dust.
Seldom indeed is it otherwise--seldom is a life morally wrecked, but
the grand cause lies in some internal mal-arrangement, some want less
of good fortune than of good guidance. Nature fashions no creature
without implanting in it the strength needful for its action and
duration: least of all does she so neglect her masterpiece and
darling, the poetic soul. Neither can we believe that it is in the
power of _any_ external circumstances utterly to ruin the mind of a
man--nay, if proper wisdom be given him, even so much as to affect its
essential health and beauty. The sternest sum-total of all worldly
misfortunes is death--nothing more _can_ lie in the cup of human woe:
yet many men, in all ages, have triumphed over death, and led it
captive, converting its physical victory into a moral victory for
themselves, into a seal and immortal consecration for all that their
past life had achieved. What has been done may be done again--nay, it
is but the degree and not the kind of such heroism that differs in
different seasons; for without some portion of this spirit, not of
boisterous daring, but of silent fearlessness, of self-denial, in all
its forms, no good man, in any scene or time, has ever attained to be
good.

We have already stated the error of Burns, and mourned over it rather
than blamed it. It was the want of unity in his purposes, of
consistency in his aims, the hapless attempt to mingle in friendly
union the common spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, which
is of a far different and altogether irreconcilable nature. Burns was
nothing wholly, and Burns could be nothing--no man formed as he was
can be anything by halves. The heart, not of a mere hot-blooded,
popular verse monger, or poetical _Restaurateur_, but of a true poet
and singer, worthy of the old religious heroic times, had been given
him: and he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of
scepticism, selfishness and triviality, when true nobleness was little
understood, and its place supplied by a hollow, dissocial, altogether
barren and unfruitful principle of pride. The influences of that age,
his open, kind, susceptible nature, to say nothing of his highly
untoward situation, made it more than usually difficult for him to
repel or resist: the better spirit that was within him ever sternly
demanded its rights, its supremacy: he spent his life in endeavoring
to reconcile these two, and lost it, as he must have lost it, without
reco