Category: Poetry

The Real Robert Burns

A man's biography should relate the story of his development in power, and his achievements for his fellow-men. Biography can justify itself only in two ways: by revealing the agencies and experiences that formed a man's character and aided in the growth of his highest powers;...

Chapters

4. CHAPTER IV.

'Burns a religious man!' scoffers exclaim. 'He was a drunkard.' Burns was a moderate drinker compared with most of the ministers of his time. If drinking whisky was a disqualifi...

9. CHAPTER VIII.

The fine training by their father developed the minds of both Robert and Gilbert Burns as original, independent thinkers, chiefly in regard to religious, ethical, and social pro...

3. CHAPTER III.

To the Right Hon. John Francis Erskine he wrote: 'The partiality of my countrymen has brought me forward as a man of genius, and has given me a character to support. In the Poet...

8. Chapter III. it has been explained that he was too shy, even at

twenty-two, to ask the woman whom he loved to marry him when he was with her. This does not indicate that he had a new love each week, as many yet believe. Miss Begbie refused t...

5. CHAPTER V.

No man ever comprehended Christ's ideals regarding democracy more fully than did Burns. Christ based His teaching of the need of human liberty on His revelation of the value of...

2. CHAPTER II.

Many people still speak of Burns as an 'uneducated man.' Although a farmer, he was in reality a well-educated man. He was not a finished scholar in the accepted sense of the uni...

10. CHAPTER IX.

At six years of age he was sent to a school in a little home near Alloway Mill for a few months. Then the school was closed, and William Burns, his father, and a few neighbours...

1. CHAPTER I.

A man's biography should relate the story of his development in power, and his achievements for his fellow-men. Biography can justify itself only in two ways: by revealing the a...

6. CHAPTER VI.

In the third letter Burns wrote Alison Begbie, the first woman he asked to marry him, he said: 'I grasp every creature in the arms of Universal Benevolence, and equally particip...

7. CHAPTER VII.

Many people yet believe that Burns was a universal and inconstant lover. He really did not love many women. He loved deeply, but he had not a great many really serious experienc...