-but something which exalts me, something which enraptures me-than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood in a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees, and raving over the plain. It is my best season for devotion: my mind is wrapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to Him, who, to use the pompous language of the Hebrew Bard, walks on the wings of the wind."-To the last, his best poetry was produced amidst scenes of solemn desolation.

CHAPTER IX.

CONTENTS.-The poet's mortal period approaches-His peculiar temperament-Symptoms of premature old age-These not diminished by narrow circumstances, by chagrin from neglect, and by the death of a Daughter—The poet misses public patronage: and even the fair fruits of his own genius-the appropriation of which is debated for the casuists who yielded to him merely the shell-His magnanimity when death is at hand; his interviews, conversations, and addresses as a dying man—Dies, 21st July 1796—Public funeral, at which many attend, and amongst the rest the future Premier of England, who had steadily refused to acknowledge the poet, living— His family munificently provided for by the public-Analysis of character-His integrity, religious state, and genius-Strictures upon him and his writings by Scott, Campbell, Byron, and others.

"I dread thee, Fate, relentless and severe,
With all a poet's, husband's, father's fear."

We are drawing near the close of this great poet's mortal career; and I would fain hope the details of the last chapter may have prepared the humane reader to contemplate it with sentiments of sorrow, pure and undebased with any considerable intermixture of less genial feelings.

For some years before Burns was lost to his country, it is sufficiently plain that he had been, on political grounds, an object of suspicion and distrust to a large portion of the population that had most opportunity of observing him. The mean subalterns of party had, it is very easy to suppose, delighted in decrying him on pretexts, good, bad, and indifferent, equally— to their superiors; and hence, who will not willingly believe it? the temporary and local prevalence of those extravagantly injurious reports, the essence of which Dr. Currie, no doubt, thought it his duty, as a biographer, to extract and circulate.

A gentleman of that county, whose name I have already more than once had occasion to refer to, has often told me, that he was seldom more grieved, than when riding into Dumfries one fine summer's evening, about this time, to attend a county ball, he saw Burns walking alone, on the shady side of the principal street of the town, while the opposite side was gay with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn together for the festivities of the night, not one of whom appeared willing to recognize him. The horseman dismounted and joined Burns, who, on his proposing to him to cross the street, said, "Nay, nay, my young friend,-that's all over now;" and quoted, after a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzel Baillie's -pathetic ballad,

"His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow,

His auld ane look'd better than mony ane's new:
But now he lets't wear ony way it will hing,
And casts himsell dowie upon the corn-bing.

"O were we young, as we ance hae been,
We sud hae been galloping doun on yon green,
And linking it ower the lilywhite lea,

And werena my heart light I wad die.”

It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on certain subjects, escape in this fashion. He, immediately after citing these verses, assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner; and taking his young friend home with him, entertained him very agreeably until the hour of the ball arrived, with a bowl of his usual potation, and Bonnie Jean's singing of some verses which he had recently composed.

The untimely death of one who, had he lived to any thing like the usual term of human existence, might have done so much to increase his fame as a poet, and to purify and dignify his character as a man, was, it is too probable, hastened by his own intemperances and imprudences: but it seems to be extremely improbable, that, even if his manhood had been a course of saintlike virtue in all respects, the irritable and nervous bodily constitution which he inherited from his father, shaken as it was by the toils and miseries of his ill-starred youth, could have sustained, to any thing like the psalmist's " allotted span," the exhausting excitements of an intensely poetical temperament. Since the first pages of this narrative were sent to the press, I have heard from an old acquaintance of the bard, who often shared his bed with him at Mossgiel, that even at that early period, when intemperance assuredly had had nothing to do with the matter, those ominous symptoms of radical disorder in the digestive system, the " palpitation and suffocation" of which Gilbert speaks, were so regularly his nocturnal visitants, that it was his custom to have a great tub of cold water by his bedside, into which he usually plunged more than once in the course of the night, thereby procuring instant, though but shortlived relief. On a frame thus originally constructed, and thus early tried with most severe afflictions, external and internal, what must not have been, under any subsequent course of circumstances, the effect of that exquisite sensibility of mind, but for which the world would never have heard any thing either of the sins, or the sorrows, or the poetry of Burns!

"The fates and characters of the rhyming tribe," (thus writes the poet himself), " often employ my thoughts when I am disposed to be melancholy. There is not, among all the martyrologies that ever were penned, so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets. In the comparative view of wretches, the criterion is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a being of our kind, give him a stronger imagination and a more delicate sensibility, which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable set of passions, than are the usual lot of man; implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, such as, arranging wild flowers in fantastical nosegays, tracing the grasshopper to his haunt by his chirping song, watching the frisks of the little minnows in the sunny pool, or hunting after the intrigues of butterflies-in short, send him adrift after some pursuit which shall eternally mislead him from the paths of lucre, and yet curse him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that lucre can purchase; lastly, fill up the measure of his woes by bestowing on him a spurning sense of his own dignity, and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a poet."

