row, the broomy or the heathery braes,—the holms by the river's side, the forest where the woodman's ringing axe no more disturbs the cushat,-the deep dell where all day long sits solitary plaided boy or girl, watching the kine or the sheep,-the moorland hut, without any garden,-the lowland cottage, whose garden glows a very orchard, even now crimsoned with pear-blossoms most beautiful to behold,-the sylvan homestead, sending its reek aloft over the huge sycamore that blackens on the hill-side,-the strawroofed village, gathering with small bright crofts its many white gable-ends round and about the modest manse, and the kirk-spire covered with the pine-tree that shadows its horologe,-the small, sweet, slated, rural town, low as Peebles, or high as Selkirk, by the clear flowings of Tweed or Ettrick, rivers whom Maga loves, -there, there, and in such sacred scenes, resides, and will for ever reside, the immortal genius of Burns! This is in good truth "the consecration and the poet's dream." Oh, that he, the prevailing Poet, could have seen this light breaking in upon the darkness that did too long and too deeply overshadow his living lot! Some glorious glimpses of it his prophetic soul did see,-witness "The Vision," or that somewhat humbler but yet high strain, in which, bethinking him of the undefined aspirations of his boyish genius that had bestirred itself in the darkness, as if the touch of an angel's hand were to awaken a sleeper in his cell, he said to himself

"Even then a wish, I mind its power,

A wish that to my latest hour,

Shall strongly heave my breast,

That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake,
Some useful plan or book could make,

Or sing a sang at least!"

Such hopes were with him in his "bright and shining youth," surrounded, as it was, with toil and trouble, that could not bend down the brow of Burns from its natural upward inclination to the sky; and such hopes, let us doubt it not, were also with him in his dark and faded prime, when life's lamp burned low indeed, and he was willing at last, early as it was, to shut his eyes on this dearly beloved but sorely distracting world.

With what strong and steady enthusiasm is the Anniversary of Burns's birth-day celebrated, not only all over his own native land, but in every country to which her adventurous spirit has carried her sons! On such occasions, nationality is a virtue. For what else is the "memory of Burns," but the memory of all that dignifies and adorns the region that gave him birth? Not till that bright and beautiful region is shorn of all its beams-its honesty,

its independence, its moral worth, its genius, and its piety, will the name of Burns

"Die on her ear, a faint, unheeded sound."

To him the Genius of Scotland points in triumph, as the glorious representative of her people. And were he not, in all the power of his genius, truly so, how could his poetry have, as we know it has, an immortal life in the hearts of young and old, whether sitting at gloaming by the ingle-side, or on the stone seat in the open air, as the sun is going down, or walking among the summer mists on the mountain, or the blinding winter snows?

In the life of the poor there is an unchanging and a preserving spirit. The great elementary feelings of human nature there disdain fluctuating fashions; pain and pleasure are alike permanent in their outward shows, as in their inward emotions; there the language of passion never grows obsolete; and at the same passage you hear the child sobbing at the knee of her grandame, whose old eyes are somewhat dimmer than usual, with a haze that seems almost to be of tears. Therefore the poetry of Burns will continue to charm, as long as Nith flows-Criffel is green, and the bonny blue of the sky of Scotland meets with that in the eyes of her maidens, as they walk up and down her many hundred hillssilent or singing-to kirk or market.

Of one so dear to Scotland-as a poet and a man,-we, of course, have many biographies. There is not one of them without much merit, and some are almost all that could be desired. Yet, perhaps, one was wanted, that should, in moderate bulk, contain not only a lucid narrative of the Life of Burns, so full of most interesting incidents, but criticisms worthy of his poetry; and, above all, a fair, candid, impartial, and manly statement of his admitted frailties, which is all that is needed for the vindication of his character. Within these last ten years that character has been placed permanently in its true light. It has been regarded, not only with a truly philosophical, but with a truly religious spirit, in connexion with the causes that acted upon it, from the earliest to the latest years of this wonderful being, causes inherent in his condition. Thus all idly babbling tongues have been put to silence. The many calumnies of the mean-spirited and malignant, who were under a natural incapacity of understanding the character of such a man as Burns, and almost under a natural necessity of hating or disliking him, are all sinking, or have already sunk, into oblivion; blame falls now only where blame was due, and even there it falls in pity rather than in anger; it is felt now to be no part of Christian charity to emblazon the errors of our brother, —

for no better reason, than because that brother was one of the most highly gifted among the children of men. It will not now be endured, that any man, however pure his own practice, shall unmercifully denounce the few vices of a character redeemed by so many virtues; it is universally acknowledged now, that "if old judgments keep their sacred course," the life and the death of each one among us, who has been as a light and a glory among the nations, will be regarded by the wise and good in the blended light of admiration and forgiveness,-and that Burns, in his grave, may well abide the sentence of such a solemn tribunal. Nor "breathes there the man with soul so dead," as to lift up an often-handled and sore-soiled "Burns's Poems" from the side of the "Big Ha' Bible, ance his father's pride," from the small "window-sole" of the peasant's hut, without having upon his lips the spirit breathing through the beautiful lines of Wordsworth,-high-souled champion of the character of his great dead compeer, and who, with a spirit different, but divine, has bound men's spirits in love to the beauty that is in the green earth and the blue sky, and the cottage-homes, whose spiral smoke seems to blend them together in the charm of a kindred being.

"Blessings be with them, and eternal praise,

The poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth, and pure delight, by heavenly lays."

