with? He mis-sees 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
moon-struck 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 starvation at home." For his worshippers too a most
questionable thing! If doing Hero-worship well or badly be the test of
vital well-being or ill-being to a generation, can we say that _these_
generations are very first-rate?--And yet our heroic Men of Letters
do teach, govern, are kings, priests, or what you like to call them;
intrinsically there is no preventing it by any means whatever. The world
has to obey him who thinks and sees in the world. The world can alter
the manner of that; can either have it as blessed continuous summer
sunshine, or as unblessed