The robin's pensive autumn cheer, The poem to a haggis so caught my own imagination, that, when a fine old Scotch farmer, hearing I was to cross the sea in 1871, wrote me to come to Scotland and be his guest, I answered: "I will come, and will you not whisper to the guid wife that I should dearly like to eat a haggis." Well, it was on the table on the day I got there, and it was duly eaten, but I have thought since that there can hardly be found a more splendid proof of the genius of Robert Burns than this which lies in his power to so glorify a haggis. Yet it was one of the elementary longings to glorify Scotland that even so deplorable a dish should be thought worthy to be set before a king, as the compound with that name, a haggis. So it is always. He is sure to be at his best when he touches Scotland and sings to us, as he talked to his children, in guid braid Scotch: "The wee bit ingle blinkin' bonnily" in the "Cotter's Saturday Night "; Hallowe'en, with its eternal charm of laughter, pranks and plays in the sheen of the pungent peat fire, and with the great Mother Nature clasping all things in the dark world to her breast; and Tam O'Shanter; "When Chapman billies leave the street And drouthy neebors meet," etc. It is the grand secret of his genius and its key. He loved Scotland with his whole heart, and thought her peerless fair; loved the life from which he sprang, so strong, and tender, and true at its best; and loved the poor in their poverty deeper even than his own. The gowan on the brae he loved, and the heather on the moor, the wild things that run and fly, and the very beggars at their revels. He held them all in his great and most hospitable heart; yes, and the noblemen with them, who were noble indeed; and the gentlemen, who were gentle indeed; and the men of my calling who were worthy to wear the sacred robes. He honored them all, cast over them all the mantle of his genius, and made them immortal for all time. Let me touch now the life Robert Burns has left with its lessons for us all, and see, as we must, how it was blended of the noble and the base, the ruined and the risen, the life which could never come to anything but sorrow and shame, and that which will reach up through the ages always toward the noblest and the best. And of the ruined life, first I would say this for love's sake, that, hard on him, and bitter as the circumstances were, there were circumstances, as I would love to believe, stronger than these in the man that would have saved him from the sin and shame if he had used them as he might; but he let his will run to willfulness as we may let a fair garden run to weeds. He was the man who could have said "No" to every devil that tempted him; but the nobler heart in him called, and he refused; stretched out her hands and he would not hearken; and then the time came, as he tells us so truly, when she wept at his calamity and could help him no more, when the need was sorest. Robert Burns says to us, out of it all, he could have died with "honor, love, obedience, troops of friends," and with the blessed sun shining on his face lighted with the light that is not of the sun; but he himself made the bed that was so desolate, on which he went to sleep. Robert Burns, at his best, never tries to lay his sin and shame to the circumstances that were so hard on him, but is it wrong for me to say what he would not try to say, that this was a battle in which we can greatly pity if we cannot quite vindicate the vanquished man? I have done that as I touched the life he lived; you have seen what a wretched lot it was he was born to and what temptation there was to rush out of it into the fool's paradise of strong drink. But there is another thing one has to notice, and that is, there was a good deal more strictness than could be good for such a boy and young man as Burns was, in his home. There never was a kinder father, after his own fashion, than William Burns, but he was a natural born Deacon, very grave and a little gloomy, and he wanted his boys to be just like himself, sort of infant Deacons in good standing, as soon as they began to run. It seemed all wrong that they should have much pleasure, because he never wanted much himself. And so that is to be added to the sum. Gilbert Burns could stand it; Robert could not, or would not, and so he crept away, as such boys will, to where pleasure was going on, and got it without the guardianship of his home, the approval of his father, and the sweet smile of his mother upon him, and then the boy felt guilty, no doubt, in doing what he knew his father would disapprove of, though it was not wrong in itself, as yet, and this led him, at last, entirely wrong. That was the way and that is the way now, with some of the best fathers to be found, in their own way of being good. Yet I know not, as I speak to you, that we can spare anything out of Burns but this sin and shame. The great heart got such mighty things out of his death-grip with poverty, for all poor men and women to take to theirs - he sang such songs of the worth of the poorest if they be but honest and true, that it is to me like our grand Declaration, set to a music which makes all poor men who hear and feel it hold up their heads and step out with a surer tread in the upward march of humanity. But far above all that is sinful and shameful in Robert Burns, there shines a genius that is becoming finer and purer to every new generation. And so I will presume to question the canon in his case of the greatest of all his brothers, how "The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones," because it is the good of Burns which lives now, and the bad is dying from the feet upwards, a line at a time. I remember things I read as a boy which I find no more in the new editions of his poems; and there were other things, dead by that time, he had written and buried in level graves. For this is the truth about Burns,- that whatever comes out of his pure genius and manhood, as he would stand transfigured, touched by the anguish of the divine fire, this is ours and always will be, while the baser things are turning to dust and ashes. That great altar-piece, "The Cotter's Saturday Night," is a picture such as Shakespeare never dreamed,- of lifting a poor, mean home into a light sweeter than ever decked a palace. And so I might touch, one by one, these perfect flowers of genius which stand so thick and flame so sweetly in this rustic peasant's garden, but you should know them all as well as I do. How fresh they are, as bluebells pearled with dew, and bright and breezy, like the shaggy woods of Bonnie Scotland in a fresh June wind. How strong they are, also, wrestling with you and mastering you so that we weep where Burns wept, and are glad in |