THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ROBERT BURNS 12

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ROBERT BURNS 12

The burial of Burns, on the 25th of July, was an impressive and

mournful scene: half the people of Nithsdale and the neighbouring

parts of Galloway had crowded into Dumfries, to see their poet

"mingled with the earth," and not a few had been permitted to look at

his body, laid out for interment. It was a calm and beautiful day, and

as the body was borne along the street towards the old kirk-yard, by

his brethren of the volunteers, not a sound was heard but the measured

step and the solemn music: there was no impatient crushing, no fierce

elbowing--the crowd which filled the street seemed conscious of what

they were now losing for ever. Even while this pageant was passing,

the widow of the poet was taken in labour; but the infant born in that

unhappy hour soon shared his father's grave. On reaching the northern

nook of the kirk-yard, where the grave was made, the mourners halted;

the coffin was divested of the mort-cloth, and silently lowered to its

resting-place, and as the first shovel-full of earth fell on the lid,

the volunteers, too agitated to be steady, justified the fears of the

poet, by three ragged volleys. He who now writes this very brief and

imperfect account, was present: he thought then, as he thinks now,

that all the military array of foot and horse did not harmonize with

either the genius or the fortunes of the poet, and that the tears

which he saw on many cheeks around, as the earth was replaced, were

worth all the splendour of a show which mocked with unintended mockery

the burial of the poor and neglected Burns. The body of the poet was,

on the 5th of June, 1815, removed to a more commodious spot in the

same burial-ground--his dark, and waving locks looked then fresh and

glossy--to afford room for a marble monument, which embodies, with

neither skill nor grace, that well-known passage in the dedication to

the gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt:--"The poetic genius of my

country found me, as the prophetic bard, Elijah, did Elisha, at the

plough, and threw her inspiring mantle over me." The dust of the bard

was again disturbed, when the body of Mrs. Burns was laid, in April,

1834, beside the remains of her husband: his skull was dug up by the

district craniologists, to satisfy their minds by measurement that he

was equal to the composition of "Tam o' Shanter," or "Mary in Heaven."

This done, they placed the skull in a leaden box, "carefully lined

with the softest materials," and returned it, we hope for ever, to the

hallowed ground.

 

Thus lived and died Robert Burns, the chief of Scottish poets: in his

person he was tall and sinewy, and of such strength and activity, that

Scott alone, of all the poets I have seen, seemed his equal: his

forehead was broad, his hair black, with an inclination to curl, his

visage uncommonly swarthy, his eyes large, dark and lustrous, and his

voice deep and manly. His sensibility was strong, his passions full to

overflowing, and he loved, nay, adored, whatever was gentle and

beautiful. He had, when a lad at the plough, an eloquent word and an

inspired song for every fair face that smiled on him, and a sharp

sarcasm or a fierce lampoon for every rustic who thwarted or

contradicted him. As his first inspiration came from love, he

continued through life to love on, and was as ready with the lasting

incense of the muse for the ladies of Nithsdale as for the lasses of

Kyle: his earliest song was in praise of a young girl who reaped by

his side, when he was seventeen--his latest in honour of a lady by

whose side he had wandered and dreamed on the banks of the Devon. He

was of a nature proud and suspicious, and towards the close of his

life seemed disposed to regard all above him in rank as men who

unworthily possessed the patrimony of genius: he desired to see the

order of nature restored, and worth and talent in precedence of the

base or the dull. He had no medium in his hatred or his love; he never

spared the stupid, as if they were not to be endured because he was

bright; and on the heads of the innocent possessors of titles or

wealth he was ever ready to shower his lampoons. He loved to start

doubts in religion which he knew inspiration only could solve, and he

spoke of Calvinism with a latitude of language that grieved pious

listeners. He was warm-hearted and generous to a degree, above all

men, and scorned all that was selfish and mean with a scorn quite

romantic. He was a steadfast friend and a good neighbour: while he

lived at Ellisland few passed his door without being entertained at

his table; and even when in poverty, on the Millhole-brae, the poor

seldom left his door but with blessings on their lips.

