These strong hymns make our souls quiver, though centuries have passed. That sort of poetry could never have sprung from the soft soil of Zealand; no, it is the fire from the Scotch furnaces that glimmers in these verses. But you shall hear something about Burns. Let me begin by telling you how I myself made this conquest. for my heart. One charming morning in May I was sitting on a plough in front of my father's farm reading a book which I just had come across, viz., Thomas Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-Worship. It was Sunday, and the bells far away called people to the church. the leaves of the book ; a sparrow was sitting, with straddling feet on the eaves over my head, peeping down ; the notes of the lark sounded as pure as silver over the dewy rye, and when I looked up from the book I had the gentle curves of the river Karup* in front of me, where the marigolds were standing so close in the supple grass† of the meadow that they formed an unbroken golden carpet. I still remember my deep enthusiasm of mind when reading the two or three wildly eloquent pages about Robert Burns. The sunshine touched The sublimity and force of the book, together with the peace and beauty of the scenery, came to me with the suddenness and ecstasy of a revelation. I felt the deep quiver that seizes the astronomer when he suddenly discovers a star of the first order, and I made the promise to myself that I would not rest until I had gained the treasures that had been put into my view. And now there came years of intense study and the work of learning a foreign language-nay, even a foreign dialect, and foreign languages never have been easy to me to learn-but in ten years of my life Burns was the personage who mostly engaged my thoughts. His poetry fascinated me, his fortune moved me by its simplicity and tragedy. It would * Karup Aa—a river in north-western Jutland, of the size of the river Ayr. It is immortalised in one of Mr Aakjar's finest poems. —{T. D.] We have preserved the quaint verbiage of the translator wherever possible. [Ed.]. be boasting to say that I perused the whole material, for almost 1100 volumes have been written on Burns, and we have 600 editions of his Works. But I thirsted to visit the country that had produced the Poet who, more than any other, had stirred the flame of poetry in my heart. It One morning, then, I found myself in the sea-fog near that land. I had passed the night wrestling with the cold and sea-sickness-the North Sea is no joke-but now the fog stood out to sea, and left only a charming blue haze through which the sunshine as through a sieve stole down on the sombre, rocky coast of that country, whose hundreds of fiords cut it out like an oak leaf. is a queer thing to see for the first time the land rise from the morning mist, about which your thoughts and dreams have played for so many happy years. The light-house of Isle of May was extinguished, the seals showed their sleek backs, sneezing in the sunshine; the morning sun put the panes afire above the rugged caves, the sea-gulls sailed majestically over the Bass Rock, and far away in the sunny haze the fairy Forth Bridge, sharply outlined against the western sky like a fantastic piece of lace in the air, a triumphal arch of steel, a daringly-wrought gateway to the Highlands behind. Do not go to Scotland on a Sunday. On that day it is apparently a joy to every orthodox Scotsman to see you hungering and enduring all the pains of thirst for the sake of your sinfulness. This does not move the preacher of repentance who has gathered a listening crowd on the pier among porters and hawsers; it does not move the young lady, who, sitting among the tram-car rails in the most crowded street of Edinburgh, strikes the keys of the organ with hands nicely gloved. When the hymn has died away, a little hunchback with eyes moistened, doubtless by the tears of repentance, steps up to the organ, puts it on a wheel-barrow, and drives it to the next corner, where the lady with the white gloves resumes her musical programme. Your corporeal wants move nobody, you see. You ask for apartments; they lead you to a chapel. You plead for some food, and they give you a hymn-book. No, never go to Edinburgh on a Sunday, but on a week-day, especially on a Saturday; then you will find a stirring crowd whose equal you must seek in Southern Europe, nay, as far as in Naples. At one o'clock a gun is fired in Edinburgh Castle-it is the holiday sign. As soon as this gun-shot has shaken the town, which is spread on the rounded rocks, the tools are flung aside, and a few moments later the railway trains with the golf players leave town for the links ; but most people stay in town and make merry. But we must onward to the Western Lowlands-to the land of Burns. The train darts along between low hill-ranges; it passes a series of rippling waters --few countries have such an abundancy of brooks as Scotland. Your train already has run over several verses of Burns. The air is tinkling with Burns's poetry, even the railway time-table breathes poetry through the names of the stations-- Douglas, Lugar, Mauchline, Tarbolton, Ayr, all of them well known from the verses of Burns. What little river is that, which I see in imagination, frolicsome as a young lass feignedly running from her lover? 0 Doon, it is you! yet as merry as that evening when you saved Tam o' Shanter from the clutches of the witch. Another river is winding its way under the drooping ashes; here and there the birk dips her branches in the water. Oh! it is the river Ayr. How often you have been before my mind's eye, like now, in the melancholy dusk of evening! And the wooded hills on my right hand? I look out of the window---gone! "Farewell the Braes of Ballochmyle. The country here is rather hilly, rushes and heather are growing undisturbed. The Scotsmen are not too clever farmers in these parts. Like our forefathers, they fear a pond as if it were Old Harry, and give up great parts of the country to toads and mushrooms; or it is perhaps the landed squire who here as in our own country— places his stony hand on the fields, swearing that nothing shall grow there. Flocks of sheep with quivering tails flying from the train; flights of wild birds that, being homeless elsewhere, have found a peaceful spot here. I know them all by the cry! They awaken a thousand reminiscences in my bosom. Dark lakes with a single cottage on the shore, rippling water, more rippling water, and then, looking to the north, I see the Highland mountains close the plain like the blue-notched blade of a sword. But where the mighty Atlantic flings her foam round naked rocks there is a town about the size of AalborgAyr it is called, like the river; it is the capital of the Land of Burns; a short trip to the south, where the ocean is seen like an endless reflection of fire along the horizon, there stands a lowly straw-thatched cottage-not much unlike a Danish smallholder's home. Stable and dwellinghouse join each other; you enter by the threshing room, then you pass the stable, and suddenly find yourself in the parlour; behind this, there is a small kitchen; here the bed is in which Robert Burns was born. It was in the midst of a wild Scotch winter, on the 25th January, 1759. While his mother was lying-in, the gable fell out, so that mother and child had to be carried through the storm in order to gain protection at a neighbour's house. Stormy was his birth, stormy was all his life. This cottage that once was one of the poorest in Scotland, is now yearly visited by some 50,000 persons, everybody paying an admission when crossing the threshold. Here you will meet rich people from all English-speaking parts of the world-bankers from London, ship-owners and merchants from Australia, scholars and lovers of literature from all Universities. American millionaires and their silkendressed ladies stand here, for the first time perhaps in their lives in a thatched cottage, looking at poor things that only are of value because Burns once possessed them. An uncut copy of Burns's first Poems was, in the year of my visit to Scotland, purchased for some £1000, and |