The clouds, that too long obscured the personal character of Burns-for his genius has always burned bright-have been, after all, blown away chiefly by the breath of the people of Scotland. Their gratitude would not suffer such obscuration, nor would their justice. But the feelings of the whole people have been nobly expressed by many of the first men of the land. All her best poets have triumphantly spoken in his vindication, and Mr Lockhart has well said, "Burns has been appreciated duly, and he has had the fortune to be praised eloquently, by almost every poet who has come after him. To accumulate all that has been said of him, even by men like himself, of the first order, would fill a volume— and a noble monument, no question, that volume would be-the noblest, except what he has left us in his own immortal verses, which were some dross removed, and the rest arranged in a chronological order-would, I believe, form, to the intelligent, a more perfect and vivid history of his life than will ever be composed out of all the materials in the world besides."

It has been stupidly and basely said by the paltry in general, that Burns, while in Edinburgh, was fond of low life, and that he loved

always to be what is elegantly called "the cock of the company. From the terms in which we have heard and read this charge conveyed, one might have imagined that Burns got drunk with Caddies and Creel-carriers, Tavern-waiters, Candle-snuffers, Tenthrate Orchestra Fiddlers, the lowest Class of Bagmen, discharged Advocates' Clerks, persons pretending to have been Pursers in the Navy, forenoon frequenters of Billiard-rooms, and Bill-stickers retired from the duties of public life. Now, all this is a mere lie. Burns, before his visit to Edinburgh, had at all times and places been in the habit of associating with the best men of his order— the best in everything, in station, in manners, in moral and intellectual character. Such men as William Tell and Hofer, for example, associated with in Switzerland and the Tyrol. Even the persons he got unfortunately too well acquainted with, (but whose company he soon shook off,) at Irvine and Kirk-Oswald-smugglers and their adherents, were, though a lawless and dangerous set, men of spunk, and spirit, and power, both of mind and body; nor was there anything the least degrading in an ardent, impassioned, and imaginative youth becoming for a time too much attached to such daring and adventurous, and even interesting characters. They had all a fine strong poetical smell of the sea, mingled to precisely the proper pitch with that of Bourdeaux brandy. As a poet, Burns must have been much the better of such temporary associates; as a man, let us hope, notwithstanding Gilbert's fears, not greatly the worse. The passions that boiled in his blood would have overflowed his life, often to disturb and destroy him, had there never been an Irvine and its steeple. But Burns's friends, up to the time he visited Edinburgh, had been chiefly his admirable brother, a few of the ministers round about, farmers, ploughmen, and farm-servants, and workers in the winds of heaven blowing over moors and mosses, corn-fields, and meadows beautiful as the very blue skies their blessed selves,-and if you call that low company, you had better fling your copy of Burns, Cotter's Saturday Night, Mary in Heaven, and all, into the fire. He, the noblest peasant that ever trode the greensward of Scotland, sought the society of other peasants, whose nature was like his own; and then, were the silken-snooded maidens whom he wooed on learig, and 'mang the rigs o' barley, were they, who inspired at once his love and his genius, his passion and his poetry, till the whole land of Coila overflowed with his immortal song, so that now to the proud native's ear every stream murmurs a music not its own, but given it by sweet Robin's lays, and the lark, more lyrical than ever, seems singing his songs at the gates of heaven, for the shepherd, as

through his half-closed hand he eyes the musical mote in the sunshine, remembers him who

66 Sung her new-waken'd by the daisy's side,"

were they, the virgin daughters of Scotia, we demand of you on peril of your life, low company? Was Mary Morrison, with whom he lived one hour of parting love" on the banks of the Ayr, and then as that last dear dim delicious hour of sinless passion was over, put into her hand, or her bosom, both so often pressed by him who hoped on her return from the far-off Highlands, in the transport of enamoured boyhood, to become her husband,-put into her bosom-a Bible, with his own name inscribed, and a holy text, silently swearing her soul to truth, beneath the all-seeing eye of Heaven-was she, whose beauty and whose innocence Burns saw never more on earth, but whom haply he has now seen again in heaven, was Mary Morrison, a simple name indeed, but a name sacred for ever and ever over all the hills and vales of happy Scotland -was she, sir, or madam, dressed as you may be in silks and satins, broad-cloth and cassimere,-low company? Was Jean Armourthe daughter it is true of a stone-mason-she to whom the soul of Burns clave with a lover's wild passion, a husband's deep affection, and whose sweet breath came to him at gloaming on the wind of the west, so that that was to him the dearest airt till his heart was stifled for ever-she who trained up his children in the way that they should go, and they have not in distant regions departed from it, and even now in her grey hairs, proudly, and better than proudly, remembers her of all the virtues and all the kindnesses of her beloved husband, illustrious now and for evermore while time shall endure is Mrs Robert Burns, formerly Miss Jean Armourlow company? If they be so-one and all-then let Scotland hang down her head and veil her eyes -- ashamed to look either at flower

or star.

How was it possible that a man, and that man Robert Burns, who had lived thus, could have been fond of low company in Edinburgh or elsewhere? Impossible! God and nature forbade. But his great heart had a wide and a close grasp. Poor men love poor men; for the bonds that link them together are the bonds of a common humanity, strong as steel, and that will bend but never break, for though both ends are struck into the earth, the crown of the arch is towards heaven. Therefore, Burns ceased not to shake the hand of any honest man-nor to sit at his board any more than you, who we trust are a Christian, fear to sit in the same pew with a low-born and low-bred fellow-creature, in church, singing from one Psalm-book, reading the text from one Bible.