as the poet of the country--and his is the
rural, the rustic muse. But we know well that the charm of his poetry
has equal power for the inhabitants of towns and cities. Occupations,
familiar objects, habitual thoughts, are indeed very different for the
two great divisions of the people; but there is a brotherhood both of
consanguinity and of lot. Labour--the hand pledged to constant toil--the
daily support of life, won by its daily wrestle with a seemingly adverse
but friendly necessity--in these they are all commoners with one
another. He who cheers, who solaces, who inspirits, who honours, who
exalts the lot of the labourer, is the poet alike of all the sons of
industry. The mechanic who inhabits a smoky atmosphere, and in whose ear
an unwholesome din from workshop and thoroughfare rings hourly, hangs
from his rafter the caged linnet; and the strain that should gush free
from blossomed or green bough, that should mix in the murmur of the
brook, mixes in and consoles the perpetual noise of the loom or the
forge. Thus Burns sings more especially to those whose manner of life he
entirely shares; but he sings a precious memento to those who walk in
other and less pleasant ways. Give then the people knowledge, without
stint, for it nurtures the soul. But let us never forget, that the mind
of man has other cravings--that it draws nourishment from thoughts,
beautiful and tender, such as lay reviving dews on the drooping fancy,
and are needed the more by him to whom they are not wafted fresh from
the face of nature. This virtue of these pastoral and rural strains to
penetrate and permeate conditions of existence different from those in
which they had their origin, appears wheresoever we follow them. In the
mine, in the dungeon, upon the great waters, in remote lands under fiery
skies, Burns's poetry goes with his countrymen. Faithfully portrayed,
the image of Scotland lives there; and thus she holds, more palpably
felt, her hand upon the hearts of her children, whom the constraint of
fortune or ambitious enterprise carries afar from the natal shores.
Unrepining and unrepentant exiles, to whom the haunting recollection of
hearth and field breathes in that dearest poetry, not with homesick
sinkings of heart, but with home-invigorated hopes that the day will
come when their eyes shall have their desire, and their feet again feel
the greensward and the heather-bent of Scotland. Thus is there but one
soul in this our great National