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borrow from foreign sources, or to imitate strains which were not produced in the land of the heather and thistle ; and of Burns in particular it can be asserted, that he never borrowed, save to mend or imitated, except to improve.

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"THE VISION" was written at Mossgiel, a place fruitful in the poetry of Burns: he regarded it as one of his happiest compositions; it has, as Currie remarks, great and various excellence. He at once compliments his own genius, and his native county. The handling is not more original than the conception: the celestial visitants of other bards find them in marble palaces, flowery fields, or in romantic glens by the side of crystal streams: the muse of the ploughman bard finds him in a humble and smoky abode; and though attired for walking on sapphire and amber floors, she enters, without hesitation, into “ the mottie misty clime," to cheer him from that despondency which dunces never feel. It was high time to interpose : weary with the labor at a farm which refused a proper return, he sat moodily by his own fireside, and as the shades of night closed in, eyed the surging smoke, and listened to the squeaking of the rats in the thatch of his cottage,

"And backward mused on wasted time"

how he had spent his youth, and posing idle strains for fools to sing.

done little, save comHad he but listened,

he thought, to good counsel, he might have ruled the

market, or presided in a banking house; but now halfmad, half-fed, and half-clad, was the whole amount. Stung by these reflections, he raised his right hand, according to the custom of Scotland, to swear by the starry sky, or some other rash oath, that he would rhyme no more, when the muse suddenly entered, to stop a vow which she knew would soon have been broken.

Painters and sculptors have exhausted their colors and their beau-ideal shapes, in attempts to embody this modest and beautiful visiter: while they catch celestial hues, and model celestial shapes, they allow the peculiar expression and sentiment to escape. Her looks are of the North she is young and lovely: her brows are wreathed with holly; and she wears a robe on which are pictured the hills and dales, and heroes and heroines, of the district over which she presides as guardian muse. seems to have been the wish of the poet to compliment the lords and ladies of Ayrshire; and to introduce them, he has burdened the muse with all his patrons and patronesses, as well as with their mansions and estates. "The robe of Coila" is a poetic map of the county, interspersed with bits of biography. But she did not come only to be looked at: she thus addresses him :

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"All hail, my own inspired bard:

In me thy native muse regard,
Nor longer mourn thy fate is hard;
Thus poorly low!

I come to give thee such reward
As we bestow.

"With future hope I oft would gaze,
Fond, on thy little early ways,
Thy rudely carolled chiming phrase
In uncouth rhymes,

Fired at the simple, artless lays

Of other times.

It

"I saw thy pulse's madd'ning play,
Wild send thee Pleasure's devious way,
Misled by Fancy's meteor ray,

By Passion driven;

But yet the light that led astray

Was light from Heaven.

"I taught thy manners-painting strains,
The loves, the ways of simple swains,
Till now o'er all my wide domains

Thy fame extends;

And some, the pride of Coila's plains,
Become thy friends."

The poet heard these words with a rapture which he sought not to dissemble; and gazed with wonder and awe on the muse, while she proceeded to tell him to choose his themes from the husbandman's cot and the shepherd's sheil, nor aspire to the moving warmth of Gray, nor the landscape glow of Thomson: fame of a humbler kind awaited him. As she said this, she placed her own wreath of hotly on his head, and vanished away in light.

Burns was not singular among the poets in desiring a more profitable calling than that of verse. Drummond thus writes of Ben Jonson : "He dissuaded me from poesie, for that she beggared him, when he might have been a rich lawyer, physician, or merchant." Ben seems to have entertained the same notion of genius, as that in after years expressed by Johnson the second: "A mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction." And Dryden, unaware of what the dramatist said, thus writes of himself:"The same parts and application which have made me a poet, might have raised me to any honors of the gown."

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THE POOR AND HONEST SODGER.

"She gaz'd-she redden'd like a rose

Syne pale like onie lily;

She sank within my arms, and cried,
Art thou my ain dear Willie ?
By Him who made yon sun and sky,
By whom true love's regarded,

I am the man; and thus may still
True lovers be rewarded."

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"I was a lad of fifteen," says Sir Walter Scott, "in 1786-7, when Burns first came to Edinburgh; but had sense and feeling enough to be much interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him... As it was, I saw him one day at the late venerable Professor Ferguson's, where there were several gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom I remember the celebrated Mr. Dugald Stewart. Of course we youngsters sat silent, looked, and listened. The only thing I remember which was remarkable in Burns's manner, was the effect produced upon him by a print of Bunbury's, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side-on the other, his widow, with a child in her These lines were written beneath,

arms.

'Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain,
Perhaps that parent wept her soldier slain-
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew,
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew,
Gave the sad presage of his future years,
The child of misery baptized in tears.'

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