birthday in the chief towns and cities of Britain. On the banks of the Amazon, 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 brands 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 sheltered valleys proudly spread, And wave thy heaths with blossoms red: Thy airy heights, thy woodland reign, Since he, the sweetest bard, is dead, That ever breathed the soothing strain! As green thy towering pines may grow, 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 strains impassioned, fond, and free, 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: Thy lonely wastes and frowning skies That waked him to sublimer thought; And oft thy winding dells he sought, Where wild-flowers poured their rath perfume, And with sincere devotion brought To thee the summer's earliest bloom. But ah! no fond maternal smile His unprotected youth enjoyed; His days with early hardships tried ! Yet, not by cold neglect depressed, And met at morn his earliest smile. -Ah! days of bliss too swiftly filed, When vigorous health from labor springs, The soft and shadowy hope inspire. Now spells of mightier power prepare, Bid brighter phantoms round him dance; He scorn the joys his youth has known. Let Friendship pour her brightest blaze, And Mirth concentre all her rays, And point them from the sparkling bowl; In social pleasures unconfined, And lead his steps those bowers among, And freed from each laborious strife, That waits the sons of polished 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 show beneath a cheerless shed, With sorrowing heart and streaming eyes And let his infants' tender cries A husband's and a father's name. 'Tis done, the powerful charm succeeds; Thy shelter'd valleys proudly spread, And wave thy heaths with blossoms red; But never more shall poet tread Thy airy heights, thy woodland reign, Since he, the sweetest bard, is dead That ever breathed the soothing strain. 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 showing; 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 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 honor to our language, 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 certainly looks upon himself as possessed of some poetic abilities, otherwise his publishing in the manner he has done would be a manœuvre 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 heartthrobbing 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 honor him with a perusal, that they will make every allowance 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. |