WE CHAPTER IX. "I dread thee, Fate, relentless and severe, E are drawing near the close of this great poet's mortal career; and I would fain hope the details of the last chapter may have prepared the humane reader to contemplate it with sentiments of sorrow, pure comparatively, and undebased with any considerable intermixture of less genial feelings. For some years before Burns was lost to his country, it is sufficiently plain that he had been, on political grounds, an object of suspicion and distrust to a large portion of the population that had most opportunity of observing him. The mean subalterns of party had, it is very easy to suppose, delighted in decrying him on pretexts, good, bad, and indifferent, equally-to their superiors; and hence, who will not willingly believe it ?-the temporary and local prevalence of those extravagantly injurious reports, the essence of which Dr. Currie, no doubt, thought it his duty, as a biographer, to extract and circulate. The untimely death of one who, had he lived to anything like the usual term of human existence, might have done so much to increase his fame as a poet, and to purify and dignify his character as a man, was, it is too probable, hastened by his own intemperances and imprudences; but it seems to be extremely improbable, that even if his manhood had been a course of saintlike virtue in all respects, the irritable and nervous bodily constitution which he inherited from his father, shaken as it was by the toils and miseries of his ill-starred youth, could have sustained to anything like the Psalmist's "allotted span," the exhausting excitements of an intensely poetical temperament. Since the first pages of this narrative were sent to the press, I have heard from an old acquaintance of the bard, who often shared his bed with him at Mossgiel, that even at that early period, when intemperance assuredly had had nothing to do with the matter, those ominous symptoms of radical disorder in the digestive system, the "palpitation and suffocation" of which Gilbert speaks, were so regularly his nocturnal visitants, that it was his custom to have a great tub of cold water by his bed-side, into which he usually plunged more than once in the course of the night, thereby procuring instant, though but shortlived relief.1 On a frame thus originally constructed, and thus early tried with most severe afflictions, external and internal, what 1 [It would have been worth the author's while to indicate who was this informant-this "old acquaintance of the bard who often shared his bed with him at Mossgiel." We do not doubt the fact stated; Chambers also records it, while he leads his reader to understand that the cold water was thus applied to restore the tone of his nervous system, weakened by over-exercise of the softer passions. That careful annotator, and latterly biographer, of Burns was long imposed upon by fictitious stories imparted to him by John Blane, who was, in 1828, driver of a stage-coach betwixt Glasgow and South Ayrshire. The old man alleged he had been a farm-servant in the Burns family both at Lochlea and Mossgiel, and for a long time slept in the same bed with Burns in the stable-loft at Mossgiel, while he was composing the poems that were published in 1786. He stated he was about 18 years old when the poet was 26, and was the identical gaudsman who chased the mouse with murdering pettle" when Burns turned up its nest with the plough in November, 1785. When Chambers afterwards got acquainted with Mrs. Begg, the poet's sister, she cautioned him to beware of Blane's stories, for he was a leein body."] 66 must not have been, under any subsequent course of circumstances, the effect of that exquisite sensibility of mind, but for which the world would never have heard anything either of the sins, or the sorrows, or the poetry of Burns! "The fates and characters of the rhyming tribe,” thus writes the poet himself to Miss Craik in 1790, “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 set of passions than are the usual lot of man; implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, such as arranging wild flowers in fantastic nosegays, tracing the grasshopper to his haunt by his chirping song, watching the frisks of the little minnows in the sunny pool, or hunting after the intrigues of wanton butterflies-in short, send him adrift after some pursuit which shall eternally mislead him from the paths of lucre, and yet curse him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that lucre can purchase; lastly, fill up the measure of his woes by bestowing on him a spurning sense of his own dignity, and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a poet." In these few short sentences, as it appears to me, Burns has traced his own character far better than any one else has done it since. But with this lot what pleasures were not mingled? To you, Madam," he proceeds, "I need not recount the fairy pleasures the muse bestows to counterbalance this catalogue of evils. Bewitching poetry is like bewitching woman; she has in all ages been accused of misleading mankind from the counsels of wisdom and the paths of prudence, involving them in difficulties, baiting them with poverty, branding them with infamy, and plunging them in the whirling vortex of ruin: yet, where is the man but must own that all our happiness on earth is not worthy the name that even the holy hermit's solitary prospect of paradisiacal bliss is but the glitter of a northern sun, rising over a frozen region, compared with the many pleasures, the nameless raptures, that we owe to the lovely Queen of the heart of man!" "What is a poet? "asks one well qualified to answer his own question. "He is a man endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected, more than other men, by absent things, as if they were present: an ability of conjuring up in himself passions which are far indeed from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events than anything which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves.' So says one of the rare beings who have been able to sustain and enjoy, through a long term of human years, the tear and wear of sensibilities, thus quickened and refined beyond what falls to the lot of the ordinary brothers of their race-feeling more than others can dream of feeling, the joys and the sorrows that come to them as individuals Preface to the second edition of Wordsworth's Poems. --and filling up all those blanks which so largely interrupt the agitations of common bosoms, with the almost equally agitating sympathies of an imagination to which repose would be death. It is common to say of those who overindulge themselves in material stimulants, that they live fast; what wonder that the career of the poet's thickcoming fancies should, in the immense majority of cases, be rapid too? That Burns lived fast, in both senses of the phrase, we have abundant evidence from himself; and that the more earthly motion was somewhat accelerated as it approached the close, we may believe, without finding it at all necessary to mingle anger with our sorrow. "Even in his earliest poems," as Mr. Wordsworth says, in a beautiful passage of his letter to Mr. Gray, "through the veil of assumed habits and pretended qualities, enough of the real man appears to show that he was conscious of sufficient cause to dread his own passions, and to bewail his errors ! We have rejected as false sometimes in the letter, and of necessity as false in the spirit, many of the testimonies that others have borne against him ;—but, by his own hand—in words the import of which cannot be mistaken-it has been recorded that the order of his life but faintly corresponded with the clearness of his views. It is probable that he would have proved a still greater poet, if, by strength of reason, he could have controlled the propensities which his sensibility engendered; but he would have been a poet of a different class and certain it is, had that desirable restraint been early established, many peculiar beauties which enrich his verses could never have existed, and many accessary influences, which contribute greatly to their effect, would have been wanting. For instance, the momentous truth of the passage, Then gently scan your brother man, |