"It's hardly in a body's pow'r To keep at times frae being sour, To see how things are shared." But, as with all greater minds, Burns did not sink down to the level of his circumstances and become absorbed in the almost hopeless effort to gain a living from the farm, or in angry murmurings at his lot. He was full of warm, generous affections, and these kept hope and mirth alive in his heart. Carlyle says, "Burns's brother Gilbert has told me that Robert, in his young days, in spite of their hardships, was usually the gayest of speech, a fellow of infinite frolic, laughter, sense, and heart; far pleasanter to hear there cutting peats in the bog, or such-like, than he ever afterwards knew him. All kinds of gifts, from the gracefullest utterances of courtesy to the highest fire of passionate speech; loud floods of mirth, soft wailings of affection, laconic emphasis, clear piercing insight: all was in him." Such a nature would soon break into song, like the robin singing joyfully, half-starved in the winter cold; and Burns had scarcely passed out of boyhood before he began to express the varied emotions of his rich nature in lyric verse. He wrote as he spoke, in the dialect of his home, and the subjects of his poems were such as met his eyes in his farm work, or in his life among his village neighbours. He saw in the simplest objects suggestions of tender feeling, sweet beauty-"thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. Thus the "Mountain Daisy,' 'wee, modest, crimsontippèd flower," has only just cheerfully struggled into bloom in the "bitter-biting north wind," when Burns's ploughshare crushes it into the dust, and he sings 99.66 "There, in thy scanty mantle clad, In humble guise : But now the share uptears thy bed, Till, wrenched of every stay but Heaven, Whilst pursuing his daily task, the rude breaking of the ploughshare into the little nest which a field mouse had made for itself, and in which it thought to sleep cosily through the winter, suggests again to Burns how "The best laid schemes of mice and men Gang aft a-gley, And leave us nought but grief and pain Although Burns, in many of his poems, satirises the religious formality which had become among a large portion of the Scottish peasantry more of a habit than the fresh fruit of a living growth, he shows himself in full sympathy with the true religious feeling of the father of the family, gathering his children around him on Saturday night, the week's work over, "to worship God;" and the whole of "The Cottar's Saturday Night" testifies how much the heart of the poet was at one with the simple faith and steadfast domestic affections of his fellow-countrymen. This is also the keynote of the old wife's song to "John Anderson, my Jo." In "A man's a man for a' that," Burns gives vigorous expression to that simple, direct clear-sightedness which caused him to see through the outward show of wealth and rank, and to value all that is best and highest in man at its own true merit "What though on homely fare we dine, Wear hodden grey, and a' that; Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, For a' that, and a' that, Their tinsel show and a' that, The honest man, though e'er so poor, Is king o' men for a' that. "A king can mak a belted knight, But an honest man's aboon his might- For a' that, and a' that, Their dignities, and a' that; The pith o' sense, and pride o' worth, Are higher ranks tan a' that." Burns's whole life was a struggle with poverty. The farming did not answer; and after the publication of his poems in 1786, he obtained an appointment as excise officer, but the salary never exceeded £70 a year. The later years of his life were brightened by such passing gleams as popular applause can throw into the gloom of troubled and embarrassed circumstances, which pressed upon him more and more. And to this later period belongs his immortal poem of "Tam o' Shanter.” He died in his thirty-eighth year, on July 21st, 1796; and twelve thousand persons attended his funeral. In the last year of the eighteenth century, Thomas Campbell, a young poet, closed the era with a bright outlook into the coming time in his poem, "The Pleasures of Hope." "Hope! when I mourn with sympathising mind The wrongs of fate, the woes of human-kind, Thy blissful omens bid my spirit see The boundless fields of rapture yet to be ; I watch the wheels of Nature's mazy plan, Ye that the rising morn invidious mark And hate the light, because your deeds are dark, CHAPTER XXII. REVOLUTION AND REACTION. AFTER Burns, and in the new century, we find that the strong force which was leading men to question and cast off authority had not lost its energy. It was the springing up of new life, and it could not be stifled or crushed. The wild, destroying power could only be controlled, as men found out that above themselves and above their fellow-men there was a rule to which it was no slavery to submit, but the noblest, freest life-the rule of reason and conscience, the self-controlled obedience of each individual to law and to God. It was the noblest and most enlightened minds which saw this first, the "Happy Warriors," who gained the victory for themselves, and then helped others to conquer too; and of these Wordsworth stands as the leader in this, the great battle of the nineteenth century. There were other poets, his contemporaries, who did not see so far; they felt the crushing weight of artificial forms and needless tyrannies; they looked only at man's representation of God, and they rose in fierce revolt against God and man, and threw off individual allegiance to duty and law. Byron represents in this way the strong energy of revolt and the bare assertion of self-will as the principle of life. He belonged to a family in which unsoundness of mind seems to have been hereditary, and he was brought up by his mother, who was a capricious and violent woman, There |