 

Of his modes of study he has himself informed us, as well as of the

seasons and the places in which he loved to muse. He composed while he

strolled along the secluded banks of the Doon, the Ayr, or the Nith:

as the images crowded on his fancy his pace became quickened, and in

his highest moods he was excited even to tears. He loved the winter

for its leafless trees, its swelling floods, and its winds which swept

along the gloomy sky, with frost and snow on their wings: but he loved

the autumn more--he has neglected to say why--the muse was then more

liberal of her favours, and he composed with a happy alacrity unfelt

in all other seasons. He filled his mind and heart with the materials

of song--and retired from gazing on woman's beauty, and from the

excitement of her charms, to record his impressions in verse, as a

painter delineates oil his canvas the looks of those who sit to his

pencil. His chief place of study at Ellisland is still remembered: it

extends along the river-bank towards the Isle: there the neighbouring

gentry love to walk and peasants to gather, and hold it sacred, as the

place where he composed Tam O' Shanter. His favourite place of study

when residing in Dumfries, was the ruins of Lincluden College, made

classic by that sublime ode, "The Vision," and that level and clovery

sward contiguous to the College, on the northern side of the Nith: the

latter place was his favourite resort; it is known now by the name of

Burns's musing ground, and there he conceived many of his latter

lyrics. In case of interruption he completed the verses at the

fireside, where he swung to and fro in his arm-chair till the task was

done: he then submitted the song to the ordeal of his wife's voice,

which was both sweet and clear, and while she sung he listened

attentively, and altered or amended till the whole was in harmony,

music and words.

 

The genius of Burns is of a high order: in brightness of __EXPRESSION__

and unsolicited ease and natural vehemence of language, he stands in

the first rank of poets: in choice of subjects, in happiness of

conception, and loftiness of imagination, he recedes into the second.

He owes little of his fame to his objects, for, saving the beauty of a

few ladies, they were all of an ordinary kind: he sought neither in

romance nor in history for themes to the muse; he took up topics from

life around which were familiar to all, and endowed them with

character, with passion, with tenderness, with humour--elevating all

that he touched into the regions of poetry and morals. He went to no

far lands for the purpose of surprising us with wonders, neither did

he go to crowns or coronets to attract the stare of the peasantry

around him, by things which to them were as a book shut and sealed:

"The Daisy" grew on the lands which he ploughed; "The Mouse" built her

frail nest on his own stubble-field; "The Haggis" reeked on his own

table; "The Scotch Drink" of which he sang was the produce of a

neighbouring still; "The Twa Dogs," which conversed so wisely and

wittily, were, one of them at least, his own collies; "The Vision" is

but a picture, and a brilliant one, of his own hopes and fears; "Tam

Samson" was a friend whom he loved; "Doctor Hornbook" a neighbouring

pedant; "Matthew Henderson" a social captain on half-pay; "The Scotch

Bard" who had gone to the West Indies was Burns himself; the heroine

of "The Lament" was Jean Armour; and "Tam O' Shanter" a facetious

farmer of Kyle, who rode late and loved pleasant company, nay, even

"The Deil" himself, whom he had the hardihood to address, was a being

whose eldrich croon bad alarmed the devout matrons of Kyle, and had

wandered, not unseen by the bard himself, among the lonely glens of

the Doon. Burns was one of the first to teach the world that high

moral poetry resided in the humblest subjects: whatever he touched

became elevated; his spirit possessed and inspired the commonest

topics, and endowed them with life and beauty.

