sort of training; he must have studied certain his poetry; it is redolent of natural life, and things, studied for instance "the elder dramatists," and so learned a poetic language; as if poetry lay in the tongue, not in the heart. At other times we are told, he must be bred in a certain rank, and must be on a confidential footing with the higher classes; because, above all other things, he must see the world. As to seeing the world, we apprehend this will cause him little difficulty, if he have but an eye to see it with. Without eyes, indeed, the task might be hard. But happily every poct is born in the world, and sees it, with or against his will, every day and every hour he lives. The mysterious workmanship of man's heart, the true light and the inscrutable darkness of man's destiny, reveal themselves not only in capital cities, and crowded saloons, but in every hut and hamlet where men have their abode. Nay, do not the elements of all human virtues, and all human vices; the passions at once of a Borgia and of a Luther, lie written, in stronger or fainter lines, in the consciousness of every individual bosom, that has practised honest self-examination? Truly, this same world may be seen in Mossgiel and Tarbolton, if we look well, as clearly as it ever came to light in Crockford's, or the Tuileries itself. hardy, natural men. There is a decisive strength in him; and yet a sweet native gracefulness: he is tender, and he is vehe ment, yet without constraint or too visible ef fort; he melts the heart, or inflames it, with a power which seems habitual and familiar to him. We see in him the gentleness, the trembling pity of a woman, with the deep earnest ness, the force and passionate ardour of a hero. Tears lie in him, and consuming fire; as lightning lurks in the drops of the summer cloud. He has a resonance in his bosom for every note of human feeling the high and the low, the sad, the ludicrous, the joyful, are wel come in their turns to his "lightly-moved and all-conceiving spirit." And observe with what a prompt and eager force he grasps his subject, be it what it may! How he fixes, as it were, the full image of the matter in his eye; foll and clear in every lineament; and catches the real type and essence of it, amid a thousand accidents and superficial circumstances, no one of which misleads him! Is it of reason; some truth to be discovered? No sophistry, no vain surface-logic detains him; quick, resolute, unerring, he pierces through into the marrow of the question; and speaks his verdict with an emphasis that cannot be forgot« Is it of description; some visual object to be represented! No poet of any age or nation is more graphic than Burns: the characteristic features disclose themselves to him at a glance; three lines from his hand, and we have a likeness. And, in that rough dias lect, in that rude, often awkward, metre, so clear, and definite a likeness! It seems a draughtsman working with a burnt stick; and yet the burin of a Retzsch is not more expres ten. But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on the poor aspirant to poetry; for it is hinted that he should have been born two centuries ago; inasmuch as poetry, soon after that date, vanished from the earth, and became no longer attainable by men! Such cobweb speculations have, now and then, overhung the field of literature; but they obstruct not the growth of any plant there: the Shakspeare or the Burns, unconsciously, and merely as he walks onward, silently brushes them away.sive or exact. Is not every genius an impossibility till he ap- This clearness of sight we may call the pear? Why do we call him new and original, foundation of all talent; for in fact, unless we if we saw where his marble was lying, and see our object, how shall we know how to place what fabric he could rear from it! It is not or prize it, in our understanding, our image the material but the workman that is wanting. nation, our affections? Yet it is not in itself It is not the dark place that hinders, but the perhaps a very high excellence; but capable dim eye. A Scottish peasant's life was the of being united indifferently with_the_strong meanest and rudest of all lives, till Burns be- est, or with ordinary powers. Homer sur came a poet in it, and a poet of it; found it passes all men in this quality: but stranger a man's life, and therefore significant to men. enough, at no great distance below him are A thousand battle-fields remain unsung; but Richardson and Defoe. It belongs, in tru., i the Wounded Hare has not perished without its to what is called a lively mind: and gives no j memorial; a balm of mercy yet breathes on sure indication of the higher endowments that us from its dumb agonies, because a poet was may exist along with it. In all the three cas there. Our Halloween had passed and repassed, we have mentioned, it is combined with great in rude awe and laughter, since the era of the garrulity; their descriptions are detailed, an Druids; but no Theocritus, till Burns, dis-ple, and lovingly exact; Homer's fire