to those passions which his "veins convulsed," and which "still eternal
galloped."

Could he but have governed himself--

"When social life and glee sat down
All joyous and unthinking,
Till, quite transmogrify'd, they've grown
Debauchery and drinking,"--

there would have been a far different story to have told of the life of
Robert Burns.

What ripe fruits of his genius we might have had, had he not burned out
the torch of that brilliant intellect at the early age of thirty-eight.
What poems he might have written--he who did immortal work with all his
drawbacks--had he kept his brain clear and his life sweet even for the
short span of life allotted him! How high might he have soared in the
years which he might have hoped from life, had he but moved at a slower
pace, in those reckless years, the record of which is so painful to the
great world of admiring and pitying friends, who cherish his memory so
tenderly. Yet there is in his case everything to mitigate a severe
judgment upon his youthful follies; and the great world has always
judged him leniently, knowing the story of his early life, and the
temptations which at that day must have surrounded a youth of his
temperament among the peasants of Scotland. Of the strength of those
temptations we probably can form but a slight idea.

"What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted."

And surely, there must have been much that was worthy of honor and
esteem, even of reverence, in the heart of the man, to have brought the
whole world to his feet, in spite of the faults and follies to which we
allude in passing, but upon which we have no disposition to dwell. As a
friendly hand long ago wrote, after visiting his poor, mean home and his
unhonored burial place:--

"We listened readily enough to this paltry gossip, but found that
it robbed the poet's memory of some of the reverence that was its
due. Indeed, this talk over his grave had very much the same effect
as the home-scene of his life, which we had been visiting just
previously. Beholding his poor, mean dwelling and its surroundings,
and picturing his outward life and earthly manifestations from
these, one does not so much wonder that the people of that day
should have failed to recognize all that was admirable and immortal
in a disreputable, drunken, shabbily-clothed, and shabbily-housed
man, consorting with associates of dam