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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
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