I do not know if passing a "writer to the sig net" be a trial of scientific merit, or a mere business of friends and interest. However it be, let me quote you my two favourite passages, which though I have repeated them ten thousand times, still they rouse my manhood and steel my resolution like inspiration. On Reason build resolve, Hear, Alfred, hero of the state, Young. Thy genius heaven's high will declare; The triumph of the truly great Is never, never to despair! Masque of Alfred. I grant you enter the lists of life, to struggle for bread, business, notice, and distinction, in common with hundreds.-But who are they? Men, like yourself, and of that aggregate body, your compeers, seven tenths of them come short of your advantages natural and accidental; while two of those that remain either neglect their parts, as flowers blooming in a desert, or misspend their strength, like a bull goring a bramble bush. But to change the theme: I am still catering for Johnson's publication; and among others, I have brushed up the following old favourite song a little, with a view to your worship. I have only altered a word here and there; but if you like the humour of it, we shall think of a stanza or two to add to it. No. XXXIV. To Mr. JAMES HAMILTON, Grocer, Glasgow. Dear sir, Ellisland, May 26, 1789. I send you by John Glover, carrier, the above account for Mr. Turnbull, as I suppose you know his address. I would fain offer, my dear sir, a word of sympathy with your misfortunes; but it is a tender string, and I know not how to touch it. It is easy to flourish a set of high-flown sentiments on the subject that would give great satisfaction to-a breast quite at ease; but as one observes, who was very seldom mistaken in the theory of life, "The heart knoweth its own sorrows, and a stranger intermeddleth not therewith." Among some distressful emergencies that I have experienced in life, I ever laid this down as my foundation of comfort-That he who has lived the life of an honest man, has by no means lived in vain! With every wish for your welfare, and future success, I am, my dear sir, Sincerely yours. Sir, No. XXXV. To WILLIAM CREECH, Esq. Ellisland, May 30, 1789. I had intended to have troubled you with a long letter, but at present the delightful sensations of an omnipotent toothach so engross all my inner man, as to put it out of my power even to write nonsense,-However, as in duty bound, I ap proach my bookseller with an offering in my hand a few poetic clinches and a song.-To expect any other offering from the rhyming tribe, would be to know them much less than you do. I do not pretend that there is much merit in these morceaux, but I have two reasons for sending them; primo, they are mostly ill-natured, so are in unison with my present feelings, while fifty troops of infernal spirits are driving post from ear to ear along my jaw-bones; and secondly, they are so short, that you cannot leave off in the middle, and so hurt my pride in the idea that you found any work of mine too heavy to get through. I have a request to beg of you, and I not only beg of you, but conjure you-by all your wishes and by all your hopes, that the muse will spare the satirie wink in the moment of your foibles; that she will warble the song of rapture round your hymeneal couch; and that she will shed on your turf the honest tear of elegiae gratitude! grant my request as speedily as possible.-Send me by the very first fly or coach for this place, three copies of the last edition of my poems; which place to my account. Now, may the good things of prose, and the good things of verse, come among thy hands until they be filled with the good things of this life! prayeth ROBERT BURNS. No. XXXVI. To Mr. ROBERT AINSLIE, My dear friend, Ellisland, June 8, 1789. I am perfectly ashamed of myself when I look at the date of your last. It is not that I forget the friend of my heart and the companion of my peregrinations; but I have been condemned to drud gery beyond sufferance, though not, thank God, beyond redemption. I have had a collection of poems by a lady put into my hands to prepare them for the press; which horrid task, with sowing my corn with my own hand, a parcel of masons, wrights, plaisterers, &c. to attend to, roaming on business through Ayrshire-all this was against me, and the very first dreadful article was of itself too much for me. 13th. I have not had a moment to spare from incessant toil since the 8th. Life, my dear sir, is a serious matter. You know by experience that a man's individual self is a good deal, but believe me, a wife and family of children, whenever you have the honour to be a husband and a father, will show you that your present most anxious hours of solicitude are spent on trifles. The welfare of those who are very dear to us, whose only support, hope, and stay we are-this, to a generous mind, is another sort of more important object of care than any concerns whatever which centre merely in the individual. On the other hand, let no young, unmarried, rakehelly dog among you, make a song of his pretended liberty and freedom from care. If the relations we stand in to king, country, kindred, and friends, be any thing but the visionary fancies of dreaming metaphysicians; if religion, virtue, magnanimity, generosity, huma nity, and justice be aught but empty sounds; then the man who may be said to love only others, for the beloved, honourable female whose tender faithful embrace endea, life, and for the helpless little innocents who are to be the men and women, the worshippers of his God, the subjects of his king, and the support, nay, the very vital existence of his country, in the ensuing age;-compare such a man with any fellow whatever, who, whether he bustle and push in business among labourers, clerks, statesmen; or whether he roar and rant, and drink and sing in taverns-a fellow over whose grave no one will breathe a single heigh-ho, except from the cobweb-tie of what is called good fellowship-who has no view nor aim but what terminates in himself-if there be any grovelling earth-born wretch of our species, a renegado to common sense, who would fain believe. that the noble creature, man, is no better than a sort of fungus, generated out of nothing, nobody knows how, and soon dissipating in nothing, nobody knows where; such a stupid beast, such a crawling reptile might balance the foregoing unexaggerated comparison, but no one else would have the patience. Forgive me, my dear sir, for this long silence. To make you amends, I shall send you soon, and, more encouraging still, without any postage, one or two rhymes of my later manufacture. Sir, No. XXXVII. To Capt. RIDDEL, Carse. Ellisland, Oct. 16, 1789. Big with the idea of this important day* at Friars Carse, I have watched the elements and skies in the full persuasion that they would announce it to the astonished world by some phenomena of terrific portent.-Yesternight, until a very late hour, did I wait with anxious horror, for the appearance of some comet firing half the sky; or aerial armies of sanguinary Scandinavians, darting athwart the sparkled heavens, rapid as the ragged lightning, and horrid as those convulsions of nature that bury nations. The elements, however, seem to take the matter very quietly; they did not even usher in this morning with triple suns and a shower of blood, symbolical of the three potent heroes, and the migh The day on which "the whistle" was contended for. |