^^^<2yu oJL^i^ (LeyuLiZy 
 
 President 
 The Burns Club of St. Louis 
 
BURNS NIGHTS IN ST. LOUIS 
 
 BURNS AND ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 BURNS AND THE PROPHET ISAIAH 
 
 BURNS AND THE AULD CLAY BIGGIN 
 
 View Points of 
 
 PROFESSOR J. L. LOWES, JUDGE M. N. SALE and 
 
 SOLICITOR GENERAL F. W. LEHMANN. 
 
 THE CLUB, THE ROOM, THE BURNSIANA, 
 THE NIGHTS 
 
 By WALTER B. STEVENS 
 
 Printed for Private Distributioa 
 
 to 
 
 Lovers of Burns 
 
 by 
 
 Tlie Burns Club of St. Louis 
 
 II 
 
33 
 
 By transfer 
 The White House 
 Anarch 3rd, 1913 
 
THE BURNS CLUB OF ST. LOUIS 
 
 This club exists, the by-laws say, "for the pur- 
 pose of commemorating the life and genius of 
 Robert Burns." The purpose had its original 
 expression in the Burns Cottage at the World's 
 Fair of 1904. Reproductions of palaces, copies 
 of historic mansions, imposing types of archi- 
 tecture of many lands were grouped in "The 
 Place of Nations," as it was called. In the midst 
 of them was the replica of the clay-walled, straw- 
 thatched birthplace of him who "brought from 
 Heaven to man the message of the dignity of 
 humanity." It was built and maintained by the 
 Burns Cottage Association, composed of men 
 who had found inspiration in the creed of Burns. 
 The Burns Club of St. Louis succeeded the 
 Cottage Association. It was given a permanent 
 home in the upper chamber of the quaint house 
 of the Artists' Guild. There, about the great 
 fireplace, the Club has assembled treasured relics 
 of Burns' life. Upon the walls are portraits of 
 Burns, sketches of scenes made familiar by his 
 writings and facsimiles of many poems in his 
 handwriting. The chamber is open to the rafters. 
 It has little windows close up under the eaves. 
 The whole interior architecture accords with the 
 collection of Burnsiana and with the uses to which 
 the chamber is put by the Club. 
 
 Anniversaries of Burns are observed by the 
 Burns Club of St. Louis in ways original. The 
 table is spread in the club room. Not forgotten 
 are the oatmeal cake, the haggis, the Scotch 
 
shortbread. By way of introduction to the din- 
 ner the president repeats a few Hnes from Burns, 
 such as The Selkirk Grace : 
 
 Some hae meat, and canna eat, 
 And some wad eat that want it; 
 But we hae meat and we can eat, 
 And sae the Lord be thanket. 
 
 In numbers the Club is not unwieldy. The 
 members fill comfortably the table running the 
 length of the chamber, with room for a congenial 
 guest or two. There is enough Scotch blood in 
 the gathering to save the flavor of Scotch speech. 
 But the membership ranges widely in nativity, 
 in creed and in vocation. The spirit of Burns 
 pervades and abides. Lines with which this spirit 
 is invoked are found by the president of the Club 
 in such quotations from Burns as his own fare- 
 well to the brethren of St, James lodge at Tar- 
 bolton : 
 
 A last request permit me here 
 When yearly ye assemble a', 
 One round, I ask it with a tear, 
 To him, the Bard, that's far awa'. 
 
 As the dinner progresses, there are stories of 
 Burns ; there are spirited discussions on opinions 
 about Burns ; there are quotations and inter- 
 pretations ; there is singing of the songs of 
 ''rantin' rovin' Robin." And thus the Burns 
 Night in St. Louis moves along all too rapidly. 
 
 When the table is cleared, comes the more 
 formal event of the evening — a thoughtful ad- 
 dress on Burns, sometimes given by a member 
 of the Club, sometimes delivered by a guest. .With 
 
 4 
 
the feeling that the interest will be shared by 
 other lovers of Burns, two of these addresses be- 
 fore the Burns Club of St. Louis are presented 
 in this book. With them is incorporated the very 
 noteworthy address on Burns by Frederick W. 
 Lehmann, now solicitor general of the United 
 States, which made memorable Scottish Day at 
 the World's Fair. Fittingly, place is given to the 
 "Lines to Burns" written by a talented Chinaman, 
 a member of the Chinese Imperial Commission 
 to the World's Fair. 
 
 W. B. S. 
 
After the dinner of 1911, Professor J. L. Lowes, of the 
 chair of English at Washington University, took the 
 Burns Club to an unusual viewpoint of the poet's genius. 
 He led his hearers back to the English poets of the 
 Eighteenth Century. He described and illustrated the 
 repressed, pent-up, tamed spirit of that period until its 
 very smoldering presence seemed to fill the chamber. 
 And then with sudden transition, he caused to burst 
 forth, without bounds, the soulful flame of Burns. 
 
 The honor guest of the Club upon this Burns Night 
 was David Franklin Houston, chancellor of Washington 
 University. 
 
BURNS AND ENGLISH POETRY. 
 
 By John Livingston Lowes, 
 Professor of English, Washington University, 
 
 January 28, 1911. 
 