Letter to Miss Chalmers in 1793,

In these few short sentences, as it appears to me, Burns has traced his own character far better than any one else has done it since.-But with this lot what pleasures were not mingled?" To you, Madam," he proeceds, "I need not recount the fairy pleasures the muse bestows to counterbalance this catalogue of evils. Bewitching poetry is like bewitching woman; she has in all ages been accused of misleading mankind from the counsels of wisdom and the paths of prudence, involving them in difficulties, baiting them with poverty, branding them with infamy, and plunging them in the whirling vortex of ruin; yet, where is the man but must own that all our happiness on earth is not worthy the name-that even the holy hermit's solitary prospect of pardisiacal bliss is but the glitter of a northern sun, rising over a frozen region, compared with the many pleasures, the nameless raptures, that we owe to the lovely Queen of the heart of man!"

It is common to say of those who over-indulge themselves in material stimulants, that they live fast; what wonder that the career of the poet's thick-coming fancies should, in the immense majority of cases, be rapid

too?

That Burns lived fast, in both senses of the phrase, we have abundant evidence from himself; and that the more earthly motion was somewhat accelerated as it approached the close, we may believe, without finding it at all necessary to mingle anger with our sorrow. "Even in his earliest poems,' as Mr. Wordsworth says, in a beautiful passage of his letter to Mr. Gray, through the veil of assumed habits and pretended qualities, enough of the real man appears to show, that he was conscious of sufficient cause to dread his own passions, and to bewail his errors! We have rejected as false sometimes in the latter, and of necessity as false in the spirit, many of the testimonies that others have borne against him :-but, by his own handin words the import of which cannot be mistaken-it has been recorded that the order of his life but faintly corresponded with the clearness of his views. It is probable that he would have proved a still greater poet if, by strength of reason, he could have controlled the propensities which his sensibility engendered; but he would have been a poet of a different class: and certain it is, had that desirable restraint been early established, many peculiar beauties which enrich his verses could never have existed, and many accessary influences, which contribute greatly to their effect, would have been wanting. For instance, the momentous truth of the passage—

"One point must still be greatly dark,
The moving why they do it:
And just as lamely can ye mark,

How far perhaps they rue it.

Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentlier sister woman--

Though they may gang a kennin' wrang;
To step aside is human,"

could not possibly have been conveyed with such pathetic force by any poet that ever lived, speaking in his own voice; unless it were felt that, like Burns, he was a man who preached from the text of his own errors; and whose wisdom, beautiful as a flower that might have risen from seed sown from above, was in fact a scion from the root of personal suffering." In how far the "thoughtless follies" of the poet did actually hasten his end, it is needless to conjecture. They had their share, unquestionably, along with other influences which it would be inhuman to characterise as

mere follies-such, for example, as that general depression of spirits which haunted him from his youth, and, in all likelihood, sat more heavily on such a being as Burns than a man of plain common sense might guess, or even a casual expression of discouraging tendency from the persons on whose good-will all hopes of substantial advancement in the scale of worldly promotion depended, or that partial exclusion from the species of society our poet had been accustomed to adorn and delight, which, from however inadequate causes, certainly did occur during some of the latter years of his life. All such sorrows as these must have acted with twofold tyranny upon Burns; harassing, in the first place, one of the most sensitive minds that ever filled a human bosom, and, alas ! by consequence, tempting to additional excesses. How he struggled against the tide of his misery, let the following letter speak. It was written February 25, 1794, and addressed to Mr. Alexander Cunningham, an eccentric being, but generous and faithful in his friendship to Burns, and, when Burns was no more, to his family." Canst thou minister," says the poet, "to a mind diseased? Canst thou speak peace and rest to a soul tost on a sea of troubles, without one friendly star to guide her course, and dreading that the next surge may overwhelm her? Canst thou give to a frame, tremblingly alive as the tortures of suspense, the stability and hardihood of the rock that braves the blast? If thou canst not do the least of these, why would'st thou disturb me in my miseries, with thy inquiries after me? For these two months I have not been able to lift a pen. My constitution and frame were ab origine, blasted with a deep incurable taint of hypochondria, which poisons my existence. Of late a number of domestic vexations, and some pecuniary share in the ruin of these ***** times-losses which, though trifling, were yet what I could ill bear, have so irritated me, that my feelings at times could only be envied by a reprobate spirit listening to the sentence that dooms it to perdition. Are you deep in the language of consolation? I have exhausted in reflection every topic of comfort. A heart at ease would have been charmed with my sentiments and reasonings; but as to myself, I was like Judas Iscariot preaching the gospel; he might melt and mould the hearts of those around him, but his own kept its native incorrigibility. Still there are two great pillars that bear us up, amid the wreck of misfortune and misery. The ONE is composed of the different modifications of a certain noble, stubborn something in man, known by the names of courage, fortitude, magnanimity. The OTHER is made up of those feelings and sentiments, which, however the sceptic may deny, or the enthusiast disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the human soul; those senses of the mind, if I may be allowed the expression, which connect us with, and link us to those awful obscure realities-an all-powerful and equally beneficent God-and a world to come, beyond death and the grave. The first gives the nerve of combat, while a ray of hope beams on the field;-the last pours the balm of comfort into the wounds which time can never cure.

"I do not remember, my dear Cunningham, that you and I ever talked on the subject of religion at all. I know some who laugh at it, as the trick of the crafty FEW, to lead the undiscerning MANY; or at most as an uncertain obscurity, which mankind can never know any thing of, and with which they are fools if they give themselves much to do. Nor would I quarre! with a man for his irreligion, any more than I would for his want of a musical ear. I would regret that he was shut out from what, to me and to