 

His songs have all the beauties and but few of them the faults of his

poems: they flow to the music as readily as if both air and words came

into the world together. The sentiments are from nature, they are

rarely strained or forced, and the words dance in their places and

echo the music in its pastoral sweetness, social glee, or in the

tender and the moving. He seems always to write with woman's eye upon

him: he is gentle, persuasive and impassioned: he appears to watch her

looks, and pours out his praise or his complaint according to the

changeful moods of her mind. He looks on her, too, with a sculptor's

as well as a poet's eye: to him who works in marble, the diamonds,

emeralds, pearls, and elaborate ornaments of gold, but load and injure

the harmony of proportion, the grace of form, and divinity of

sentiment of his nymph or his goddess--so with Burns the fashion of a

lady's boddice, the lustre of her satins, or the sparkle of her

diamonds, or other finery with which wealth or taste has loaded her,

are neglected us idle frippery; while her beauty, her form, or her

mind, matters which are of nature and not of fashion, are remembered

and praised. He is none of the millinery bards, who deal in scented

silks, spider-net laces, rare gems, set in rarer workmanship, and who

shower diamonds and pearls by the bushel on a lady's locks: he makes

bright eyes, flushing cheeks, the magic of the tongue, and the

"pulses' maddening play" perform all. His songs are, in general,

pastoral pictures: he seldom finishes a portrait of female beauty

without enclosing it in a natural frame-work of waving woods, running

streams, the melody of birds, and the lights of heaven. Those who

desire to feel Burns in all his force, must seek some summer glen,

when a country girl searches among his many songs for one which

sympathizes with her own heart, and gives it full utterance, till wood

and vale is filled with the melody. It is remarkable that the most

naturally elegant and truly impassioned songs in our literature were

written by a ploughman in honour of the rustic lasses around him.

 

His poetry is all life and energy, and bears the impress of a warm

heart and a clear understanding: it abounds with passions and

opinions--vivid pictures of rural happiness and the raptures of

successful love, all fresh from nature and observation, and not as

they are seen through the spectacles of books. The wit of the clouted

shoe is there without its coarseness: there is a prodigality of humour

without licentiousness, a pathos ever natural and manly, a social joy

akin sometimes to sadness, a melancholy not unallied to mirth, and a

sublime morality which seeks to elevate and soothe. To a love of man

he added an affection for the flowers of the valley, the fowls of the

air, and the beasts of the field: he perceived the tie of social

sympathy which united animated with unanimated nature, and in many of

his finest poems most beautifully he has enforced it. His thoughts are

original and his style new and unborrowed: all that he has written is

distinguished by a happy carelessness, a bounding elasticity of

spirit, and a singular felicity of __EXPRESSION__, simple yet inimitable;

he is familiar yet dignified, careless, yet correct, and concise, yet

clear and full. All this and much more is embodied in the language of

humble life--a dialect reckoned barbarous by scholars, but which,

coming from the lips of inspiration, becomes classic and elevated.

 

The prose of this great poet has much of the original merit of his

verse, but it is seldom so natural and so sustained: it abounds with

fine outflashings and with a genial warmth and vigour, but it is

defaced by false ornament and by a constant anxiety to say fine and

forcible things. He seems not to know that simplicity was as rare and

as needful a beauty in prose as in verse; he covets the pauses of

Sterne and the point and antithesis of Junius, like one who believes

that to write prose well he must be ever lively, ever pointed, and

ever smart. Yet the account which he wrote of himself to Dr. Moore is

one of the most spirited and natural narratives in the language, and

composed in a style remote from the strained and groped-for witticisms

and put-on sensibilities of many of his letters:--"Simple," as John

Wilson says, "we may well call it; rich in fancy, overflowing in

feeling, and dashed off in every other paragraph with the easy

boldness of a great master."

 

 

 

 

PREFACE.

 

 

[The first edition, printed at Kilmarnock, July, 1786, by John Wilson,

bore on the title-page these simple words:--"Poems, chiefly in the

Scottish Dialect, by Robert Burns;" the following motto, marked

"Anonymous," but evidently the poet's own composition, was more

ambitious:--

 

"The simple Bard, unbroke by rules of art,

He pours the wild effusions of the heart:

And if inspired, 'tis nature's pow'rs inspire--

Hers all the melting thrill, and hers the kindling fire."]

 

The following trifles are not the production of the Poet, who, with

all the advantages of learned art, and perhaps amid the elegancies 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 impulse of the

softer passions, it was not till very lately that the applause,

perhaps the partiality, of friendship awakened his vanity so for as to

make him think anything 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

fatigue 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

Scotch 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 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 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 Scotch 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 Subscriber, 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 allowance for education and circumstances of

life; but if, after a fair, candid, and impartial criticism, he shall

stand convicted of dulness and nonsense, let him be done by as he

would in that case do by others--let him be condemned, without mercy,

in contempt and oblivion.

