the first of all our song-writers; for we know not where to find one worthy of being second to him. It is on his songs, as we believe, that Burns's chief influence as an author will ultimately be found to depend; nor, if our Fletcher's aphorism is true, shall we account this a small influence. "Let me make the songs of a people," said he, "and you shall make its laws." Surely, if ever any poet might have equalled himself with legislators on this ground, it was Burns. His songs are already part of the mother tongue, not of Scotland only, but of Britain, and of the millions that in all ends of the earth speak a British language. In hut and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in many-coloured joy and woe of existence, the name, the voice of that joy and that woe is the name and voice which Burns has given them. Strictly speaking, perhaps no British man has so deeply affected the thoughts and feelings of so many men as this solitary and altogether private individual, with means apparently the humblest. In another point of view, moreover, we incline to think that Burns's influence may have been considerable; we mean, as exerted specially on the literature of his country, at least on the literature of Scotland. Among the great changes which British, particularly Scottish literature, has undergone since that period, one of the greatest will be found to consist in its remarkable increase of nationality. Even the English writers, most popular in Burns's time, were little distinguished for their literary patriotism, in this its best sense. A certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had, in good measure, taken place of the old insular home feeling; literature was, as it were, without any local environment-was not nourished by the affections which spring from a native soil. Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write almost as if in vacuo; the thing written bears no mark of place; it is not written so much for Englishmen as for men; or rather, which is the inevitable result of this, for certain generalisations which philosophy termed men. Goldsmith is an exception; not so Johnson; the scene of his Rambler is little more English than that of his "Rasselas." gall enough in both cases, seemed to have blotted out the intellect of the country; however, it was only obscured, not obliterated. Lord Kames made nearly the first attempt at writing English; and ere long, Hume, Robertson, Smith, and a whole host of followers, attracted hither the eyes of all Europe. And yet in this brilliant resuscitation of our "fervid genius" there was nothing truly Scottish, nothing indigenous, except, perhaps, the natural impetuosity of intellect, which we sometimes claim and are sometimes upbraided with as a characteristic of our nation. It is curious to remark that Scotland, so full of writers, had no Scottish culture, nor indeed any English; our culture was almost exclusively French. It was by studying Racine and Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau, that Kames had trained himself to be a critic and philosopher; it was the light of Montesquieu and Mably that guided Robertson in his political speculations; Quesney's lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam Smith. Hume was too rich a man to borrow, and perhaps he reacted on the French more than he was acted on by them; but neither had he aught to do with Scotland; Edinburgh, equally with La Flèche, was but the lodging and laboratory in which he not so much morally lived as metaphysically investigated. Never, perhaps, was there a class of writers so clear and wellordered, yet so totally destitute, to all appear ance, of any patriotic affection; nay, of any human affection whatever. The French wits of the period were as unpatriotic, but their general deficiency in moral principle, not to say their avowed sensuality and unbelief in all virtue, strictly so called, render this accountable enough. We hope there is a patriotism founded on something better than prejudice; that our country may be dear to us without injury to our philo. sophy; that in loving and justly prizing all other lands we may prize justly and yet love before all others, our own stern motherland, and the vener able structure of social and moral life which mind has through long ages been building up for us there. Surely there is nourishment for the better part of man's heart in all this; surely the roots that have fixed themselves in the very core of man's being may be so cultivated as to grow up, not into briers, but into roses in the field of his life! Our Scottish sages have no such propensities; the field of their life shows neither briers nor roses, but only a flat, continuous thrashing. floor for logic, whereon all questions, from the "Doctrine of Rent" to the "Natural History of Religion," are thrashed and sifted with the same mechanical impartiality! But if such was in some degree the case with England, it was in the highest degree the case with Scotland. In fact, our Scottish literature had at that period a very singular aspect; unexampled, so far as we know, except perhaps at Geneva, where the same state of matters appears still to continue. For a long period after Scotland became British we had no literature; at the date when Addison and Steele were writing their With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our