Nor even Sol too fiercely view
Thy bosom blushing still with dew!

May'st thou long, sweet crimson gem,
Richly deck thy native stem;
Till some ev'ning, sober, calm,
Dropping dews, and breathing balm,
While all around the woodland rings,

And every bird thy requiem sings,
Thou amid the dirgeful sound,

Shed thy dying honors round,

And resign to parent earth,

The loveliest form she e'er gave birth."

In this beautiful allegory, how the delicate analogies between a young girl and a rose-bud are seized upon, by those intuitions of the poet, which enable him to read in nature the most delicate expressions of hidden sentiment, and are woven together with the thread of associations into a master-piece of poetic fancy! And how all the evils of life which beset the path of a young girl, are likened, through the analogies which a poet sees, to the winds, the untimely blights, the reptiles and other things which destroy flowers, and all accommodated by the plastic power of genius to the personification of the young girl as a rose-bud! And with what a strong meaning do the analogies sustain the allegory to the end! Now, it was Miss Cruikshank who awakened in the soul of Burns, that inspiration which called up all the analogies of this poem. Kindling his soul into poetic ardor, his fancy filled with her youth and beauty, he associates her with the rose-bud; and

though a superficial reader may at first think it is the rose-bud giving charms to the young girl, yet it is manifest, that it is she who gives her charms to the mere sign and emblem of her youth and beauty. And whoever is peculiarly susceptible to the beauty of woman, is also peculiarly susceptible to those things in nature, which produce impressions analogous to the sentiments awakened by the beauty of woman, and which lead us to associate these sentiments with those things, and to personify them. And such was Burns. Indeed, Burns saw in nature so many poetic analogies suggestive of woman, and borrowing by association her charms, that he has uttered as a poetic conceit, the truth which I am now propounding, as a great æsthetical doctrine;

"But woman, nature's darling child,
There all her charms she does compile !"

And it was the exquisitely delicate intuition by which he saw these poetic analogies, that constituted the faculty by which he wrought the witchery of the spell, that he has thrown over the hearts of men, binding them in the blissful sympathy with the beautiful. This is the mysterious secret of his power. This, the divine rod by which he smites the stoniest hearts and makes waters of sweetness flow out. In fact, it was woman who was his inspiring muse. The first poetic impulse ever felt within him, was awakened by a young girl, his partner in the harvest field. In speaking of it, he says,

"But still the elements o' sang
In formless jumble, right an' wrang,
Wild floated in my brain;

Till on that hairst I said before,
My partner in the merry core,
She rous'd the forming strain:
I see her yet, the sonsie quean,
That lighted up my jingle,
Her witching smile, her pauky een,

That gart my heart-strings tingle."

And in a letter to George Thomson, inclosing a song for publication, he says: "I assure you that to my lovely young friend, you are indebted for many of my best songs. Do you think that the sober, ginhorse routine of existence, could inspire a man with life, and love, and joy-could fire him with enthusiasm, or melt him with pathos equal to the genius of your book? No! no! Whenever I want to be more than ordinary in song-to be in some degree equal to your diviner airs-do you imagine I fast and pray for the celestial emanation? Tout au contraire! I have a glorious recipe-the very one that, for his own use, was invented by the god of healing and poetry, when erst he piped to the flocks of Admetus. I put myself in a regimen of admiring a fine woman, and in proportion to the adorability of her charms, in proportion you are delighted with my verses. The lightning of her eye is the godhead of Parnassus, and the witchery of her smile, the divinity of Helicon." This hasty and facetious effusion

of the moment, is in reality, the revelation of the true secret of Burns's poetic power.

But let me not, amidst the variety of my proofs and illustrations, lose the thread of my theory. It is not the mere form of woman that inspires us, any more than it is the mere form of other objects which impress us with beauty. For as captivating as is the external form of woman, with all its refined and untraceable fitnesses, still how infinitely less glorious is it than the soul within, which wooes, and wins, and fills, and purifies, and hallows, and exalts the heart of man, until bound in a spell of bliss so ineffable, he feels that the winning graces which come so artlessly from the purity of the female heart, are a holy witchery bestowed by the Creator, for the very purpose of holding him fast in the ennobling thrall. But the female form itself is only the language of the soul, the medium through which it communicates its thoughts, its feelings, its emotions, its love; for every part of the form breathes forth expression. Even the foot has its expression, and its own tale of sentiment to tell. The heart is the sculptor of both the face and the form, moving and moulding it with its every emotion; and the changes that are wrought out in the ever-varying sculpture, are adapted by the Creator to express the various emotions of the heart, through all the fluctuations of sentiment and thought.

This, then, is the great truth which lies at the foundation of the theory of the beautiful: The beauty of every object in the material world is the expres

sion of some feminine sentiment. The rose has expression, the lily has expression, the violet has expression, the myrtle has expression, and so has every object in nature. They have no soul moving within Neither has the sculptured marble yet it breathes forth the beauty of

them, it is true,

a soul within it;

the Venus de Medici, and the Greek Slave.

Neither

has the lifeless corpse a soul stirring within it, yet

no one will deny that it has expression:

"Who hath bent him o'er the dead,

Ere the first day of death is fled,

Before decay's effacing fingers

Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,

And mark'd the mild angelic air,

The rapture of repose that's there,

The fix'd, yet tender traits that streak
The languor of the placid cheek,
And-but for that sad shrouded eye,

That fires not, wins not, weeps not now,
And but for that chill changeless brow,
Where cold obstruction's apathy,
Appals the gazing mourner's heart,
As if to him, it could impart

The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon:
Yes, but for these, and these alone,
Some moments, ay, one treacherous hour,
He still might doubt the tyrant's power;
So fair, so calm, so softly seal'd,

The first, last look, by death reveal'd."

There is connected with each passion, a material machinery subservient to its expression; and this machinery, even when at rest, speaks to our sympa