Essays on Burns

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D.C. Heath, 1897 - 139 pages
 

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Page 101 - Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang, To step aside is human : One point must still be greatly dark, The moving Why they do it ; And just as lamely can ye mark, How far perhaps they rue it. Who made the heart, 'tis He alone Decidedly can try us, He knows each chord its various tone, Each spring its various bias : Then at the balance let's be mute, We never can adjust it ; What's done we partly may compute, But know not what's resisted.
Page 106 - THE poet in a golden clime was born, With golden stars above ; Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love.
Page 50 - Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather by the ideas which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed tears. He asked whose the lines were, and it chanced that nobody but myself remembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's, called by the unpromising title of
Page 80 - This kind of life - the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave - brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before which period I first committed the sin of rhyme.
Page 95 - Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee Jest, and youthful jollity, Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles, Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles Such as hang on Hebe's cheek, And love to live in dimple sleek; Sport that wrinkled Care derides, And Laughter holding both his sides...
Page 50 - His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received part of its effect perhaps from one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's picture: but to me it conveys the idea that they are diminished, as if seen in perspective. I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits.
Page 50 - There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments ; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time.
Page 49 - Burns's manner, was the effect produced upon him by a print of Bunbury's, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side, — on the other, his widow, with a child in her arms.
Page 24 - We know nothing, or next to nothing, of the substance or structure of our souls, so cannot account for those seeming caprices in them that one should be particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I have some...
Page 24 - I never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plover in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry.

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