the peculiar spirit of the old song at once; he thought as his elder brother in rhyme thought, and communicated an antique sentiment and tone to all the verses which he added. Finer feeling, purer fancy, more exquisite touches of nature, and more vigorous thoughts, were the result of this intercourse. Burns found Scottish song like a fruit-tree in winter, not dead, though unbudded; nor did he leave it till it was covered with bloom and beauty. He sharpened the sarcasm, deepened the passion, heightened the humor, and abated the indelicacy of his country's lyrics.

"To Burns's ear," says Wilson-a high judge in all poetic questions-"the lowly lays of Scotland were familiar, and most dear were they all to his heart. Often had he 'sung aloud old songs that are the music of the heart;' and, some day, to be able himself to breathe such strains was his dearest, his highest ambition. His genius and his moral frame were thus imbued with the spirit of our old traditionary ballad poetry; and, as soon as all his passions were ripe, the voice of song was on all occasions of deep and tender interest-the voice of his daily, his nightly speech. Those old songs were his models; he felt as they felt, and looked up with the same eyes on the same objects. So entirely was their language his language, that all the beautiful lines, and half-lines, and single words that, because of something in them most exquisitely true to nature, had survived the rest of the compositions to which they had long ago belonged, were sometimes adopted by him, almost unconsciously it might seem, in his finest inspirations; and oftener still sounded in his ear like a key-note, on which he pitched his own plaintive tune of the heart till the voice and language of the old and new days were but as one." He never failed to surpass what he

imitated; he added fruit to the tree and fragrance to the flower. That his songs are a solace to Scottish hearts in far lands we know from many sources; the poetic testimony of an inspired witness is all we shall call for at present:

A want of chivalry has been instanced & a radical fault in the lyrics of Burns. He certainly is not of the number who appr h beauty with much awe or reverence, and who raise loveliness an idol for man to fall down and worship. The polished court and romantic affectations of high society had not found their among the maidens of Kyle; the midnight tryste, and the stolen interview-the rapture to meet-and the anguish to part-the secret vow, and the scarce audible whisper, were dear to their bosoms; and they were unacquainted with moving in parallel lines, and breathing sighs into roses, in the affairs of the heart. To draw a magic circle of affection round those he loved, which could not be passed without lowering them from the station of angels, forms no part of the lyrical system of Burns's poetic wooing: there is no affectation in him; he speaks like one unconscious of the veneered and varnished civilities of artificial life; he feels that true love is unacquainted with fashionable distinctions, and in all he has written has thought but of the natural man and woman, and the uninfluenced emotions of the heart. Some have charged him with a want of delicacy-an accusation easily answered: he is rapturous, he is warmed, he is impassioned--his heart cannot contain its ecstasies; he glows with emotion as a crystal goblet with wine; but in none of his best songs is there the least indelicacy. Love is with him a leveller; passion and feeling are of themselves as little influenced by fashion and manners as the wind is in blowing, or the sun is in shining; chivalry, and even notions of delicacy, are changeable things; our daughters speak no longer with the free tongues of their great-grandmothers, and young men no longer challenge wild lions, or keep dangerous castles, in honor of their ladies' eyes. The prose of Burns has much of the original merit of his poetry; but it is seldom so pure, so natural, and so sustained. It abounds with bright bits, fine outflashings, gentle emotions, and uncommon warmth and ardor. It is very unequal; sometimes it is simple and vigorous; now and then inflated and cumbrous; and he not seldom labors to say weighty and decided things, in which a "double

double toil and trouble" sort of labor is visible. "But hundreds even of his most familiar letters"—I adopt the words of Wilsonare perfectly artless, though still most eloquent compositions. Simple we may not call them, so rich are they in fancy, so overflowing in feeling, and dashed off in every other paragraph with the easy boldness of a great master, conscious of his strength even at times when, of all things in the world, he was least solicitous about display; while some there are so solemn, so sacred, so religious, that he who can read them with an unstirred heart can have no trust, no hope, in the immortality of the soul." Those who desire to feel him in his strength must taste him in his Scottish spirit. There he spoke the language of life: in English, he te that of education; he had to think in the former before he d express himself in the latter. In the language in which his er sung and nursed him he excelled; a dialect reckoned barbarous by scholars, grew classic and elevated when uttered by the tongue of ROBERT BURNS.

Of the family and fame of the Poet something should be said. Good and active friends bestirred themselves after his death: Currie munificently wrote his Life and edited his works; Robert, his eldest son, was placed in the Stamp-office by Lord Sidmouth; cadetships in India were generously obtained for William and James by Sir James Shaw, who otherwise largely befriended the family; and Lord Panmure nobly presented one hundred 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 brotherin-law, Gilbert, died lately, after having established his family successfully in the world.

The citizens of my native Dumfries feel the honor which the Poet's ashes confer on them; Mill-hole-brae has been named Burnsstreet the walks are reverenced where he loved to muse; and his grave may be traced by the well-trodden pathways which pass the unnoticed tombs of the learned, the pious, the brave, and the far-descended, and lead to that of the inspired Peasant. Honors 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

* Mrs. Burns died 1834.