United States or Guinea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
This is of interest as showing the popularity Burns's poems had already won; while the eagerness of those farmers to see and know the man after they had read his poems proves most strikingly how straight the poet had gone to the hearts of his readers. They had recognised the voice of a human being, and heard it gladly.
There, up the bank, John Ellison produced the mysterious object of Henry Burns's inquiry. It proved to be an old wash-boiler. Harvey and the others eyed it with astonishment. "What are you going to do with that old thing?" asked Harvey. "This isn't Fourth of July." "That's my fiddle," replied Henry Burns, coolly. "I've got the string in my pocket."
It took all of Henry Burns's nerve, to seat himself at the front end of the toboggan, while Jack Harvey gave a shove off. For the first moment, it was almost like falling off a steeple. Then he caught the exhilaration of the sport, as the toboggan gathered speed and shot down the incline at lightning speed.
Burns stopped to answer a series of questions as to the best route toward a neighbouring city. There were matters of road mending and detours to be made plain to the inquirers, so the detention occupied a full five minutes, during which the chauffeur got down and came to Burns's side with a road map, with which the two wrestled after the fashion usually made necessary by such aids to travel.
King had just finished a heart-warming report of certain messages brought from some of Burns's old chronic patients in the hospital wards, where it was evident the young man had gone on purpose to collect them. "Every time I look at you I think what an idiot I was ever to imagine you needed me to put backbone into you, last spring." "But I did and you did it.
I don't know that one's eyes fill with tears when he thinks of the famous inventor of logarithms, but song of Burns's or a hymn of Charles Wesley's goes straight to your heart, and you can't help loving both of them, the sinner as well as the saint.
"Of course I know," Burns responded, his hand resting gently on the frail shoulder, his voice as tender as that of a son's to a father whom he knows he is not long to see. There was a woman in the room, an old woman with a pathetic face and eyes like a mourning dog's as they rested on her husband. But her voice was cheerful and full of quiet courage as she answered Burns's questions.
It, the new Truth, new deeper revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is verily of the nature of a message from on high; and must and will have itself obeyed. My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns's history, his visit to Edinburgh. Often it seems to me as if his demeanor there were the highest proof he gave of what a fund of worth and genuine manhood was in him.
If they preferred their own talk of crops and cattle and meaner things to the undoubted brilliancy of Burns's conversation, surely their dulness and want of appreciation is not to be laid to the charge of the poet. I doubt not had the poet lived to a good old age he would have been gradually dropped out of acquaintance by some who have not scrupled to write his biography.
This inexpected triumph lasted only one winter. Burns's fondness for taverns and riotous living shocked his cultured entertainers, and when he returned to Edinburgh next winter, after a pleasure jaunt through the Highlands, he received scant attention. He left the city in anger and disappointment, and went back to the soil where he was more at home.
Word Of The Day