Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1849, by ERASTUS DARROW, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Northern District of New-York. SHEPARD & GREYES, Printers, 2 State-street, THE PARNASSIAN PLOWMAN NINETY years ago, an infant's piteous birth-cry told the anxious inhabitants of an humble Ayrshire cottage, that a new pilgrim had with pain just made his entrance upon the sad, cold journey of human life. That cry was a renewed utterance of Nature's voice, that "man was made to mourn ;" and that new-born weeper was Robert Burns, the poet of tears. It is good to remember a great man's birth. It reminds us of natural equality and universal brotherhood; since from the same goal we all begin the race of life, we must have been companions once, howe'er we afterwards diverge. Hence should we learn a tender sympathy. We were the same and we shall be the same. What matters that we differ now? We are brothers in birth and in death. "Let us love one another." Robert Burns was the son of a poor man. His father William was an industrious and frugal farmer, and his circumstances of extreme indigence made it impossible for him to ruin his children's physical or mental constitutions by the enervating indulgences of luxury. Robert, his eldest son, shared the lot of honest poverty; was plainly, aye, and thinly dressed, coarsely and perhaps at times scantily fed. A naturally vigorous constitution was thus early and |