bursts cerned in it the materials of a Scottish Idyl: through, from time to time, as if by acciden't neither was the Holy Fair any Council of Trent, but Defoe and Richardson have no fire. or Roman Jubilee, but nevertheless, Supersti- Burns, again, is not more distinguished WV, tion, and Hypocrisy, and Fun having been pro- the clearness than by the impetuous force of pitious to him, in this man's hand it became a his conceptions. Of the strength, the pier r poem, instinct with satire, and genuine comic emphasis with which he thought, his emph life. Let but the true poet be given us, we sis of expression may give an humble but he repeat it, place him where and how you will, readiest proof. Who ever uttered sharper and true poetry will not be wanting. sayings than his; words more memorable, 7} by their burning vehemence, now by their col vigour and laconic pith? A single phrase d picts a whole subject, a whole scene. Scottish forefathers in the battle-field struggl forward, he says, "red-wat shod :' giving, i Independently of the essential gift of poetic reeling, as we have now attempted to describe it, a certain rugged sterling worth pervades whatever Burns has written: a virtue, as of green fields and mountain breezes, dwells in 1 this one word, a full vision of horror and carBag, perhaps too frightfully accurate for Art! In fact, one of the leading features in the mind of Burns is this vigour of his strictly intellectual perceptions. A resolute force is ever visible in his judgments, as in his feelings and volitions. Professor Stewart says of him, with some surprise: "All the faculties of Barns's mind were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous; and his predilection for poetry was rather the result of his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted to that species of composition. From his conversation I should have pronounced him to be fitted to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities." But this, if we mistake not, is at all times the very essence of a truly poetical endowment. Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole consists in extreme sensibility, and a certain vague pervading tunefulness of nature, is no separate faculty, no organ which can be superadded to the rest, or disjoined from them; but rather the result of their general harmony and completion. The feelings, the gifts, that exist in the Poet, are those that exist, with more or Jess development, in every human soul: the imagination, which shudders at the Hell of Dante, is the same faculty, weaker in degree, which called that picture into being. How does the poet speak to all men, with power, but by being still more a man than they? Shakspeare, it has been well observed, in the planBing and completing of his tragedies, has shown an Understanding, were it nothing more, shich might have governed states, or indited A Norum Organum. What Burns's force of understanding may have been, we have less means of judging: for it dwelt among the bumblest objects, never saw philosophy, and never rose, except for short intervals, into the region of great ideas. Nevertheless, sufficient indication remains for us in his works: we discern the brawny movements of a giganbe though untutored strength, and can understand how, in conversation, his quick, sure might into men and things may, as much as aght else about him, have amazed the best thinkers of his time and country. Bat, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of Burns is fine as well as strong. The more delicate relations of things could not well have escaped his eye, for they were intimately preseat to his heart. The logic of the senate and the forum is indispensable, but not all-suffitet; nay, perhaps the highest Truth is that which will the most certainly elude it. For this logic works by words, and "the highest," It has been said, "cannot be expressed in Words." We are not without tokens of an penness for this higher truth also, of a keen though uncultivated sense for it, having existto Barns. Mr. Stewart, it will be remembered "wonders," in the passage above quoted, aat Borns had formed some distinct concepon of the "doctrine of association." We rather think that far subtiler things than the doctrine of association had from of old been fa Bilar to him. Here for instance: "We know nothing," thus writes he, "or next to nothing, of the structure of our souls, so we cannot account for those seeming caprices in them, that one should be particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the hare-bell, the fox-glove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plover in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the Eolian 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 wo beyond death and the grave." Force and fineness of understanding are often spoken of as something different from general force and fineness of nature, as something partly independent of them. The necessities of language probably require this; but in truth these qualities are not distinct and independent: