feet-its huge flanks purr very pleasantly to you; but it will crack your bones and eat you, for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened. The mountains give their lost children berries and water; the sea mocks their thirst and lets them 5 die. The mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea has a fascinating, treacherous intelligence. The mountains lie about like huge ruminants, their broad backs awful to look upon, but safe to handle. The sea smooths its silver scales until you cannot see 10 their joints—but their shining is that of a snake's belly, after all. In deeper suggestiveness I find as great a difference. The mountains dwarf mankind and foreshorten the procession of its long generations. The sea drowns out humanity and time; it has no sympathy with 15 either; for it belongs to eternity, and of that it sings for ever and ever. Yet I should love to have a little box by the seashore. I should love to gaze out on the wild feline element from a front window of my own, just as I should love to look on a caged panther, and see it stretch 20 its shining length, and then curl over and lap its smooth sides, and by and by begin to lash itself into a rage and show its white teeth and spring at its bars, and howl the cry of its mad, but, to me, harmless fury. And then— to look at it with that inward eye--who does not love to shuffle off time and its concerns, at intervals to forget who is President and who is Governor, what race he belongs to, what language he speaks, which goldenheaded nail of the firmament his particular planetary system is hung upon, and listen to the great liquid met-30 ronome' as it beats its solemn measure, steadily swinging when the solo or duet of human life began, and to swing just as steadily after the human chorus has died out and man is a fossil on its shores ?

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LV.

ROBERT BURNS.

BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.'

THE year 1759 was a proud year for Great Britain. Two years before, amid universal disaster, Lord Chesterfield' had exclaimed, "We are no longer a nation." But, meanwhile, Lord Chatham3 had restored to his country the scepter of the seas and covered her name with the glory of continuous victory. The year 1759 saw his greatest triumphs. It was the year of Minden,* where the French army was routed; of Quiberon, where the French fleet was destroyed; of the heights of Abraham in Canada, where Wolfe died happy, and the dream of 10 French supremacy upon the American continent vanished forever. The triumphant thunder of British guns was heard all around the world. Robert Clive" was founding British dominion in India; Boscawen and his fellow-admirals were sweeping France from the ocean; 18 and, in America, Col. George Washington had planted the British flag on the field of Braddock's defeat. "We are forced to ask every morning what victory there is," said Horace Walpole," "for fear of missing one."

But not only in politics and war was the genius of 20 Great Britain illustrious. James Watts was testing the force of steam; Hargreaves was inventing the spinning jenny, which ten years later Arkwright would complete; and Wedgwood was making household ware beautiful. Fielding's' “Tom Jones" had been ten years in print, and Gray's "Elegy" nine years. Dr. Johnson had lately

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published his dictionary," and Edmund Burke his essay on the Sublime and Beautiful. In the year 1759 Garrick" was the first of actors and Sir Joshua Reynolds of painters. Gibbon" dated in this year the preface of his first work; Hume published the third and fourth vol- s umes of his history of England; Robertson his history of Scotland; and Sterne came to London to find a publisher for "Tristram Shandy." Oliver Goldsmith," "unfriended, solitary," was toiling for the booksellers in his garret over Fleet Ditch; but four years later, with Burke and Reynolds and Garrick and Johnson, he would found the most famous of literary clubs, and sell the "Vicar of Wakefield" to save himself from jail. It was a year of events decisive of the course of history, and of men whose fame is an illustrious national possession. 15 But among those events none is more memorable than the birth of a son in the poorest of Scotch homes; and of all that renowned and resplendent throng of statesmen, soldiers, and seamen, of philosophers, poets, and inventors, whose fame filled the world with acclamation, 20 not one is more gratefully and fondly remembered than the Ayrshire plowman, Robert Burns."

This great assembly is in large part composed of his countrymen. Most of you, fellow-citizens, were born in Scotland. There is no more beautiful country, and, as 25 you stand here, memory and imagination recall your native land. Misty coasts and far-stretching splendors of summer sea, solemn mountains and wind - swept moors, singing streams and rocky glens and waterfalls; lovely vales of Ayr" and Yarrow, of Teviot and the 30 Tweed; crumbling ruins of ancient days, abbey and castle and tower; legends of romance gilding burn1 and brae with "the light that never was on sea or land," every hill with its heroic tradition, every stream with

its story, every valley with its song, land of the harebell and the mountain daisy, land of the laverock" and the curlew, land of braw 18 youths and sonsie lasses, of a deep, strong, melancholy manhood, of a deep, true, tender womanhood-this is your Scotland, this is your native 5 land-and how could you so truly transport it to the home of your adoption, how interpret it to us beyond the sea, so fully and so fitly, as by this memorial of the poet whose song is Scotland? No wonder that you proudly bring his statue and place it here under the 10 American sun, in the chief American city, side by side with that of the other great Scotchman whose genius and fame, like the air and the sunshine, no local boundIn this Walhalla 20 of our various naary can confine. tionality, it will be long before two fellow-countrymen 15 are commemorated whose genius is at once so characteristically national and so broadly universal, who speak so truly for their own countrymen and for all mankind, as Walter Scott and Robert Burns.

This season of the reddening leaf, of sunny stillness 20 and of roaring storm, especially befits this commemoration, because it was at this season that the poet was peculiarly inspired, and because the wild and tender, the wayward and golden-hearted autumn is the best symbol of his genius. The sculptor has imagined him in some 25 hour of pensive and ennobling meditation, when his soul, amid the hush of evening, in the falling year, was exalted to an ecstasy of passionate yearning and regret; and here, rapt into silence, just as the heavenly melody is murmuring from his lips, here he sits and will sit forever. It 30 was in October that Highland Mary died. It was in October that the hymn "To Mary in Heaven" was written. It was in October, ever afterwards, that Burns was lost in melancholy musing as the anniversary 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 wrote the most rollicking, resistless, and immortal of drinking songs:

"O Willie brewed a peck o' maut,

And Rob and Allan cam to pree:

Three blither hearts that lee-lang night

Ye wad na find in Christendie." 21

Here were the two strains of this marvelous genius, and the voices of the two spirits that went with him 10 through life:

This was Burns. This was the blended poet and man. What sweetness and grace! What soft, pathetic, pene-15 trating melody, as if all the sadness of shaggy Scotland had found a voice! What whispering witchery of love! What boisterous, jovial humor, excessive, daring, unbridled !—satire of the kirk so scorching and scornful that John Knox" might have burst indignant from his 20 grave, and shuddering ghosts of Covenanters have filled the mountains with a melancholy wail. A genius so masterful, a charm so universal, that it drew farmers from the field when his coming was known, and men from their tavern beds at midnight to listen delighted 25 until dawn.

It cannot be said of Burns that he "burst his birth's invidious bar." He was born poor, he lived poor, he died poor, and he always felt his poverty to be a curse. He was fully conscious of himself and of his intellectual 30 superiority. He disdained and resented the condescension of the great, and he defiantly asserted his independence. I do not say that he might not or ought not to