Part 4

Come, lovely and soothing Death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later, delicate Death, Praised be the fathomless universe For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise For the sure enwinding arms of cool, enfolding Death. Dark Mother, always gliding near with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? Then I chant for thee, I glorify thee above all, I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly, Approach, strong deliveress, When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead, Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee, Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death. From me to thee glad serenades, Dances for thee I propose, saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee, And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting, And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night, The night in silence under many a star, The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know, And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well veil’d Death, And the body gratefully nestling close to thee,

Over the tree tops I float thee a song, Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide, Over the dense-packed cities all, and the teeming wharves, and ways, I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death.

Whitman in his wheel chair, physically shattered and broken, but with a mind strong and serene, and at peace with all the world, waiting for the sun to set, is a lesson in optimism better than all the sermons ever preached. Without faith in any form of religion that the world has ever known, he had brought his life so in harmony with nature that he felt every beat of the great, universal heart, and with the confidence of certain knowledge he looked upon the fading earth and caroled a song as he sailed forth on that great unknown sea, which is hidden in perpetual night, from all but the few great souls, whose wisdom and insight have given them the confidence and trust of a little child.

Joy, shipmates, joy! (Pleas’d to my soul at death I cry,) Our life is closed, our life begins, The long, long anchorage we leave, The ship is clear at last, she leaps! She swiftly courses from the shore, Joy, shipmates, joy.

Conscious of the integrity of his purpose, and the inherent righteousness of his life, moved and upheld by his broad philosophy and his patient, trustful soul, with no false modesty and with the same manly egoism that made him what he was—the kindest, gentlest, justest, broadest, manliest man—Walt Whitman asked the reward his life had earned.

Give me the pay I have served for, Give me to sing the song of the great Idea, take all the rest, I have loved the earth, sun, animals, I have despised riches, I have given alms to every one that ask’d, stood up for the stupid and crazy, devoted my income and labor to others, Hated tyrants, argued not concerning God, had patience and indulgence toward people, taken off my hat to nothing known or unknown, Gone freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young, and with the mothers of families, Read these leaves to myself in the open air, tried them by trees, stars, rivers, Dismiss’d whatever insulted my own soul or defiled my body, Claim’d nothing to myself which I have not carefully claim’d for others on the same terms, Sped to the camps, and comrades found and accepted from every State, (Upon this breast has many a dying soldier lean’d to breathe his last, This arm, this hand, this voice, have nourish’d, rais’d, restor’d, To life recalling many a prostrate form;) I am willing to wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of myself, Rejecting none, permitting all.

When man has grown simpler and saner and truer—when the fever of civilization has been subdued and the pestilence been cured; when man shall no longer deny and revile the universal mother who gave him birth, then Walt Whitman’s day will come. In the clear light of that regenerated time, when the world looks back to the doubt and mist and confusion of to-day, Walt Whitman will stand alone, the greatest, truest, noblest prophet of the age, a man untainted by artificial life and unmoved by the false standards of his time. In a sodden, commercial, money-getting age, he enjoyed all the beauty of the earth without the vulgar lust to own. In a world of privilege and caste, he felt and taught the brotherhood of man and the kinship of all living things. In an age of false modesty and perverted thought, he sang the sanctity of the body with the divinity of the soul. Against the agnostic and the Christian too, he defended every part and portion of the faultless work of the creative power. Above the doleful, doubting voice of men, through the dreariest day and darkest night, in the raging of the storm and the madness of the waves, his strong, optimistic, reassuring note was ever heard above the rest, proclaiming to the universe that all is well. He saw that in a wise economy and a great broad way, that the false was true, the evil good, the wrong was right, and that over all the universe, pervading all its teeming life, a power omnipotent, beneficent and wise, was working to uplift, conserve and purify the whole. The poor, the weak, the suffering, the outcast, the felon, all knew him for their comrade and their friend. His great, inclusive, universal heart left no soul outside, but all alike he knew, the life of all he felt, and one and all he loved. In his vocabulary were no words of bitterness and hate, and in his philosophy no right to censure or to blame. In his every deed and thought he seemed to say:

“So I be written in the book of love, I have no care about that book above, Erase my name, or write it as you please, So I be written in the book of love.”

