most strong, simple, manly heart. The feeling is not turned over in the reflective faculty, and there artistically shaped--not subtilized and refined away till it has lost its power and freshness-but given at first hand, as it comes warm from within. When he is at his best, you seem to hear the whole song warbling through his spirit, naturally as a bird's. The whole subject is wrapped in an element of music, till it is penetrated and transfigured by it. No one else had so much of the native lilt in him. When his mind was at the white heat, it is wonderful how quickly he struck off some of his most perfect songs. And yet he could, when it was required, go back upon them, and retouch them line by line, as we saw him doing in Ye Banks and Braes. In the best of them, the outward form is as perfect as the inward music is all-pervading, and the two are in complete harmony.

To mention a few instances in which he has given their ultimate and consummate expression to fundamental human emotions, four songs may be mentioned, in each of which a different phase of love has been rendered for all time :-

"Of a' the airts* the wind can blaw,"

"Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon,"

"Go fetch to me a pint o' wine;"

and that other, in which the calm depth of long-wedded and happy love utters itself, so blithely yet pathetically,—

"John Anderson, my jo, John."

Then for comic humor of courtship, there is,

"Duncan Gray cam' here to woo."

For that contented spirit which, while feeling life's troubles, yet keeps "aye a heart aboon them a'," we have,—

"Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair.”

For friendship rooted in the past, there is,—

"Should auld acquaintance be forgot,"

even if we credit antiquity with some of the verses.

For wild

and reckless daring, mingled with a dash of finer feeling, there is Macpherson's Farewell. For patriotic heroism,

* See Glossary on following page.

"Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled;"

and for personal independence, and sturdy, if self-asserting, manhood,―

"A man's a man for a' that."

These are but a few of the many permanent emotions to which Burns has given such consummate expression as will stand for all time.

In no mention of his songs should that be forgotten which is so greatly to the honor of Burns. He was emphatically the purifier of Scottish song. There are some poems he has left, there are also a few among his songs, which we could wish that he had never written. But we, who inherit Scottish song as he left it, can hardly imagine how much he did to purify and elevate our national melodies. To see what he has done in this way, we have but to compare Burns's songs with the collection of Scottish songs published by David Herd in 1769, a few years before Burns appeared. A genuine poet, who knew well what he spoke of the late Thomas Aird-has said: "Those old Scottish melodies, sweet and strong though they were, strong and sweet, were, all the more for their very strength and sweetness, a moral plague, from the indecent words to which many of them had long been set. How was the plague to be stayed? All the preachers in the land could not divorce the grossness from the music. The only way was to put something better in its stead. This inestimable something better Burns gave us.' So, purified and ennobled by Burns, these songs embody human emotion in its most condensed and sweetest essence. They appeal to all ranks, they touch all ages, they cheer toil-worn men under every clime. Wherever the English tongue is heard, beneath the suns of India, amid African deserts, on the western prairies of America, among the squatters of Australia, whenever men of British blood would give vent to their deepest, kindliest, most genial feelings, it is to the songs of Burns they spontaneously turn, and find in them at once a perfect utterance and a fresh tie of brotherhood. It is this which forms Burns's most enduring claim on the world's gratitude. BURNS, in English Men of Letters.

GLOSSARY.-A', all; aboon, above; airts, points of the compass (Gaelic aird, a cardinal point); auld, old; aye, ever, always; blaw, blow; bonnie, pretty, beautiful; braes, hill-sides; cam', came; cantie, cheerful, happy; hae, have; jo, love, darling (French joie, joy); mair, more; wha, who; wi, with.

THE HARVEST MOON.

CHARLES (TENNYSON) TURNER (1808-1879).

How peacefully the broad and golden moon
Comes up to gaze upon the reaper's toil!
That they who own the land for many a mile
May bless her beams, and they who take the boon
Of scattered ears. Oh, beautiful! how soon

The dusk is turned to silver without soil,
Which makes the fair sheaves fairer than at noon.
And guides the gleaner to his slender spoil.
So, to our souls the Lord of love and might
Sends harvest-hours, when daylight disappears;
When age and sorrow, like a coming night,
Darken our field of work with doubts and fears,
He times the presence of his heavenly light
To rise up softly o'er our silver hairs.

Sonnets (1864).

66

SONNET FROM THE PORTUGUESE."

MRS. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1809-1861).

"

[The following exquisite sonnet forms the first of a series of forty-four, which Mrs. Browning playfully called "Sonnets from the Portuguese. They are really chapters of her own Autobiography. While still Miss Barrett, her health became so delicate that her friends apprehended the worst. Fortunately for English literature she recovered, to become the happy wife of Robert Browning. This is here beautifully told.]

The

I thought once how Theocritus* had sung

Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young.
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,

I saw in gradual vision through my tears
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware,
So weeping, how a mystic shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery while I strove-

"Guess now who holds thee?"-" Death," I said. But there
The silver answer rang-"Not Death, but Love!"

passage of Theocritus here alluded to is in Syracusan Gossips, 102.

STUDIES IN DRYDEN.

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

1. Astræa Redux* (1660).

The merits of Astræa Redux must, of course, not be judged by the reader's acquiescence in its sentiments. But let any

one read the following passage without thinking of the Treaty of Dover† and the closed Exchequer, of Madam Carwell's twelve thousand a year, and Lord Russell's scaffold, and he assuredly will not fail to recognize their beauty :

"Methinks I see those crowds on Dover's strand,
Who, in their haste to welcome you to land,

Choked up the beach with their still growing store,
And made a wilder torrent on the shore :

While, spurred with eager thoughts of past delight,
Those who had seen you court a second sight,
Preventing still your steps, and making haste
To meet you often wheresoe'er you past.
How shall I speak of that triumphant day
When you renewed the expiring pomp of May?
A month that owns an interest in your name;
You and the flowers are its peculiar claim.
That star that at your birth shone out so bright
It stained the duller sun's meridian light,
Did once again its potent fires renew,

Guiding our eyes to find and worship you."

The extraordinary art with which the recurrences of the you and your in the circumstances naturally recited with a little stress of the voice-are varied in position so as to give a corresponding variety to the cadence of the verse, is perhaps the chief thing to be noted here. But a comparison with even the best couplet verse of the time will show many other excellences in it. I am aware that this style of minute criticism has gone out of fashion, and that the variations of the position of a pronoun

* Astræa Returned.-In the classic poets, Astræa was the goddess of justice, who during the golden age sojourned on Earth; but finally abandoning the Earth when the brazen age set in, she returned to Heaven. By a sad misuse of ingenuity, Dryden applied this beautiful myth to the return of Charles II. to England in 1660.

+ Secret Treaty of Dover, under which Charles II. became a pensioner of France, May 22, 1670.- "Madam Carwell," the English designation of a French favorite of Charles II., Louisa Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth.Lord William Russell was executed (1683) for his pretended connection with the Rye-House conspiracy to assassinate Charles II.