Carlyle.

“Is there a man, whose judgment clear,
Can others teach the course to steer,
Yet runs, himself, life’s mad career,
Wild as the wave? 
Here pause—­and, through the starting tear,
Survey this grave.”

Burns was a true son of the soil.  There is no art in his songs but only nature.  Apart form his melody what strikes us most is his truth; he sang of what he saw, of what he felt and knew.  He knew the Scottish peasant through and through.  Grave and humorous, simple and cunning, honest and hypocritical, proud and independent—­every phase of him is to be found in Burns’s poems.  He knew love too; and in every phase—­happy and unhappy, worthy and unworthy—­he sings of it.  But it is of love in truth that he sings.  Here we have no more the make-believe of the Elizabethan age, no longer the stilted measure of the Georgian.  The day of the heroic couplet is done; with Burns we come back to nature.

BOOK TO READ

Selected Works of Robert Burns, edited by R. Sutherland. (This is probably the best selection for juvenile readers.)

Chapter LXXIII COWPER—­“THE TASK”

WHILE Burns was weaving his wonderful songs among the Lowland hills of Scotland, another lover of nature was telling of placid English life, of simple everyday doings, in a quiet little country town in England.  This man was William Cowper.

Cowper was the son of a clergyman.  He was born in 1731 and became a barrister, but it seemed a profession for which he was little fitted.  He was shy and morbidly religious, and he also liked literature much better than law.  Still he continued his way of life until, when he was thirty-two, he was offered a post as Clerk of the Journals of the House of Lords.  He wished to accept the post, but was told he must stand an examination at the bar of the House of Lords.

This was more than his nervous sensitive nature could bear.  Rather than face the trial he decided to die.  Three times he tried to kill himself.  Three times he failed.  Then the darkness of madness closed in upon him.  Religious terrors seized him, and for many months he suffered agonies of mind.  But at length his tortured brain found rest, and he became once more a sane man.

Then he made up his mind to leave London, and all the excitements of a life for which he was not fit, and after a few changes here and there he settled down to a peaceful life with a clergyman and his wife, named Unwin.  And when after two years Mr. Unwin died, Cowper still lived with his widow.  With her he moved to Olney in Buckinghamshire.  It was here that, together with the curate, John Newton, Cowper wrote the Olney hymns, many of which are still well loved to-day.  Perhaps one of the best is that beginning—­

    “God moves in a mysterious way,
        His wonders to perform;
    He plants His footsteps in the sea,
        And rides upon the storm.”