As the shadows lengthen and the daylight wanes—as the hair whitens and the passions cool, more and more do we learn that love is the true philosophy of life; more and more do we revise the sterner judgments of our earlier years; more and more do we see that pity should take the place of blame, forgiveness of punishment, charity of justice, and hatred be replaced by love. When old familiar faces awake the memories of bygone days, often and often again do we fear that our judgments were cruel and unjust, but every deed of mercy and every act of charity and every thought of pity is like the balm of Gilead to our souls. We may none of us be wise or great, fortune may elude us and fame may never come; but however poor or weak or humble, we yet may inscribe our names in the fairest, brightest book,—the book of love, and on its sacred pages, earned by the glorious truths he taught, by his infinite, ever present love of all, upon the foremost line will be inscribed Walt Whitman’s name.

ROBERT · BURNS

ROBERT BURNS.

It is difficult to account for a genius like Robert Burns. His life and work seem to defy the laws of heredity and environment alike. The beasts of the field were scarcely bound closer to the soil than were the ancestors from which he sprang; and from his early infancy he was forced to follow the stony path his father trod before. As a mere child, he learned how hard it is to sustain life in the face of an unfriendly nature and a cruel, bitter world. He was early bred to toil; not the work that gives strength and health, but the hard, constant, manual labor that degrades and embitters, deforms and twists and stunts the body and the soul alike. Burns was denied even the brief years of childhood—those few, short years upon which most of us look back from our disappointments and cares as the one bright spot in a gray and level plain.

It is not alone by the works he has left us that Robert Burns is to be truly judged. Fortune endowed him with a wondrous brain and a still rarer and greater gift—a tender, loving, universal heart; but as if she grudged him these and sought to destroy or stunt their power, she cast his lot in a social and religious environment as hard and forbidding as the cold and sterile soil of his native land; and from these surroundings alone he was obliged to draw the warmth and color and sunshine that should have come from loving hearts, generous bounties, and bright, blue southern skies. In measuring the power and character of Robert Burns, we must remember the hard and cruel conditions of his life, and judge of his great achievements in the light of these.

The ways of destiny have ever been beyond the ken of man; now and then, at rare, long intervals, she descends upon the earth, and in her arms she bears disguised a precious gift, which she lavished upon a blind, unwilling world. She passes by the gorgeous palaces and beautiful abodes of men, and drops the treasure in a manger or a hut; she comes again to take it back from a world that knew it not and cast it out; and again, she seeks it not among the strong and great, but in the hovel of the poor, the prison pen, or perhaps upon the scaffold or the block.

Measured by the standards of our day and generation, the life of Robert Burns was a failure and mistake. He went back to the great common Mother as naked of all the gilded trappings and baubles, which men call wealth, as when she first placed the struggling infant on its mother’s breast.

Robert Burns was not a “business man”; he was not one of Dumfries’ “first citizens”—in the measure of that day and this; he was one of its last if not its worst. He had no stock in a corporation and no interest in a syndicate or trust. He had neither a bank nor bank account. He never endowed a library, a museum, or a university. He was a singer of songs,—a dreamer of dreams. He was poor, improvident, intemperate, and according to the Scottish creed, immoral and irreligious. In spite of his great intellect he was doubted, neglected and despised. He died in destitution and despair; but the great light of his genius, which his neighbors could not see or comprehend, has grown brighter and clearer as the years have rolled away. A beautiful mausoleum now holds his once neglected ashes; monuments have been reared to his memory wherever worth is known and fame preserved; while millions of men and women, the greatest and the humblest of the world alike, have felt their own heartstrings moved and stirred in unison with the music of this immortal bard, whose song was the breath of Nature,—the sweetest, tenderest melody that ever came from that rarest instrument—the devoted poet’s soul.

The great masterpieces of his genius were not created in the pleasant study of a home of refinement, luxury, and ease, but were born in the fields, the farm yard, the stable; while the “monarch peasant” was bending above the humblest tasks that men pursue for bread. Only the most ordinary education was within the reach of this child of toil, and the world’s great storehouses of learning, literature, and art were sealed forever from his sight; and yet, with only the rude peasants, with whom his life was spent, the narrow setting of bleak fields and grey hills, which was the small stage on which he moved, and the sterile Scotch dialect with which to paint, he stirred the hearts of men with the sweetest, highest, purest melody that has ever moved the human soul.

