I've been at drucken1 writers' feasts, I've even join'd the honour'd jorum But wi' a lord!-stand out, my shin: Up higher yet, my bonnet ! But, oh! for Hogarth's magic power! To meet good Stewart little pain is, Thinks I, they are but men ! But Burns, my lord-guid God! I doited!" I sidling shelter'd in a nook, Like some portentous omen; I marked nought uncommon. I watch'd the symptoms o' the great, ADDRESS TO EDINBURGH. WRITING to his friend, William Chalmers, the poet says:-"I enclose you two poems, which I have carded and spun since I passed Glenbuck. Fair Burnet' is the heavenly Miss Burnet, daughter of Lord Monboddo, at whose house I have had the honour to be more than once. There has not been anything nearly like her in all the combinations of beauty, grace, and goodness the great Creator has formed, since Milton's Eve on the first day of her existence!" EDINA! Scotia's darling seat! All hail thy palaces and towers, Here wealth still swells the golden tide, Thy sons, Edina ! social, kind, With open arms the stranger hail ; Or modest Merit's silent claim; Thy daughters bright thy walks adorn, And own His work indeed divine. There, watching high the least alarms, Thy rough, rude fortress gleams afar; And mark'd with many a seamy scar: With awe-struck thought, and pitying tears, Famed heroes! had their royal home: Haply, my sires have left their shed, All hail thy palaces and towers, THE POET'S WELCOME TO HIS ILLEGITIMATE CHILD.* We cannot take this effusion as giving a true index of the poet's feelings in the circumstances in question. Lockhart says:-"To wave ('in his own language') the quantum of the sin,' he who, two years afterwards, wrote the 'Cotter's Saturday Night' had not, we may be sure, hardened his heart to the thought of bringing additional sorrow and unexpected shame to the fireside of a widowed mother. But his false pride recoiled from letting his jovial associates guess how little he was able to drown the whispers of the still small voice;' and the fermenting bitterness of a mind ill at ease within itself escaped, (as may be too often traced in the history of satirists,) in the shape of angry sarcasms against others, who, whatever their private errors might be, had at least done him no wrong. It is impossible not to smile at one item of consolation which Burns proposes to himself on this occasion:- The mair they talk, I'm kenn'd the better; This is indeed a singular manifestation of 'the last infirmity of noble minds.”” If ought of thee, or of thy mammy, 1 Misfortune. The subject of these verses was the poet's illegitimate daughter whom, in "The Inventory," he styles his "Sonsie, smirking, dear-bought Bess." She grew up to womanhood, was married, and had a family. Her death is thus announced in the Scots Magazine, December 8, 1817:-"Died Elizabeth Burns, wife of Mr. John Bishop, overseer at Polkemmet, near Whitburn. She was the daughter of the celebrated Robert Burns, and the subject of some of his most beautiful lines. Shall ever danton me, or awe me, My sweet wee lady, Or if I blush when thou shalt ca' me Tit-ta or daddy. Wee image of my bonny Betty, As a' the priests had seen me get thee What though they ca' me fornicator, An auld wife's tongue's a feckless3 matter Sweet fruit o' mony a merry dint, My funny toil is now a' tint, Sin' thou came to the warld asklent,5 Which fools may scoff at ; And if thou be what I wad hae thee, If thou be spared: Through a' thy childish years I'll ee thee, Guid grant that thou may aye inherit Yet deviating, own I must, But kind still, I mind still TO MISS LOGAN, with beattie's poems as a new-year's gift, JAN. 1, 1787. MISS SUSAN LOGAN was the sister of the Major Logan to whom Burns wrote a rhymed epistle. AGAIN the silent wheels of time Their annual round have driven, And you, though scarce in maiden prime, No gifts have I from Indian coasts I send you more than India boasts, Our sex with guile and faithless love But may, dear maid, each lover prove VERSES "I INTENDED TO BE WRITTEN BELOW A NOBLE EARL'S PICTURE. "THE enclosed stanzas," said the poet, in a letter to the Earl of Glencairn, " tended to write below a picture or profile of your lordship, could I have been happy as to procure one with anything of a likeness." WHOSE is that noble, dauntless brow? And whose that eye of fire? And whose that generous princely mien Stranger, to justly show that brow, Would take His hand, whose vernal tints Bright as a cloudless summer sun, Among the illustrious Scottish sons 1 Sky. |