all into tears." The brave, hard-toiling, hard-suffering
Father, his brave heroine of a wife; and those children, of whom Robert
was one! In this Earth, so wide otherwise, no shelter for _them_. The
letters "threw us all into tears:" figure it. The brave Father, I say
always;--a _silent_ Hero and Poet; without whom the son had never been
a speaking one! Burns's Schoolmaster came afterwards to London, learnt
what good society was; but declares that in no meeting of men did he
ever enjoy better discourse than at the hearth of this peasant. And his
poor "seven acres of nursery-ground,"--not that, nor the miserable patch
of clay-farm, nor anything he tried to get a living by, would prosper
with him; he had a sore unequal battle all his days. But he stood to
it valiantly; a wise, faithful, unconquerable man;--swallowing down
how many sore sufferings daily into silence; fighting like an unseen
Hero,--nobody publishing newspaper paragraphs about his nobleness;
voting pieces of plate to him! However, he was not lost; nothing
is lost. Robert is there the outcome of him,--and indeed of many
generations of such as him.

This Burns appeared under every disadvantage: uninstructed, poor, born
only to hard manual toil; and writing, when it came to that, in a rustic
special dialect, known only to a small province of the country he lived
in. Had he written, even what he did write, in the general language of
England, I doubt not he had already become universally recognized as
being, or capable to be, one of our greatest men. That he should have
tempted so many to penetrate through the rough husk of that dialect of
his, is proof that there lay something far from common within it. He
has gained a certain recognition, and is continuing to do so over all
quarters of our wide Saxon world: wheresoever a Saxon dialect is spoken,
it begins to be understood, by personal inspection of this and the
other, that one of the most considerable Saxon men of the Eighteenth
Century was an Ayrshire Peasant named Robert Burns. Yes, I will say,
here too was a piece of the right Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock,
rooted in the depths of the world;--rock, yet with wells of living
softness in it! A wild impetuous whirlwind of passion and faculty
slumbered quiet there; such heavenly _melody_ dwelling in the heart of
it. A noble rough genuineness; homely, rustic, honest; true simplicity
of strength; with its lightning-fire, with its soft dewy pity;--like the
o