The last few years of Burns’s life are a sad tragedy, and we pass over them hurriedly.  He bought the farm Ellisland, Dumfriesshire, and married the faithful Jean Armour, in 1788, That he could write of her,

    I see her in the dewy flowers,
    I see her sweet and fair;
    I hear her in the tunefu’ birds,
    I hear her charm the air: 
    There’s not a bonie flower that springs
    By fountain, shaw, or green;
    There’s not a bonie bird that sings,
    But minds me o’ my Jean,

is enough for us to remember.  The next year he was appointed exciseman, i.e. collector of liquor revenues, and the small salary, with the return from his poems, would have been sufficient to keep his family in modest comfort, had he but kept away from taverns.  For a few years his life of alternate toil and dissipation was occasionally illumined by his splendid lyric genius, and he produced many songs—­“Bonnie Doon,” “My Love’s like a Red, Red Rose,” “Auld Lang Syne,” “Highland Mary,” and the soul-stirring “Scots wha hae,” composed while galloping over the moor in a storm—­which have made the name of Burns known wherever the English language is spoken, and honored wherever Scotchmen gather together.  He died miserably in 1796, when only thirty-seven years old.  His last letter was an appeal to a friend for money to stave off the bailiff, and one of his last poems a tribute to Jessie Lewars, a kind lassie who helped to care for him in his illness.  This last exquisite lyric, “O wert thou in the cauld blast,” set to Mendelssohn’s music, is one of our best known songs, though its history is seldom suspected by those who sing it.

THE POETRY OF BURNS.  The publication of the Kilmarnock Burns, with the title Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), marks an epoch in the history of English Literature, like the publication of Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar.  After a century of cold and formal poetry, relieved only by the romanticism of Gray and Cowper, these fresh inspired songs went straight to the heart, like the music of returning birds in springtime.  It was a little volume, but a great book; and we think of Marlowe’s line, “Infinite riches in a little room,” in connection with it.  Such poems as “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” “To a Mouse,” “To Mountain Daisy,” “Man was Made To Mourn,” “The Twa Dogs,” “Address to the Deil,” and “Halloween,” suggest that the whole spirit of the romantic revival is embodied in this obscure plowman.  Love, humor, pathos, the response to nature,—­all the poetic qualities that touch the human heart are here; and the heart was touched as it had not been since the days of Elizabeth.  If the reader will note again the six characteristics of the romantic movement, and then read six poems of Burns, he will see at once how perfectly this one man expresses the new idea.  Or take a single suggestion,—­