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Burns's life was, therefore, quite full at Ellisland, too full indeed; for, towards the end of 1791, we find him disposing of the farm, and looking to the Excise alone for a livelihood. In the farm he had sunk the greater part of the profits of his Edinburgh Edition; and now it was painfully evident that the money was lost.
As to my individual self I am tranquil, and would despise myself if I were not; but Burns's poor widow and half a dozen of his dear little ones helpless orphans! there, I am weaker than a woman's tear. From Brow, whither he had gone to try the effect of sea-bathing, he wrote several letters all in the same strain, one to Cunningham; a pathetic one to Mrs.
Advice is of scanty use to men of keen reason who are capable of composing precepts for themselves; but to the duller sort I certainly think that the flash of a sudden revelation given in concise words is beneficial. Here is poor Burns's saying Is there a man whose judgment clear Can others teach the course to steer, Yet runs himself life's mad career Wild as the wave?
But, however it manifest itself, we recognise at once that it has a character of its own, which marks it off from the humour of any other writer; it is a peculiar possession of Burns. Perhaps the poem in which all Burns's poetic qualities are seen at their best is The Jolly Beggars. The subject may be low and the materials coarse, but that only makes the finished poem a more glorious achievement.
Some unexpected particulars emerge; as, for instance, that, notwithstanding his poverty, he occasionally accommodated his friends with money and credit, and almost to the last was able to be their host as well as their guest. But perhaps the most important result is what we learn of the wonderful versatility of Burns's feelings and emotions.
It is a memorial not only of the admiration of one poet for another, but of Burns's poignant pity a wellnigh intolerable pang for a young soul who preceded himself in the way of poetry and despair, one whose life, destined to better and brighter things, had been flung away like a weed on the dismal strand.
When things are ugly I simply make them transparent for my eyes, and see through them as if they didn't exist. I had to do a good deal of this juggling in the neighbourhood of the monument; for the booths bristling with Burns souvenirs, and the tea gardens where crowds drink to Burns's memory in ginger pop and fizzy lemonade, would be rather dreadful if they were not funny.
But, in honest truth, the great charm of a woman, in Burns's eyes, was always her womanhood, and not the angelic mixture which other poets find in her. Our driver pointed out the course taken by the Lass of Ballochmyle, through the shrubbery, to a rock on the banks of the Lugar, where it seems to be the tradition that Burns accosted her. The song implies no such interview.
Union of the Elizabethan with the Revolutionary Spirit. In no respect does the poetry of Burns more completely part company with the productions of the classical school than in the expression of feeling. The emotional fire of Elizabethan times was restored to literature. No poet except Shakespeare has ever written more nobly impassioned love songs. Burns's song beginning:
Who does not remember how the "Marseillaise" was born, or how Burns's "Scots wha ha' wi' Wallace bled," or the story of Moore's taking the old "Red Fox March," and giving it a new immortality as "Let Erin remember the days of old," while poor Emmett sprang up and cried, "Oh, that I had twenty thousand Irishmen marching to that tune!"
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