ote: 'You are to work, not think.' Of your _thinking_-faculty,
the greatest in this land, we have no need; you are to gauge beer
there; for that only are _you_ wanted. Very notable;--and worth
mentioning, though we know what is to be said and answered! As if
Thought, Power of Thinking, were not, at all times, in all places and
situations of the world, precisely the thing that _was_ wanted. The
fatal man, is he not always the _un_thinking man, the man who cannot
think and _see_; but only grope, and hallucinate, and _mis_see the
nature of the thing he works with? He missees it, mis_takes_ it as we
say; takes it for one thing, and it _is_ another thing,--and leaves
him standing like a Futility there! He is the fatal man; unutterably
fatal, put in the high places of men.--"Why complain of this?" say
some: "Strength is mournfully denied its arena; that was true from of
old." Doubtless; and the worse for the _arena_, answer I!
_Complaining_ profits little; stating of the truth may profit. That a
Europe, with its French Revolution just breaking out, finds no need of
a Burns except for gauging beer,--is a thing I, for one, cannot
_rejoice_ at!--

Once more we have to say here, that the chief quality of Burns is the
_sincerity_ of him. So in his Poetry, so in his Life. The Song he
sings is not of fantasticalities; it is of a thing felt, really there;
the prime merit of this, as of all in him, and of his Life generally,
is truth. The Life of Burns is what we may call a great tragic
sincerity. A sort of savage sincerity,--not cruel, far from that; but
wild, wrestling naked with the truth of things. In that sense, there
is something of the savage in all great men.

Hero-worship,--Odin, Burns? Well; these Men of Letters too were not
without a kind of Hero-worship: but what a strange condition has that
got into now! The waiters and ostlers of Scotch inns, prying about the
door, eager to catch any word that fell from Burns, were doing
unconscious reverence to the Heroic. Johnson had his Boswell for
worshipper. Rousseau had worshippers enough; princes calling on him in
his mean garret; the great, the beautiful doing reverence to the poor
moonstruck man. For himself a most portentous contradiction; the two
ends of his life not to be brought into harmony. He sits at the tables
of grandees; and has to copy music for his own living. He cannot even
get his music copied. "By dint of dining out," says he, "I run the
risk of dying by starvat