Page:The poetical works of Robert Burns.djvu/39
"My compliments to my friend James, and to all the rest. I do not know what I have written. The subject is so horrible I dare not look over it again. Farewell.
"R. B."
On the same day he addressed Mr. Thomson:—
"After all my boasted independence, curst necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds. A cruel scoundrel of a haberdasher, to whom I owe an account, taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a process, and will infallibly put me in jail. Do, for God's sake, send me that sum, and that by return of post. Forgive me this earnestness; but the horrors of a jail have made me half distracted. I do not ask all this gratuitously; for, upon returning health, I hereby promise and engage to furnish you with five pounds' worth of the neatest song-genius you have seen. I tried my hand on Rothemurchie this morning. The measure is so difficult that it is impossible to infuse much genius into the lines; they are on the other side. Forgive, forgive me!"
This was Burns's last working day. He wrote his song in the morning, Fairest Maid on Devon Banks, and the two letters afterwards—to both of which answers were promptly returned. He soon after left the Solway and returned to Dumfries, where his wife was daily expected to be confined. He came home in a small spring-cart, and when he alighted, he was unable to stand. The hand of death was visibly upon him. His children were sent to the house of Mr. Lewars: Jessie was sedulous in her attentions. On the 21st, he sank into delirium; his children were brought to see him for the last time; and with an execration on the legal agent who had threatened him, the troubled spirit passed. Those who came to see him as he lay in his last sleep were touched and affected. Mighty is the hallowing of death to all,—to him more than to most. As he lay stretched, his dark locks already streaked with unnatural gray, all unworthiness fell away from him—every stain of passion and debauch, every ignoble word, every ebullition of scorn and pride—and left pure nobleness. Farmer no longer, exciseman no longer, subject no longer to criticism, to misrepresentation, to the malevolence of mean natures and evil tongues, he lay there, the great poet of his country, dead too early for himself and for it. He had passed from the judgments of Dumfries, and made his appeal to Time.
Of Burns, the man and poet, what is there left to be said? During his lifetime he was regarded as a phenomenon; and now, when he has been seventy years in his grave, he is a phenomenon still. He came up from Ayrshire with all the sense and shrewdness of its peasantry, the passion of its lovers, the piety of its circles of family worship, the wild mirth of its kirns and halloweens. Of all the great men of the North Country, his was incomparably the fullest soul. What fun he had, what melancholy, what pity, what anger, what passion, what homely sagacity, what sensitiveness! Of every thing he was brimful and overflowing. It is difficult to carry a full cup and not to spill it. He had his errors, but they arose out of his splendid and perilous richness. As a man he was full of natural goodness, but he was unreticent even amongst poets. We know the best and the worst of him; and he has himself frankly told us that best and that worst. He had to fight with adverse circumstances, he died before he had run his race, and his fame—greater than that of any other poet of his country—rests upon poems written swiftly, as men write their letters, and on songs which came to him naturally as its carol comes to the blackbird.
Of all poets Burns was, perhaps, the most directly inspired. His poems did not grow—like stalactites—by the slow process of accretion; like Adam, they had no childhood—they awoke complete. Burns produced all his great effects by single strokes. In his best things there is an impetus, a hurry, which gives one the idea of boundless resource. To him a song was the occupation of a morning; his poetic epistles drive along in a fiery sleet of words and images: his Tam O' Shanter was written in a day—since Bruce fought Bannockburn, the best single day's work done in Scotland. Burns was never taken by surprise; he was ready for all calls and emergencies. He had not only—like Addison—a thousand-pound note at home, but he had—to carry out the image—plenty of loose intellectual coin in his pocket. A richer