black thunder and tornado,--with unspeakable
difference of profit for the world! The manner of it is very alterable;
the matter and fact of it is not alterable by any power under the sky.
Light; or, failing that, lightning: the world can take its choice. Not
whether we call an Odin god, prophet, priest, or what we call him; but
whether we believe the word he tells us: there it all lies. If it be a
true word, we shall have to believe it; believing it, we shall have
to do it. What _name_ or welcome we give him or it, is a point that
concerns ourselves mainly. _It_, the new Truth, new deeper revealing of
the Secret of this Universe, is verily of the nature of a message from
on high; and must and will have itself obeyed.--

My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns's history,--his
visit to Edinburgh. Often it seems to me as if his demeanor there were
the highest proof he gave of what a fund of worth and genuine manhood
was in him. If we think of it, few heavier burdens could be laid on
the strength of a man. So sudden; all common _Lionism_. which ruins
innumerable men, was as nothing to this. It is as if Napoleon had
been made a King of, not gradually, but at once from the Artillery
Lieutenancy in the Regiment La Fere. Burns, still only in his
twenty-seventh year, is no longer even a ploughman; he is flying to the
West Indies to escape disgrace and a jail. This month he is a ruined
peasant, his wages seven pounds a year, and these gone from him: next
month he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing down jewelled
Duchesses to dinner; the cynosure of all eyes! Adversity is sometimes
hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a
hundred that will stand adversity. I admire much the way in which Burns
met all this. Perhaps no man one could point out, was ever so sorely
tried, and so little forgot himself. Tranquil, unastonished; not
abashed, not inflated, neither awkwardness nor affectation: he feels
that _he_ there is the man Robert Burns; that the "rank is but the
guinea-stamp;" that the celebrity is but the candle-light, which will
show _what_ man, not in the least make him a better or other man! Alas,
it may readily, unless he look to it, make him a _worse_ man; a wretched
inflated wind-bag,--inflated till he _burst_, and become a _dead_ lion;
for whom, as some one has said, "there is no resurrection of the body;"
worse than a living dog!--Burns is admirable here.

And yet, alas, as I