Litchfield enquirer., 1880-10-07
Robert Burns.

OH Saturday DIE JoHu CItcl StdIuc vi Asoo-
ert Burns was unveiled at the New York
Central Park. The address was delivered by
Mr.. George w. Curtis and very fine and
appropriate address it certainly was. We
have room for but q single quotation from an
Grafton that should be read entire:
This season of the reddening leaf, of sunny
stiffness and of roaring storm, especially BELTS
this commemoration, because it was at this
season that the poet was peculiarly inspired,
and because the wild and tender, the hayward
and golden hearted autumn is the best symbol
of his genius. The sculptor has imagined him
in some hour of pensive and ennebling medi.
tation, when his soul, amid the hush OF even
ing, in the falling year, was exalted to an
ecstasy of passionate yearning and regret !;
and here, rapt into silence, just as the heaven
ly melody is murmuring from his lips, here he
sits and will sit forever. 1t was in October
that Highland Mary died. 1t was in October
that the hymn to Mary in heaven was written.
1t was in October, ever afterward, that Burns
was lost in melancholy musiDg as the annivef-
sarv of her death drew near. Yet within a
few days. while his soul might seem to have
been still lifted in that sorrowful prayer. he
mortal of drinking songs:
o Willie brew's peck o. maui,
And Rob and Allan cam to pree,
Three blighter hearts that lee lang night
Ye wadna find in Christendie.
genius, and the voices of the two spirits that
went with him through life:
He raised mortal TO the skies,
She drew an angel down.
This was Burns. This was the blended poet
and NAH. What sweetness and grace! What
soft, pathetic, penetrating melody, as If all the
sadness of shaggy Scotland had found voice!
What whispering witchery of love! What
boisterous jOvial humor, excessive daring, un-
bridled satire of the kirk so scorching and
scornful that John Knox might have burst in
dignant from bis grave and shuddering ghosts
of Covenanters have filled the mountains with
q melancholy wall. A genius 80 masterful, o
charm 80 universal, that it drew farmers from
the fields when his coming was known, and
men from their tavern beds at midnight to
listen delighted until dawn.
Burns sweetness as poet would alone have
placed him among the imniortals but his
bitterness as . radical UNNECESSARILY
widened the influence of his poems. Just as
with US Abraham Lincoln had such hold on
the masses of the people because they felt that
he was the president Of the people, Burns
owes much of his great and continuing popu-
larity to the fact that he is the poet of the
people. The fact that society had no place
for him, that his career was protest against
the proprieties and the fixed facts Of society,
ruined the man, but they gave flavor of in
dependence to his poetry that is, after all, its
finest attribute. Unhappiy there is much
that is immoral much that IS vinous, not to
say alcoholic, in quality; but there is also the
grand protest of one of the born leaders of So
ciety against the barriers that shut him off
from his blrthright. He might have had p!en-
ty of high society on the terms of fattery and
clentage that have too often, satisfied poets,
but true social equality was denied him He
He would accept nothing less, and broke out
in rebellion against society.
A happy, contented, moral Robert Burns
would have been a vastly better man, but he
would never have held the place in the hearts
of his fellow men he mas maintained for near
ly century.