except in special cases, and from special causes, they ever go together. A man of strong understanding is generally a man of strong character; neither is delicacy in the one kind often divided from delicacy in the other. No one, at all events, is ignorant that in the poetry of Burns, keenness of insight keeps pace with keenness of feeling; that his light is not more pervading than his warmth. He is a man of the most impassioned temper; with passions not strong only, but noble, and of the sort in which great virtues and great poems take their rise. It is reverence, it is Love towards all Nature that inspires him, that opens his eyes to its beauty, and makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise. There is a true old saying, that "love furthers know. ledge:" but above all, it is the living essence of that knowledge which makes poets; the first principle of its existence, increase, activity. Of Burns's fervid affection, his generous, alleinbracing Love, we have spoken already, as of the grand distinction of his nature, seen equally in word and deed, in his Life and in his Writings. It, were easy to multiply ex amples. Not man only, but all that environs man in the material and moral universe, is lovely in his sight: "the hoary hawthorn," the "troop of gray plover," the "solitary curlew." are all dear to him: all live in this Earth along with him, and to all he is knit as in mysterious brotherhood. How touching is it, for instance, that, amidst the gloom of personal misery, brooding over the wintry desolation without him and within him, he thinks of the "ourie cattle" and "silly sheep," and their sufferings in the pitiless storm! Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, The tenant of the mean hut, with its "ragged roof and chinky wall," has a heart to pity even these! This is worth several homilies on Mercy for it is the voice of Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, lives in sympathy; his soul rushes forth into all realms of being; nothing that has existence can be indifferent to him. The very Devil he cannot hate with right orthodoxy! But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben; I'm wae to think upo' yon den, Even for your sake! He did not know, probably, that Sterne had been beforehand with him. "He is the father of curses and lies,' said Dr. Slop; and is cursed and damned already.I am sorry for it,' quoth my uncle Toby!"-"A poet without Love, were a physical and metaphsyical impossibility." Why should we speak of Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled; since all know it, from the king to the meanest of his subjects? This dithyrambic was composed on horseback; in riding in the middle of tempests, over the wildest Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, who, | observing the poet's looks, forebore to speak, -judiciously enough,-for a man composing Bruce's Address might be unsafe to trifle with Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns; but to the external ear, it should be sung with the throat of the whirlwind. So long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war-ode, the best, we believe, that was ever written by any pen. Another wild stormful song, that dwells in our ear and mind with a strange tenacity, is Macpherson's Farewell. Perhaps there is something in the tradition itself that co-operates. For was not this grim Celt, this shaggy Northland Cacus, that "lived a life of sturt and strife, and died by treacherie," was not he too one of the Nimrods and Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of his own remote misty glens, for want of a clearer and wider one? Nay, was there not a touch of grace given him? A fibre of ove and softness, of poetry itself, must have lived in his savage heart; for he composed nat air the night before his execution; on the wings of that poor melody, his better soul would soar away above oblivion, pain, and all the ignominy and despair, which, like an avaCanche, was hurling him to the abyss! Here also, as at Thebes, and in Pelops' line, was material Fate matched against man's Freewill; matched in bitterest though obscure duel: and the ethereal soul sunk not, even in it blindness, without a cry which has survive lit But who, except Burns, could have given words to such a soul; words that we neve listen to without a strange half-barbarous, halı poetic fellow-feeling? Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, Sae dauntingly gaed he; He play'd a spring, and danced it round, Below the gallows tree. Under a lighter and thinner disguise, the same principle of Love, which we have recognised as the great characteristic of Burns and of all true poets, occasionally manifests itself in the shape of Humour. Everywhere, indeed, in his sunny moods, a full buoyant flood of mirth rolls through the mind of Burns; he rises to the high, and stoops to the low, and is brother and playmate to all Nature. We speak not of his bold and often irresistib.e faculty of caricature; for this is Drollery rather than Humour: but a much tenderer sportfulness dwells in him; and comes forth here and there, in evanescent and beautiful touches; as in his Address to the Mouse, or the Farmer's Mare, or in his Elegy on Poor Mail, which last may be reckoned his happiest effort of this kind. In these pieces, there are traits of a Humour as fine as that of Sterne; yet altogether different, original, peculiar,-the Humour of Burns. Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many other kindred qualities of Burns's poetry, much more might be said; but now, with these poor outlines of a sketch, we must prepare to quit this part of our subject. To speak of his individual writings, adequately, and with any detail, would lead us far beyond our limits. As already hinted, we can look on but few of these pieces as, in strict critical language, deserving the name of Poems; they are rhymed elquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense; yet seldom essentially melodious, aerial, poetical. Tam o' Shanter itself, which enjoys so high a favour, does not appear to us, at all decisively, to come under this last category. It is not s much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric, the heart and body of the story still lies hard and dead. He has not gone back, much les carried us back, into that dark, earnest wan dering age, when the tradition was believed, and when it took its rise; he does not attempt, by any new modelling of his supernatural ware, to strike anew that deep mysteriery chord of human nature, which once responded to such things; and which lives in us too, and will for ever live, though silent, or vibrating with far other notes, and to far different issue Our German readers will understand us, whe we say, that he is not the Tieck but the Musaus of this tale. Externally it is all green and living; yet look closer, it is no firm growa but only ivy on a rock. The piece does not properly cohere; the strange chasm which yawns in our incredulous imaginations be tween the Ayr public-house and the gal- †? Tophet, is nowhere bridged over, nav, the iont of such a bridge is laughed at; and thus the Tragedy of the adventure becomes a meit drunken phantasmagoria, painted on vaporus, and the farce alone has any realt المدية We do not say that Burns should have made | department. True, we have songs enough much more of this tradition; we rather think "by persons of quality;" we have tawdry that, for strictly poetical purposes, not much hollow, wine-bred, madrigals; many a rhymed was to be made of it. Neither are we blind to "speech" in the flowing and watery vein of the deep, varied, genial power displayed in Ossorius the Portugal Bishop, rich in sonor what he has actually accomplished; but we ous words, and, for moral, dashed perhaps fnd far more "Shakspearian" qualities, as with some tint of a sentimental sensuality; these of Tam o' Shanter have been fondly named, all which many persons cease not from en. in many of his other pieces; nay, we incline deavouring to sing: though for most part, to believe, that this latter might have been we fear, the music is but from the throat outwritten, all but quite as well, by a man who, ward, or at best from some region far enough in place of genius, had only possessed talent. short of the Soul: not in which, but in a certain Perhaps we may venture to say, that the inane Limbo of the Fancy, or even in some most strictly poetical of all his "poems" is vaporous debatable land on the outside of the ne, which does not appear in Currie's Edi- Nervous System, most of such madrigals and bon; but has been often printed before and rhymed speeches seem to have originated. since, under the humble title of The Jolly Eeg- With the Songs of Burns we must not name gurs. The subject truly is among the lowest these things. Independently of the clear, manly, in nature; but it only the more shows our heartfelt sentiment that ever pervades his poet's gift in raising it into the domain of Art. poetry, his Songs are honest in another point To our minds, this piece seems thoroughly of view: in form, as well as in spirit. They compacted; melted together, refined; and do not affect to be set to music, but they actually poured forth in one flood of true liquid har- and in themselves are music; they have re mony. It is light, airy, and soft of movement; ceived their life, and fashioned themselves yet sharp and precise in its details; every face together, in the medium of Harmony, as is a portrait: that ravcle carlin, that wee Apollo, Venus rose from the bosom of the sea. The that Son of Mars, are Scottish, yet ideal; the story, the feeling, is not detailed, but suggested; scene is at once a dream, and the very Rag- not said, or spouted, in rhetorical completeness castle of "Poosie-Nansie." Farther, it seems and coherence; but sung, in fitful gushes, it in a considerable degree complete, a real self- glowing hints, in fantastic breaks, in warblings supporting Whole, which is the highest merit not of the voice only, but of the whole mind. in a poem. The blanket of the night is drawn We consider