) In these compositions, especially the first, there is much
indelicacy (some editions flatly leave it out,) but the composer
reigns alone, with handling free and broad and true, and is an artist.
You may see and feel the man indirectly in his other verses, all of
them, with more or less life-likeness--but these I have named last
call out pronouncedly in his own voice,
"I, Rob, am here."
Finally, in any summing-up of Burns, though so much is to be said in
the way of fault-finding, drawing black marks, and doubtless severe
literary criticism--(in the present outpouring I have "kept myself
in," rather than allow'd any free flow)--after full retrospect of his
works and life, the aforesaid "odd-kind chiel" remains to my heart and
brain as almost the tenderest, manliest, and (even if contradictory)
dearest flesh-and-blood figure in all the streams and clusters of
by-gone poets.
Notes:
[39] Probably no man that ever lived--a friend has made the
statement--was so fondly loved, both by men and women, as Robert
Burns. The reason is not hard to find: he had a real heart of flesh
and blood beating in his bosom; you could almost hear it throb. "Some
one said, that if you had shaken hands with him his hand would have
burnt yours. The gods, indeed, made him poetical, but Nature had a
hand in him first. His heart was in the right place; he did not pile
up cantos of poetic diction; he pluck'd the mountain daisy under his
feet; he wrote of field-mouse hurrying from its ruin'd dwelling.
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