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Little Tim sat in front, yelling like an Indian at a war-dance. They fairly took Henry Burns's breath away as they shot past him. He looked at Harvey and shrugged his shoulders. "Guess that's pretty near as exciting as cruising in Samoset bay, isn't it?" he remarked. "Well, you hold the tiller, Jack, and I'm game; though it's new sport to me. I never spent a winter in Maine before."
The man who wrote that was certainly not the man, when the day of battle came, to join himself with the orthodox party, the party that stuck to the pure, undiluted Puritanism of Covenanting times. Yet many biographers have not seen the bearing that such a letter has on Burns's attitude to the Church.
The church stands about midway up the street, and is built of red freestone, very simple in its architecture, with a square tower and pinnacles. In this sacred edifice, and its churchyard, was the scene of one of Burns's most characteristic productions, "The Holy Fair." Almost directly opposite its gate, across the village-street, stands Posie Nansie's inn, where the "Jolly Beggars" congregated.
His neighbors, who had got along a little better than himself, were free with advice and suggestion as to the cause of his persistent poverty. Old man Bacon, the hardest-working man in the county, laid it to Burns's lack of management. But the larger number, feeling themselves in the same boat with Burns, said: "I d' know. Seems as if things get worse an' worse.
Because he embodies the new spirit of romanticism, critics give him a high place in the history of our literature; and because his songs go straight to the heart, he is the poet of common men. Of Burns's many songs for music little need be said. They have found their way into the hearts of a whole people, and there they speak for themselves.
This beautiful estate of Ballochmyle is still held by the family of Alexanders, to whom Burns's song has given renown on cheaper terms than any other set of people ever attained it. How slight the tenure seems!
His wrath was quite evidently no explosion of the moment, but the culmination of long irritation and distrust, brought to a head by some overt act which had settled the offender's case in the twinkling of an eye. Burns came out soon after, followed by a woman well shrouded in a heavy veil. King jumped out of the car. "I'm awfully sorry," he tried to say in Burns's ear.
But of the Corn-Law Rhymer we may say here, that howsoever he may have been indebted to Burns's example for the notion of writing at all, he has profited very little by Burns's own poems. Instead of the genial loving tone of the great Scotchman, we find in Elliott a tone of deliberate savageness, all the more ugly, because evidently intentional.
The stranger was George Thomson, a young man of about Burns's own age, and head clerk in the office of the Board of Manufactures in Edinburgh. Thomson outlived his great correspondent by more than half a century. He died so recently as 1851, at the advanced age of ninety-two. Robert Chambers has described him as a most honourable man, of singularly amiable character and cheerful manners.
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.
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