Spectators, our good John Boston was writing, literature, it cannot be denied that much of this with the noblest intent, but alike in defiance of evil is past or rapidly passing away; our chief grammar and philosophy, his "Fourfold State literary men, whatever other faults they may of Man." Then came the schisms in our national have, no longer live among us like a French Church, and the fiercer schisms in our body colony, or some knot of Propaganda missionaries; politic; theologic ink and Jacobite blood, with | but like natural-born subjects of the soil, par beneath his feet; and he looked down alike on noble and slave, on prince and beggar, and all that wore the stamp of man, with clear recog nition, with brotherly affection, with sympathy, with pity. Nay, we question whether for his culture as a poet poverty and much suffering for a season were not absolutely advantageous. Great men, in looking back over their lives, have testified to that effect. "I would not for much," says Jean Paul, "that I had been born richer." And yet Paul's birth, was poor enough; for, in another place, he adds: "The prisoner's allowance is bread and water; and I had often only the latter." But the gold that is refined in the hottest furnace comes out the purest; or, as he has himself expressed it, "the canarybird sings sweeter the longer it has been trained in a darkened cage." taking and sympathising in all our attachments, humours, and habits. Our literature no longer grows in water but in mould, and with the true racy virtues of the soil and climate. How much of this change may be due to Burns, or to any other individual, it might be difficult to estimate. Direct literary imitation of Burns was not to be looked for. But his example, in the fearless adoption of domestic subjects, could not but operate from afar; and certainly in no heart did the love of country ever burn with a warmer glow than in that of Burns: "a tide of Scottish prejudice," as he modestly calls this deep and generous feeling, "had been poured along his veins; and he felt that it would boil there till the flocd-gates shut in eternal rest." It seemed to him as if he could do so little for his country, and yet would so gladly have done all. One small province stood open for him-that of Scottish song; and how eagerly he entered on it, how devotedly he laboured there! In his toil-industry which all true feeling sanctions, nay some journeyings, this object never quits him; it is the little happy valley of his careworn heart. In the gloom of his own affliction, he eagerly searches after some lonely brother of the muse, and rejoices to snatch one other name from the oblivion that was covering it. These were early feelings, and they abode with him to the end: "A wish (I mind its power), The rough bur thistle spreading wide I turned my weeding clips aside And spared the symbol dear." He loved poetry warmly, and in his heart; could he but have loved it purely, and with his whole undivided heart, it had been well. For poetry, as Burns could have followed it, is but another form of wisdom, of religion; is itself wisdom and religion. But this also was denied him. His poetry is a stray vagrant gleam, which will not be extinguished within him, yet rises not to be the true light of his path, but is often a wildfire that misleads him. It was not necessary for Burns to be rich, to be, or to seem, "independent;" but it was necessary for him to be at one with his own heart; to place what was highest in his nature highest also in his life; "to seek within himself for that consistency and sequence, which external events would for ever refuse him." He was born a poet; . poetry was the celestial element of his being, and should have been the soul of his whole endeavours. Lifted into that serene ether, whither he had wings given him to mount, he would have needed no other elevation: poverty, neglect, and all evil, save the desecration of himself and his art, were a small matter to him; the pride and the passions of the world lay far A man like Burns might have divided his hours between poetry and virtuous industry; prescribes, and which has a beauty, for that cause, beyond the pomp of thrones: but to divide his hours between poetry and rich men's banquets was an ill-starred and inauspicious attempt. How could he be at ease at such banquets? What had he to do there, mingling his music with the coarse roar of altogether earthly voices; brightening the thick smoke of intoxication with fire lent him from heaven? Was it his aim to enjoy life? To-morrow he must go drudge as an exciseman! We wonder not that Burns became moody, indignant, and at times an offender against certain rules of society; but rather that he did not grow utterly frantic, and run amuck against them all. How could a man, so falsely placed, by his own or others' fault, ever know contentment or peaceable diligence for an hour? What he did, under such perverse guidance, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with astonishment at the natural strength and worth of his character. Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness; but not in others; only in himself; least of all in simple increase of wealth and worldly "respectability." We hope we have now heard enough about the efficacy of wealth for poetry, and to make poets happy. Nay, have we not seen another instance of it in these very days? Byron, a man of an endowment considerably less ethereal than that of Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer: the highest worldly honours, the fairest worldly career, are his by inheritance; the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another province, by his own hand. And what does all this avail him? Is he happy, is he good, is he true? Alas, he has a poet's soul, and strives towards the Infinite and the Eternal; and soon feels that all this is but mounting to the house-top to reach the stars! Like Burns, he is only a proud man; might, like him, have "purchased a pocket-copy of Milton to study the character of Satan;" for Satan also is Byron's grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, and the model apparently of his conduct. As in Burns's case too, the celestial element will not mingle with the clay of earth; both poet and man of the world he must not be; vulgar Ambition will not live kindly with poetic Adoration; he cannot serve God and Mammon. Byron, like Burns, is not happy; nay, he is the most wretched of all men. His life is falsely arranged: the fire that is in him is not a strong, still, central fire, warming into beauty the products of a world; but it is the mad fire of a volcano; and now we look sadly into the ashes of a crater, which ere long will fill itself with snow!* Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries to their generation, to teach it a higher doctrine, a purer truth: they had a message to deliver, which left them no rest till it was accomplished; in dim throes of pain, this divine behest lay smouldering within them, for they knew not what it meant, and felt it only in mysterious anticipation, and they had to die without articulately uttering it. They are in the camp of the unconverted; yet not as high messengers of rigorous though benignant truth, but as soft flattering singers, and in pleasant fellowship, will they live there: they are first adulated, then persecuted; they accomplish little for others; they find no peace for themselves, but only death and the peace of the grave. We confess, it is not without a certain mournful awe that we view the fate of these noble souls, so richly gifted, yet ruined to so little purpose with all their gifts. It seems to us there is a stern moral taught in this piece of history-twice told us in our own time! Surely to men of like genius, if there be any such, it carries with it a lesson of deep impressive significance. Surely it would become such a man, furnished for the highest of all enterprises, that of being the poet of his age, to consider well what it is that he attempts, and in what spirit he attempts it. For the words of Milton are true in all times, and were never truer than in this: "He who would write heroic poems must make his whole life a heroic poem.' If he cannot first so make his life, then let him hasten from this arena; for neither its lofty glories, nor its fearful perils, are fit for him. Let him dwindle into a modish balladmonger; let him worship and be-sing the idols of the time, and the time will not fail to reward him. If, indeed, he can endure to live in that capacity! Byron and Burns could not live as idol-priests, but the fire of their own hearts consumed them; and better it was for them that they could not. For it is not in the favour of the great, or the small, but in a life of truth, and in the inexpugnable citadel of his own soul, that a Byron's or a Burns's strength must lie. Let the great stand aloof from him, or *For Macaulay's Essay on Byron, see p. 443. know how to reverence him. Beautiful is the union of wealth with favour and furtherance for literature; like the costliest flower-jar enclosing the loveliest amaranth. Yet let not the relation be mistaken. A true poet is not one whom they can hire by money or flattery to be a minister of their pleasures, their writer of occasional verses, their purveyor of table-wit; he cannot be their menial, he cannot even be their partisan. At the peril of both parties, let no such union be attempted! Will a courser of the sun work softly in the harness of a dray-horse? His hoofs are of fire, and his path is through the heavens, bringing light to all lands; will he lumber on mud highways, dragging ale for earthly appetites, from door to door? But we must stop short in these considerations, which would lead us to boundless lengths. We had something to say on the public moral character of Burns; but this also we must forbear. We are far from regarding him as guilty before the world, as guiltier than the average; nay, from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten thousand. Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that where the plebiscita of common civic reputations are pronounced, he has seemed to us even there less worthy of blame than of pity and wonder. But the world is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men; unjust on many grounds, of which this one may be stated as the substance: It decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes; and not positively but negatively, less on what is done right, than on what is or is not done wrong. Not the few inches of deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. This orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay, the circle of a gin-horse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured: and it is assumed that the diameter of the gin-horse, and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when compared with them! Here lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens to with approval. Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is blame-worthy; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful: but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs. With our readers in general, with men of right feeling anywhere, we are not required to plead for Burns. In pitying admiration, he lies enshrined in all our hearts, in a far nobler mausoleum than that one of marble; neither will his works, even as they are, pass away from the memory of men. While the Shakespeares and Miltons roll on like mighty rivers through the country of thought, bearing fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves; this little Valclusa fountain will also arrest our eye: for this also is of Nature's own and most cunning workmanship, bursts from the depths of the earth, with a full gushing current, into the light of day; and often will the traveller turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and muse among its rocks and pines! ON A PROPER CHOICE OF READING. With these illusafter solid, nutritive food? trations I will recommend Johnson's advice to you. Another thing, and only one other will I say. All books are properly the record of the history of past men. What thoughts past men had in them; what actions past men did; the summary of all books whatsoever lies there. It is on this ground that the class of books specifically named history can be safely recommended as the basis of all study of books; the preliminary of all right and full understanding of anything we can expect to find in books. Past history, and especially the past history of one's own native country: everybody may be advised to begin with that. Let him study that faithfully, branch out from it; he has a broad beaten highway from which all the country is more or less visible; there travelling, let him choose where he will dwell. As to the books which you, whom I know so little of, should read, there is hardly anything definite that can be said. For one thing, you may be strenuously advised to keep reading. Any good book, any book that is wiser than your-innumerable inquiries, with due indications, will self, will teach you something-a great many things, indirectly and directly, if your mind be open to learn. This old counsel of Johnson's is also good and universally applicable: Read the book you do honestly feel a wish and a curiosity to read. The very wish and curiosity indicates that you then and there are the person likely to get good of it. "Our wishes are presentiments of our capabilities:" that is a noble saying, of deep encouragement to all true men; applicable to our wishes and efforts in regard as to other things. Among all the objects that look wonderful or beautiful to you, follow with fresh hope the one which looks wonderfullest, beautifullest. You will gradually by various trials (which trials see that you make honest, manful ones, not silly, short, fitful ones) discover what is for you the wonderfullest, beautifullest; what is your true element and province, and be able to abide by that. True desire, the monition of nature, is much to be attended to. But here also you are to discriminate carefully between true desire and false. The medical men tell us we should eat what we truly have an appetite for; but what we only falsely have an appetite for, we should resolutely avoid. It is very true. And flimsy, "desultory" readers, who fly from foolish book to foolish book, and get good of none, and mischief of all-are not these as foolish, unhealthy eaters, who mistake their superficial, false desire after spiceries and confectioneries for the real appetite, of which even they are not destitute, though it lies far deeper, far quieter, Neither let mistakes nor wrong directions, of which every man in his studies and elsewhere There is falls into many, discourage you. precious instruction to be got by finding that we were wrong. Let a man try faithfully, manfully, to be right; he will grow daily more and It is at bottom the condition on which more so. all men have to cultivate themselves. Our very walking is an incessant falling: a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement. It is emblematic of all things a man does. In conclusion, I will remind you that it is not by books alone, or by books chiefly, that a man becomes in all points a man. Study to do faithfully whatsoever thing in your actual situation, there and now, you find either expressly or tacitly laid to your charge; that is your post; stand in it like a true soldier; silently devour the many chagrins of it, as all human situations have many; and be your aim not to quit it without doing all that it, at least, required of you. A man perfects himself by work much more than by reading. They are a growing kind of men that can wisely combine the two things; wisely, valiantly, can do what is laid to their hand in their present sphere, and prepare themselves withal for doing other wider things, if such lie before them. THOMAS AIRD.