 

 

 

 

THE

 

POETICAL WORKS

 

OF

 

ROBERT BURNS.

 

 

I.

 

WINTER.

 

A DIRGE.

 

[This is one of the earliest of the poet's recorded compositions: it

was written before the death of his father, and is called by Gilbert

Burns, 'a juvenile production.' To walk by a river while flooded, or

through a wood on a rough winter day, and hear the storm howling among

the leafless trees, exalted the poet's thoughts. "In such a season,"

he said, "just after a train of misfortunes, I composed _Winter, a

Dirge._"]

 

 

The wintry west extends his blast,

And hail and rain does blaw;

Or the stormy north sends driving forth

The blinding sleet and snaw;

While tumbling brown, the burn comes down,

And roars frae bank to brae;

And bird and beast in covert rest,

And pass the heartless day.

 

"The sweeping blast, the sky o'ercast,"[1]

The joyless winter day

Let others fear, to me more dear

Than all the pride of May:

The tempest's howl, it soothes my soul,

My griefs it seems to join;

The leafless trees my fancy please,

Their fate resembles mine!

 

Thou Power Supreme, whose mighty scheme

These woes of mine fulfil,

Here, firm, I rest, they must be best,

Because they are Thy will!

Then all I want (O, do thou grant

This one request of mine!)

Since to enjoy Thou dost deny,

Assist me to resign!

 

FOOTNOTES:

 

[Footnote 1: Dr. Young.]

 

* * * * *

 

 

 

 

II.

 

THE

 

DEATH AND DYING WORDS

 

OF

 

POOR MAILIE,

 

THE AUTHOR'S ONLY PET YOWE.

 

AN UNCO MOURNFU' TALE.

 

[This tale is partly true; the poet's pet ewe got entangled in her

tether, and tumbled into a ditch; the face of ludicrous and awkward

sorrow with which this was related by Hughoc, the herd-boy, amused

Burns so much, who was on his way to the plough, that he immediately

composed the poem, and repeated it to his brother Gilbert when they

met in the evening; the field where the poet held the plough, and the

ditch into which poor Mailie fell, are still pointed out.]

 

 

As Mailie, an' her lambs thegither,

Were ae day nibbling on the tether,

Upon her cloot she coost a hitch,

An' owre she warsl'd in the ditch:

There, groaning, dying, she did lie,

When Hughoc[2] he cam doytin by.

Wi' glowing e'en an' lifted han's,

Poor Hughoc like a statue stan's;

He saw her days were near-hand ended,

But, waes my heart! he could na mend it!

He gaped wide but naething spak--

At length poor Mailie silence brak.

 

"O thou, whose lamentable face

Appears to mourn my woefu' case!

My dying words attentive hear,

An' bear them to my master dear.

 

"Tell him, if e'er again he keep

As muckle gear as buy a sheep,

O bid him never tie them mair

Wi' wicked strings o' hemp or hair!

But ca' them out to park or hill,

An' let them wander at their will;

So may his flock increase, and grow

To scores o' lambs, an' packs of woo'!

 

"Tell him he was a master kin'

An' ay was gude to me an' mine;

An' now my dying charge I gie him,

My helpless lambs, I trust them wi' him.

 

"O, bid him save their harmless lives

Frae dogs, and tods, an' butchers' knives!

But gie them guid cow-milk their fill,

Till they be fit to fend themsel;

An' tent them duly, e'en an' morn,

Wi' teats o' hay, an' ripps o' corn.

 

"An' may they never learn the gaets

Of ither vile, wanrestfu' pets!

To sink thro' slaps, an' reave an' steal

At stacks o' pease, or stocks o' kail.

So may they, like their great forbears,

For monie a year come thro' the sheers;

So wives will gie them bits o' bread,

An' bairns greet for them when they're dead.