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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
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