† BORN 1802: DIED 1876. AUTUMN. AUTUMN, in the usual allegorical picture-a fat motherly-looking dame, with a sickle in her right hand, and a wheat sheaf or a horn of plenty upraised in her left, and mounted on her shoulder like a musket-gives us but a poor representation of the multiform exhilarations of that lect, and strong imagination-and his mind dwells in a lofty sphere."-Professor Wilson, "Noctes Ambrosi Of strong intel-ana," vol. iii., p. 72. * From a letter written in March 1843 to a young man seeking advice on a choice of reading. "A man of true genius. even intended continuity, as he evidently does not, should at least have preceded what he gives as the first. Tried by the "serene and silent art," no painter could bring them both upon the same canvas. The very word vesper means to every heart a blue, or rosy, or orange-tawny sky in the west, with a single star. According to the high authority of Milton, in a fine scene in his "Paradise Lost," of which this passage from Pollok just serves to remind us, Hesperus and his starry host make a distinct picture, which lasts only "till the moon, Rising in clouded majesty, at length, delightful season. The corn, and the wine, and the oil are so far indicated thereby. But where are the whirring gorcocks, crowing so wildly triumphant; where the deep-blooming heather of the mountain-side, powdering the sportsman's ankles with rich-coloured dust; where the antlered king of the red deer, scornful of the stalker, hanging high and far in the weathergleam of the north, magnificent, momentary, as he stretches the natural, living, untanned, unsophisticated buckskin of his loins away over a hundred hill-tops in the wild Highlands of Braemar; where the transparent purity and dry healthfulness of the autumnal atmosphere; where the pellucid stream sliding and sleeping away velvet green under the trees, with the little fishes poised in it, as in crystal air; where the If Vesper in full glow be not compatible with fine wires, half revealed in long glimmerings, of the moon, according to the author of the "Course the floating gossamer, in the meek sunny day-of Time," riding unclouded up the east, a fortiori not so agreeable, however, when they break, it belongs not as a part to what I call his first invisible but felt, over the bridge of your nose scene, in which the world is flooded with moonwhere the soft streams of pencilled light, lacing light. divergingly the glistering clouds of the western afternoon, and falling like a silent kiss on the far ancient pine-wood; where the shoulder of the green distant hill, steeped in the sunny brightness of evening, beautiful as the shoulder of Pelops; where the orange-necked wheat, nodding and shaking before the rustling din of the merry reapers coming on; where the "rantin' kirn;" where the many-coloured beauty of the autumnal woods; where the harvest moon? Poets and poetesses of all kinds, from Charlotte Smith upward and downward, have tried their hand at the harvest moon; but none of them not even Homer himself-has reached the perfect glory of that fair ordinance of the night. Pollok has attempted it thus: "It was an eve of Autumn's holiest mood; The cornfields, bathed in Cynthia's silver light, Its Maker: now and then the aged leaf There is considerable breadth of repose in this "Vesper looked forth From out her western hermitage, and smiled; And up the east unclouded rode the moon With all her stars, gazing on earth intense, As if she saw some wonder walking there." This sacrifices utterly the fine contiguities of time and place; and confuses the first unique picture by adding another, which, if Pollok had moon There is a further confusion; for the "gazing on earth intense, as if she saw some wonder walking there"-which, though homely, yet expresses very well the still earnestness of moonlight-cannot be said of the moon riding up the east. In truth of nature, it is only when "riding near her highest noon," that our own feelings-which we give to inanimate things, and take back again-ascribe to the moon an earnest gaze upon our world. Pollok is thus trebly wrong. He gives two pictures, where only one was intended; he puts the second first, and the first second; and he ascribes to the moon in the one (namely, an intense gaze upon the earth) what in truth of nature belongs to the moon in the other. While I am upon these night pieces, I may notice an equal confusion of a starlight scene by Byron. Indeed I may remark of Byron generally, that he not unfrequently spoils his picture by giving us adjuncts which belong to it as it may be seen at another time, but which, strictly speaking, are not parts of it as it is before us for the time being. Here is the instance to which I specially refer at present: "It was the night-and Lara's glassy stream The stars are studding, each with imaged beam, So calm, the waters scarcely seem to stray, And yet they glide like happiness away; Reflecting far and fairy-like from high The immortal lights that live along the sky: Its banks are fringed with many a goodly tree, And flowers the fairest that may feast the bee; Such in her chaplet infant Dian wove, And Innocence would offer to her love." These pretty lines about the flowers have nothing to do with the starlight picture. How, at such a time of night, could the fair flowers on the banks of the stream be seen? Not being seen, they have, strictly speaking, no existence whatever. To describe their beauty here, mingles the divided portraiture of night with circum. |