Olive Schreiner tells of an artist whose pictures shone with the richest, brightest glow. His admirers gazed upon the canvas and wondered where he found the colors—so much rarer than any they had ever seen before. Other artists searched the earth, but could find no tints like his; he died with the secret in his breast. And when they undressed him to put his grave-clothes on, they found an old wound, hard and jagged above his heart; and still they wondered where he found the coloring for his work. Robert Burns, perhaps more than any other man who ever lived, taught the great truth that poets are not made but born; that the richest literature, the brightest gems of art, even the most pleasing earthly prospects are less than one spark of the divine fire, which alone can kindle the true light. Robert Burns like all great artists, taught the world that the beauty of the landscape, and the grandeur and pathos of life depend, not upon the external objects that nature has chanced to place before our view, but upon the soul of the artist, which alone can really see and interpret the manifold works of the great author, beside which all human effort is so poor and weak.

Millet looked at the French peasants standing in their wooden shoes, digging potatoes from the earth and pausing to bow reverently at the sounding of the Angelus, and saw in this simple life, so close to Nature’s heart, more beauty and pathos and poetry than all the glittering courts of Europe could produce. And Robert Burns, whose broad mind and sympathetic soul made him kin to all living things, had no need to see the splendor and gaiety of wealth and power, to visit foreign shores and unknown lands; but the flowers, the heather, the daisies, the bleak fields, the pelting rains, the singing birds, the lowing cattle, and above all, the simple country folk seen through his eyes, and felt by his soul, and held in his all-embracing heart, were covered with a beauty and a glory that all the artificial world could not create, and that his genius has endowed with immortal life. Robert Burns did not borrow his philosophy from the books, his humanity from the church, or his poetry from the schools. Luckily for us he escaped all these, and unfettered and untaught, went straight to the soul of Nature to learn from the great source, the harmony and beauty and unity that pervades the whole; and he painted these with colors drawn from his great human heart. His universal sympathy gave him an insight into life that students of science and philosophy can never reach. Contemplating Nature, and seeing her generous bounties lavished alike on all her children, he could not but contrast this with the selfishness and inhumanity of man, which crushes out the weak and helpless and builds up the great and strong. Burns was a natural leveler, and while men still believed in the “divine right of kings,” he preached that “man was the divine King of rights.” None knew better than he the injustice of the social life in which he lived, and in which we live to-day. Burns knew, as all men of intelligence understand, that worldly goods are not, and never have been given as a reward of either brains or merit.

It’s hardly in a body’s power To keep at times, frae being sour, To see how things are shared; How best o’chiels are whiles in want While coofs on countless thousands rant And ken na how to wair’t.

The immortal singer of songs, and all his descendants, received infinitely less for all the works of his genius than an ordinary gambler often gets for one sale of something that he never owned, or one purchase of something that he never bought; and it is doubtful if all the masterpieces of the world in art, in literature, and in science, ever brought as much cash to those whose great, patient brains have carefully and honestly wrought that the earth might be richer and better and brighter, as has been often “made” by one inferior speculator upon a single issue of watered stock.

Living in the midst of aristocracy and privilege and caste, Burns was a democrat that believed in the equality of man. It required no books or professors, or theories to teach him the injustice of the social conditions under which the world has ever lived. Here, as elsewhere, he looked to the heart—a teacher infinitely more honest and reliable than the brain.

If I’m design’d yon lordling’s slave, By Nature’s law design’d; Why was an independent wish E’er planted in my mind?

If not, why am I subject to His cruelty, or scorn? Or why has man the will and pow’r To make his fellow mourn?

Preachers and authors and teachers, judges and professors and lawyers, have been employed for ages to teach the justice of slavery and the folly and crime of equal rights; but through all quibbles and evasions, this question of Burns, straight from the heart, as well as the head, shows that all these excuses are but snares and cheats. The voice of the French Revolution could not fail to move a soul like that of Robert Burns. This great struggle for human liberty came upon the world with almost the suddenness of an earthquake, and with much of its terrors, too. Here the poor and the oppressed felt the first substantial hope for freedom that had pierced the long, dark centuries since history told the acts of men. To the oppressors and the powerful, who hated liberty then as they ever have, before and since, it was a wild, dread threat of destruction and ruin to their precious “rights.” When the struggle commenced, Burns was enjoying the munificent salary of Fifty pounds a year as a whisky gauger in the village of Dumfries. He had already spent a winter in Edinburgh, and had been feted and dined by the aristocracy and culture of Scotland’s capital without losing his head, although at no small risk. An acquaintance and entertainer of the nobility and an incumbent of a lucrative office, there was but one thing for Burns to do; this was to condemn the Revolution and lend his trenchant pen to the oppressor’s cause; but this course he flatly refused to take. He openly espoused the side of the people, and wrote the “Tree of Liberty,” one of his most stirring songs, in its defense.