this to be the essence of a song; asunder for a moment; in full, ruddy, and and that no songs since the little careless flaming light, these rough tatterdemalions are catches, and, as it were, drops of song, which seen in their boisterous revel; for the strong Shakspeare has here and there sprinkled over pulse of Life vindicates its right to gladness his plays, fulfil this condition in nearly the even here; and when the curtain closes, we same degree as most of Burns's do. Such grace prolong the action without effort; the next day and truth of external movement, too, presup as the last, our Caird and our Palladmonger are poses in general a corresponding force and singing and soldiering; their "brats and cal- truth of sentiment, and inward meaning. The are hawking, begging, cheating; and Songs of Burns are not more perfect in the some other night, in new combinations, they former quality than in the latter. With what will wring from Fate another hour of wassail tenderness he sings, yet with what vehemence and good cheer It would be strange, doubt- and entireness! There is a piercing wail in less, to call this the best of Burns's writings; his sorrow, the purest rapture in his joy: he we mean to say only, that it seems to us the burns with the sternest ire, or laughs with the most perfect of its kind, as a piece of poetical loudest or slyest mirth; and yet he is sweet Composition, strictly so called. In the Beggar's and soft, "sweet as the smile when fond lovers pera, in the Beggar's Eush, as other critics meet, and soft as their parting tear!" If we have already remarked, there is nothing which, farther take into account the immense variety m real poetic vigour, equals this Cantata: no- of his subjects; how, from the loud flowing thing, as we think, which comes within many revel in Willie brew'd a peck o' Maut, to the still, degrees of it. rapt enthusiasm of sadness for Mary in Heaven; from the glad kind greeting of Auld Langsyne, or the comic archness of Duncan Gray, to the fire-eyed fury of Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled, he has found a tone and words for every mood of man's heart,-it will seem a small praise if we rank him as the first of all our songwriters; for we know not where to find one worthy of being second to him. lets" But by far the most finished, complete, and truly inspired pieces of Burns are, without dispule, to be found among his Songs. It is here that although through a small aperture, his bght shines with the least obstruction; in its highest beauty, and pure sunny clearness. The reason may be, that Song is a brief and simple species of composition: and requires nothing so much for its perfection as genuine poetic feelg, genuine music of heart. The song has its rales equally with the Tragedy; rules which in most cases are poorly fulfilled, in many cases are not so much as felt. We might write a long essay on the Songs of Burns; which we reckon by far the best that Britain has yet produced; for, indeed, since the era of Queen Elizabeth, we kow not that, by any other hand, anght truly worth attention has been accomplished in this It is on his Songs, as we believe, tha Burns s chief influence as an author will ultimately be found to depend: nor, if our Fletcher's aphor ism is true. shall we account this a small in fluence. "Let me make the songs of a people," said he," and you shail make its laws." Surely, if ever any Poet might have equalled himself with Legislators, en this ground, it was Burns. His songs are already part of the mother tongue, not of Scotland only but of Britain, and of the millions that in all the ends of the earth | Montesquieu and Mably hat guided Robert speak a British language. In hut and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in the joy and wo of existence, the name, the voice of that joy and that wo, is the name and voice which Burns has given them. Strictly speaking, perhaps, no British man has so deeply affected the thoughts and feelings of so many men as this solitary and altogether private individual, with means apparently the humblest. son in his political' speculations; Quesnay's lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam Sinith. Hume was too rich a man to borrow; and per haps he reached on the French more than he was acted on by them: but neither had h aught to do with Scotland; Edinburgh, equall with La Flèche, was but the lodging and labor atory, in which he not so much morally lined as metaphysically investigated. Never, perhaps In another point of view, moreover, we in- was there a class of writers, so clear and wellcline to think that Burns's influence may have ordered, yet so totally destitute, to all appearbeen considerable: we mean, as exerted spe- ance, of any patriotic affection, nay, of anv cially on the Literature of his country, at least human affection whatever. The French wits on the Literature of Scotland. Among the of the period were as unpatriotic: but their great changes which British, particularly Scot-general deficiency in moral principle, not to tish