But with each draught--in every bitter cup
Thy hand hath mixed, to make its soreness less,
Some cordial drop, for which thy name I bless,
And offer up my mite of thankfulness.
Thou hast chastised my frame with dire disease,
Long, obdurate, and painful; and thy hand
Hath wrung cold sweat-drops from my brow; for these
I thank thee too. Though pangs at thy command
Have compassed me about, still, with the blow,
Patience sustained my soul amid its woe.

Of the actual literary merit of these men's writings there is less to
be said. However extraordinary, considering the circumstances under
which they were written, may be the polish and melody of John's
verse, or the genuine spiritual health, deep death-and-devil-defying
earnestness, and shrewd practical wisdom, which shines through all
that either brother writes, they do not possess any of that fertile
originality, which alone would have enabled them, as it did Burns, to
compete with the literary savants, who, though for the most part of
inferior genius, have the help of information and appliances, from
which they were shut out. Judging them, as the true critic, like the
true moralist, is bound to do, "according to what they had, not
according to what they had not," they are men who, with average
advantages, might have been famous in their day. God thought it
better for them to "hide them in his tabernacle from the strife of
tongues;" and--seldom believed truism--He knows best. Alexander
shall not, according to his early dreams, "earn nine hundred pounds
by writing a book, like Burns," even though his ideal method of
spending be to buy all the boys in the parish "new shoes with iron
tackets and heels," and send them home with shillings for their
mothers, and feed their fathers on wheat bread and milk, with tea and
bannocks for Sabbath-days, and build a house for the poor old toil-
stiffened man whom he once saw draining the hill field, "with a yard
full of gooseberries, and an apple-tree!"--not that, nor even, as the
world judges, better than that, shall he be allowed to do. The poor,
for whom he writes his "Practical Economy," shall not even care to
read it; and he shall go down to the grave a failure and a lost thing
in the eyes of men: but not in the eyes of grand God-fearing old
Alison Christie, his mother, as he brings her, scrap by scrap, the
proofs of their dead idol's poems, which she has prayed to be spared
just to see once in print, and, when t