AFTER-THOUGHT. I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide, Enough, if something from our hands have power To live, and act, and serve the future hour; And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower, We feel that we are greater than we know. LECTURE XIV. ROBERT BURNS. WHEN speaking at the beginning of these lectures of theology in the earlier poets of the Natural School, in Cowper and Crabbe who preceded the great outbreak of song, I omitted Robert Burns. I now fill up that gap, which was left for a sufficiently good reason—that though the influences which came on England at that time did have their result upon Burns, they had far less result than on others, because he was essentially the creation of his own land, and of another poetic descent than that of England. With regard to the poetry of Nature, he only carried on in a more vivid and tender way, and on precisely the same lines, the same sort of natural description which had been worked by the Scottish poets from the time they began to write. With regard to what I have called, along with others, the poetry of Man, he was less universal and more national than the English poets who followed him. But when we look at his work on this subject, and compare it with that of the English poets who preceded him, or with that of his contemporaries, Cowper and Crabbe, we find in him a peculiar quality which gives him a distinct rank in the history of English poetry, of which I may as well speak in this connection. He restored passion to our poetry. It had not belonged to it since the days of Elizabeth. No one would guess, who began to read our poetic literature shortly after the death of Shakespeare, how rich the veins of nature and emotion had been in our country. He might read through the whole of our poetry, with the exception of a few songs and sonnets, down to Burns, and not find any poetry which could truly be called passionate. So, when the fire broke out again in Burns, it was like a new revelation; men were swept back to the age of Elizabeth, and heard again, though in different chords, the music which had then enchanted the world. And since his time, our poetry has not only been the poetry of Man and of Nature, but also of Passion. And it sprang clean and clear out of the natural soil of a wild heath, not out of a cultivated garden; it was underived from other poets, for Burns read nothing but a collection of English songs; it was unassisted by the general culture of a literary class, for it was born when he was reaping in the fields, and when he held the handles of the plough; it came direct out of a fresh stratum of popular life. It was as if the Muse had said, I am weary of philosophy and satire, weary of faded sentiment, of refined and classic verse, and of stern pictures of misery, and I will have something fresh, at last; and had driven a shaft down through layer after layer of dry clay, till she touched far below, a source of new and hidden waters, that, loosened from their prison, rushed upwards to the surface, and ran away a mountain torrent of clear bright verse, living and life giving. Burns added passion to the poetry of Nature and Man. But independent of the poetry that has to do with these two subjects, and the theology of which I shall speak of in this lecture and the following, there is in Burns a poetry of personality. On this, in its religious aspect, I shall speak in my third lecture. Our subject to-day is the Poetry of Man from a theological point of view, as we find it represented in Burns. The poetry of Man began distinctly in England with the first coming to the light of the ideas of the Revolution. Before the great singers came we can trace these ideas in English poetry, and I have traced them in Cowper and Crabbe. They appear also in Burns, but in by no means so full a form. They influenced him insensibly; he does not recognise their power. But in one point he was consciously at one with them, in their claim that the poor should be thought of as men; in the placing of Man-apart from all consideration of caste and rank and wealth and race-foremost. How far he was touched by this, and how far it was specially modified in him, we have now to consider, and it is part of our subject, for it either flowed directly from a new and larger idea of God, or was creative of a larger view of Him. He was born in 1759, and the first edition of his poems was in 1786. His first work and his youth preceded then the outbreak of the Revolution. We cannot therefore say that he was revolutionised, but he was a born revolutionist, in the sense of being ready, when he thought it needed, to take the part of his own class against selfish rank and wealth; and to appeal for his right to do this U to the common duties and rights of man as man. Not in Cowper, not in Crabbe, not in any of the after Poets, was the deep cry of the Revolution more clearly heard than in the whole of the fine song Is there, for honest poverty, That hangs his head, and a' that? Our toils obscure, and a' that; Being thus himself poor, "following his plough along the mountain side," and having in him, not discontent with his poverty, but a heart framed to enjoy and love all beauty, and to feel all that was human, and being insensibly influenced by the spirit of the time, he threw into tender and humourous song the sorrows and affections of his own class, their religion and their passions, their amusements and their toil, till all the world laughed and wept with Ayrshire ploughmen. As in England, so in Scotland, we now find something better than the distant sentimental view which we found the Poets took of the poor. Burns did in 1786 the work which Crabbe began in England in 1783 and Cowper in 1785. Mark the dates-how they all run togetherAnd I have often wondered in looking at these lines of Gray's, which Burns put as motto to the "Cottar's Saturday Night" Let not ambition mock their useful toil, |