literature, has undergone since that period, say their avowed sensuality and unbelief in all one of the greatest will be found to consist in virtue, strictly so called, render this accountits remarkable increase of nationality. Even able enough. We hope there is a patriotism the English writers, most popular in Burns's founded on something better than prejudice, time, were little distinguished for their literary that our country may be dear to us, without patriotism, in this its best sense. A certain injury to our philosophy; that in loving and attenuated cosmopolitanism had, in good mea- | justly prizing all other lands, we may prize sure, taken place of the old insular home- justly, and yet love before all others, our own feeling; literature was, as it were, without any stern Motherland, and the venerable structure local environment; was not nourished by the of social and moral Life, which Mind has affections which spring from a native soil. through long ages been building up for us Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write almost there. Surely there is nourishment for the as if in vacuo; the thing written bears no mark better part of man's heart in all this: surely of place; it is not written so much for English- the roots, that have fixed themselves in the men, as for men; or rather, which is the inev- very core of man's being, may be so cultivated itable result of this, for certain Generalizations as to grow up not into briers, but into roses, in which philosophy termed men. Goldsmith is the field of his life! Our Scottish sages have no an exception; not so Johnson; the scene of such propensities: the field of their life shows his Rambler is little more English than that of neither briers nor roses; but only a flat, conhis Rasselas. But if such was, in some degree, tinuous thrashing-floor for Logic, whereon all the case with England, it was, in the highest questions, from the "Doctrine of Rent," to the degree, the case with Scotland. In fact, our "Natural History of Religion, are thrashed and Scottish literature had, at that period, a very sifted with the same mechanical impartiality! singular aspect; unexampled, so far as we With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our know, except perhaps at Geneva, where the literature, it cannot be denied that much of same state of matters appears still to continue. this evil is past, or rapidly passing away: our For a long period after Scotland became Bri-chief literary men, whatever other faults they tish, we had no literature: at the date when Addison and Steele were writing their Spectators, our good Thomas Boston was writing, with the noblest intent, but alike in defiance of grammar and philosophy, his Fourfold State of Man. Then came the schisms in our National Church, and the fiercer schisms in our Body Politic: Theologic ink, and Jacobite blood, with gall enough in both cases, seemed to have blotted out the intellect of the country; how-it might be difficult to estimate. Direct literary ever, it was only obscured, not obliterated. Lord Kames made nearly the first attempt, and a tolerably clumsy one, at writing English; and ere long, Hume, Robertson, Smith, and a whole host of followers, attracted hither the eyes of all Europe. And yet in this brilliant resuscitation of our "fervid genius," there was nothing truly Scottish, nothing indigenous; except, perhaps, the natural impetuosity of inellect, which we sometimes claim, and are sometimes upbraided with, as a characteristic of our nation. It is curious to remark that Scotland, so full of writers, had no Scottish culture, nor indeed any English; our culture was almost exclusively French. It was by studying Racine and Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau, that Kames had trained himself to be a critic and philosopher: it was he light of may have, no longer live among us like a French Colony, or some knot of Propaganda Missionaries; but like natural-born subjects of the soil, partaking and sympathizing in all our attachments, humours, and habits. Our literature no longer grows in water, but in mould, and with the true racy virtues of the soil and climate. How much of this change may be due to Burns, or to any other individual, imitation of Burns was not to be looked for. But his example, in the fearless adoption of domestic subjects, could not but operate from afar; and certainly in no heart did the love of country ever burn with a warmer glow than it that of Burns: "a tide of Scottish_prejudice," as he modestly calls this deep and generous feeling, "had been poured along his veins; and he felt that it would boil there till the floodgates shut in eternal rest." It seemed to him, as if he could do so little for his country, and and yet would so gladly have done all. Our small province stood open for him; that ef Scottish song, and how eagerly he entered co it; how devotedly he laboured there! In his most toilsome journeyings, this object never quits him; it is the little happy-valley of s careworn heart. In the gloom of his u |