Upon this tree there grows sic fruit, Its virtues a’can tell man; It raises man aboon the brute, It mak’s him ken himsel’ man. Gif ance the peasant taste a bit, He’s greater than a lord man.

King Louis thought to cut it down When it was unco sma’ man; For this the watchman cracked his crown, Cut aff his head an’ a’ man.

Even these words are not strong enough to express his love for natural liberty and his distrust of those forms and institutions which over and over again have crushed the priceless gem they pretend to protect.

A fig for those by law protected! Liberty’s a glorious feast! Courts for cowards were erected, Churches built to please the priest.

Even higher and broader was Burns’ view of equality and right. He stood on a serene height, where he looked upon all the strife and contention of individuals and states, and dreamed of a perfect harmony and universal order, where men and Nations alike should be at peace, and the world united in one grand common brotherhood, where the fondest wish of each should be the highest good of all. These beautiful, prophetic lines seem to speak of a day as distant now as when Burns wrote them down a hundred years ago. But still, all men that love the human race will ever hope, and work, and say with him:

Then let us pray that come it may, As come it will for a’ that, That sense and worth, o’er a’ the earth May bear the gree, and a’ that; For a’ that, and a’ that, It’s coming yet, for a’ that, That man to man, the warld o’er, Shall brothers be for a’ that.

It is perhaps as a singer of songs that the literary fame of Burns will longest be preserved. No other poet has ever breathed such music from his soul. His melodies are as sweet and pure as the bubbling spring; and as natural and spontaneous as ever came from the throat of the nightingale or lark. These songs could not be made. The feeling and passion that left his soul bore this music as naturally as the zephyr that has fanned the strings of the Æolian harp. The meter of these songs was not learned by scanning Latin verse, or studying the dry rules that govern literary art, but it was born of the regular pulse beats, which in the heart of Nature’s poets are as smooth and unstudied as the rippling laughter of her purling brooks.

John Anderson, my jo, John, When we were first acquent, Your locks were like the raven, Your bonnie brow was brent; But now your brow is beld, John, Your locks are like the snow; But blessing on your frosty pow, John Anderson, my jo.

John Anderson, my jo, John, We clamb the hill tegither, And mony a canty day, John, We’ve had wi’ ane anither; Now we maun totter down, John, But hand in hand we’ll go, And sleep tegither at the foot, John Anderson, my jo.

Although a plough boy and surrounded by the grime and dirt that come from contact with the soil, still even here Burns found material for music and poetry that will live as long as human hearts endure; for, though the sky may be warmer and bluer on the Mediterranean shore than where it domes the Scottish hills and crags, still the same heaven bends above them both, and the same infinite mysteries are hidden in their unfathomed depths. The tragedy of death is alike, whether defying the power of a Prince, or entering the home of the humblest peasant to bring the first moments of relief and rest. The miracle of life, whether wrought by Nature on the rich couch of the Queen or the unwatched pallet of the peasant, is the same mystery, ever new, ever old, appealing ever to the heart of man. The affections and passions,—those profound feelings that Nature planted deep in the being of all sentient things, and on whose strength all life depends,—these are the deepest and purest as we leave the conventions and trappings of the artificial world, and draw nearer to the heart of the great Universal power. With the sky above, the fields around, and all Nature throbbing and teeming with pulsing life, but one thing more was needed to make harmony and music, and that was Robert Burns.

The old story of human love was sung by him a thousand times and in a thousand varying moods, as never love was sung before. It mattered not that his melodies breathed of rustic scenes, of country maids, and of plain untutored hearts that beat as Nature made them feel, unfettered by the restraints and cords of an artificial life. Transport his Mary to a gorgeous palace, and deck her fair form with the richest treasures of the earth and bring to her side the proudest noble that ever paid homage to a princess, and no singer,—not even Burns himself,—could make a melody like the matchless music that he sung to Highland Mary.

How sweetly bloom’d the gay green birk, How rich the hawthorn’s blossom; As underneath their fragrant shade, I clasp’d her to my bosom!

The golden hours, on angel wings, Flew o’er me and my dearie; For dear to me as light and life Was my sweet Highland Mary.

All the conventions and baubles and spangles which fashion and custom use to adorn the fair could only have cheapened and made vulgar the rustic maiden that moved Burns’ soul to song.

These sweet lines could never have been written of any but a simple country lass, whose natural charms had moved a susceptible human heart: