gies. We cannot agree with those critics-some of them of deserved reputation-who have objected to the form in which the poet chose to give expression to his grief. Imagination, touched by human sorrow, loves to idealize; because thereby it purifies, elevates, and ennobles realities, without impairing the pathos belonging to them in nature. Many great poets-nor do we fear now to mention Milton among the number-have in such strains celebrated the beloved dead. They have gone out, along with the object of their desire, from the real living world in which they had been united, and shadowed forth in imagery that bears a high similitude to it, all that was most spiritual in the communion now broken in upon by the mystery of death. So it is in the Lycidas--and so it is in this "Lament." Burns imagines an aged Bard giving vent to his sorrow for his noble master's untimely death, among the "fading yellow woods, that wav'd o'er Lugar's winding stream." That name at once awakens in us the thought of his own dawning genius; and though his head was yet dark as the raven's wing, and "the locks were bleached white with time" of the Apparition evoked with his wailing harp among the "winds lamenting thro' the caves," yet we feel on the instant that the imaginary mourner is one and the same with the real-that the old and the young are inspired with the same passion, and have but one heart. We are taken out of the present time, and placed in one far remote-yet by such removal the personality of the poet, so far from being weakened, is enveloped in a melancholy light that shows it more endearingly to our eyes—the harp of other years sounds with the sorrow that never dies-the words heard are the everlasting language of affection-and is not the object of such lamentation aggrandized by thus being lifted into the domain of poetry?

"I've seen sae mony changefu' years,

On earth I am a stranger grown;
I wander in the ways of men,
Alike unknowing and unknown;
Unheard, unpitied, unreliev'd:
I bear alane my lade o' care,

For silent, low, on beds of dust,

Lie a' that would my sorrows share.

"And last (the sum of a' my griefs!)

My noble master lies in clay;

THE FLOW'R AMANG OUR BARONS BOLD,

HIS COUNTRY'S PRIDE, HIS COUNTRY'S STAY."

We go along with such a mourner in his exaltation of the character of the mourned-great must have been the goodness to generate such gratitude-that which would have been felt to be exaggeration, if expressed in a form not thus imaginative, is here brought within our unquestioning sympathy-and we are prepared to return to the event in its reality, with undiminished fervor, when Burns re-appears in his own character without any disguise, and exclaims

"Awake thy last sad voice, my harp,

The voice of wo and wild despair;
Awake, resound thy latest lay,

Then sleep in silence evermair!
And thou, my last, best, only friend,
That fillest an untimely tomb,

Accept this tribute from the bard

Thou brought from fortune's mirkest gloom.

"In poverty's low, barren vale,

Thick mists, obscure, involv'd me round;
Though oft I turned the wistful eye,

Nae ray of fame was to be found:
Thou found'st me, like the morning sun,
That melts the fogs in limpid air,
The friendless bard and rustic song

Became alike thy fostering care."

The Elegy on "Captain Matthew Henderson "-of whom little or nothing is now known-is a wonderfully fine flight of imagination, but it wants, we think, the deep feeling of the "Lament." It may be called a Rapture. Burns says, "It is a tribute to a man I loved much ;" and in "The Epitaph" which follows it, he draws his character-and a noble one it is—in many points resembling his own. With the exception of the opening and concluding stanzas, the Elegy consists entirely of a supplication to Nature to join with him in lamenting the death of the "ae best fellow e'er was born ;" and though to our ears

there is something grating in that term, yet the disagreeableness of it is done away by the words immediately following:

"Thee, Matthew, Nature's sel' shall mourn,

By wood and wild,

Where, haply, pity strays forlorn,

By man exil'd."

The poet is no sooner on the wing, than he rejoices in his strength of pinion, and with equal ease soars and stoops. We know not where to look, in the whole range of poetry, for an Invocation to the great and fair objects of the external world, so rich and various in imagery, and throughout so sustained; and here again we do not fear to refer to the Lycidas—and to say that Robert Burns will stand a comparison with John Milton.

"But oh, the heavy change, now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone, and never must return!
Thee, Shepherd, thee the woods, and desert caves,
With wild thyme, and the gadding vine o'ergrown,
And all their echoes mourn :

The willows and the hazel copses green
Shall now no more be seen,

Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.

As killing as the canker to the rose,

Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze,

Or frost to flowers, that their gay wardrobe wear,

When first the white-thorn blows;

Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd's ear.

And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues,
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart-star sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rath primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freak'd with jet
The growing violet,

The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,

With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears:
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,

And daffodillies fill their cups with tears,

To strew the Laureat herse where Lycid lies."

All who know the "Lycidas," know how impossible it is to detach any one single passage from the rest, without marring its beauty of relationship-without depriving it of the charm consisting in the rise and fall—the undulation—in which the whole divine poem now gently and now magnificently fluctuates. But even when thus detached, the poetry of these passages is exquisite the expression is perfect-consummate art has crowned the conceptions of inspired genius-and shall we dare set by their side stanzas written by a ploughman? We shall. But first hear Wordsworth. In the Excursion, the Pedlar saysand the Exciseman corroborates its truth

"The poets in their elegies and hymns
Lamenting the departed, call the groves;

They call upon the hills and streams to mourn;
And senseless rocks; nor idly for they speak
In these their invocations with a voice

Of human passion."

:

You have heard Milton-hear Burns

"Ye hills, near neebors o' the starns,
That proudly cock your crested cairns!
Ye cliffs, the haunts of sailing yearns,

Where echo slumbers!

Come join ye, Nature's sturdiest bairns,
My wailing numbers!

"Mourn, ilka grove the cushat kens!

Ye haz❜lly shaws and briery dens!
Ye burnies, wimplin' down your glens,
Wi' toddlin' din,

Or foaming strang, wi' hasty stens,

Frae linn to linn!

"Mourn, little harebells o'er the lea,

Ye stately foxgloves fair to see,