 This address was delivered extempore, and, as it stands, has been 
 dictated from scanty notes. It is printed here, not because the writer 
 deems it in form or content worthy of such permanence — for he does 
 not; but because the Burns Club has asked that it be done. — J. L. L. 
 
 No one but a Scotchman born has any right to 
 speak of Burns before a Burns Club, and I, alas ! 
 am not a Scotchman born. It is true that one 
 of my remote grandmothers was named Janet 
 Adair, and that an ancestor of my own name lies 
 buried, for some inscrutable reason, in Holyrood 
 Chapel. But another grandmother bore the name 
 of Anne West, and still another was christened 
 in unspellable Holland Dutch, so that I fear there 
 is a blending of blood which excludes me from 
 the magic circle of those who call Burns country- 
 man. Moreover, Burns is like Shakespeare, in 
 that everything about him has been already said, 
 and most of it said finally. To attempt to add 
 a note to the chorus of praise with which for a 
 century he has been greeted would be "to paint 
 the lily, and add another hue unto the rainbow." 
 My only salvation (and that for the time being 
 is yours, too) lies in approaching Burns from 
 outside ; and what I wish, with your permission, 
 to do very briefly this evening, is to consider 
 something of what Burns brought into the great 
 current of English poetry. 
 
 Burns appeared at the beginning of a reaction 
 against a reaction. The century to whose close 
 he belonged had swung far enough away from 
 
 7 
 
the traits and qualities which had characterized 
 the great age that had preceded it. Few periods 
 have been so keenly alive, so virile and red- 
 blooded, so brilliantly varied in their interests 
 and activities as that of Elizabeth. There was 
 a zest in living that expressed itself in a superb 
 spontaneity, a careless audacity, an unconsidered 
 lavishness, both in life and in letters, which it 
 would be hard to parallel elsewhere. There was 
 the stir of great movements in the air. The in- 
 fluence of the Renaissance, sweeping up through 
 France and Spain from Italy — "that great limbec 
 of working brains," as old James Howell after- 
 wards called it — had reached England. The 
 voyages to the New World and the daring ex- 
 ploits of men who (in the phrase which em- 
 bodies the very spirit of the Elizabethan voy- 
 agers) "made a wild dedication of themselves 
 To unpath'd waters, undream'd shores" — all this 
 had powerfully stimulated men's imagination. 
 The menace of Spain was making possible such 
 patriotism as burns in old Gaunt's dying words: 
 
 This happy breed of men, this little world. 
 This precious stone set in the silver sea . . . 
 This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this 
 
 England . . . 
 This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear 
 
 land . . . 
 England, bound in with the triumphant sea. 
 
 In a word, men were living deeply, broadly, 
 keenly, and the literature reflected that depth 
 and breadth and vividness. It reflected it in the 
 richness and searching veracity with which al- 
 
most every phase of human passion was de- 
 picted; it reflected it in the unfettered freedom 
 of form that characterized the literature from 
 the briefest lyric to a tragedy Hke Lear ; and it 
 was couched in a diction which was often Hke 
 the large utterance of the early gods. 
 
 Then gradually the pendulum began to swing 
 the other way. This is no place to enter into 
 the reasons for the change. The change came, 
 and it is what it carried with it that concerns us 
 here. I am not one of those who decry the 
 eighteenth century. That much maligned period 
 had its own contribution to make, and it made 
 it in its own dispassionate and businesslike way. 
 But its needle pointed to the other pole, and its 
 ideals were in large degree opposed to those of 
 the spacious days that had preceded it. And 
 nowhere was this more strikingly true than in 
 its poetry. If, then, you will permit me to be 
 concrete, I should like to suggest a few things 
 that may help to set in clearer light the real 
 significance of Robert Burns. 
 
 In the first place, one fundamental article of 
 the eighteenth century poetical code was the re- 
 pression of passion. Here, for example, are a 
 few passages taken wholly at random from the 
 poets of the period, which will illustrate what 
 I mean : 
 
 Let all be hushed, each softest motion cease, 
 Be every loud tumultous thought at peace. 
 
 That happens to be from Congreve lines. On 
 Miss Arabella Hunt Singing. Again, in Parnell : 
 
 9 
 
When thus she spake — Go rule thy will, 
 Bid thy wild passions all be still. 
 
 Doctor Johnson, too, strikes the same note : 
 
 Pour forth thy fervors for a healthful mind, 
 Obedient passions, and a will resigned. 
 
 Not otherwise writes Whitehead, in a poem 
 called (of all things!) The Enthusiast: 
 
 The tyrant passions all subside. 
 Fear, anger, pity, shame and pride 
 No more my bosom move. 
 
 I shall add without comment a few more 
 examples : 
 
 At helm I make my reason sit, 
 
 My crew of passions all submit (Green) ; 
 
 Content me with an humble shade. 
 
 My passions tamed, my wishes laid (Dyer) ; 
 
 And through the mists of passion and of sense 
 To hold his course unfaltering (Akenside) ; 
 
 the virtuous man 
 
 Who keeps his tempered mind serene and pure, 
 And every jarring passion aptly harmonized 
 
 (Thomson). 
 
 These are perfectly typical examples of the 
 attitude of the times. And it is, of course, a 
 sound enough attitude ethically, too. But that 
 
 10 
 
is not the point. The point is simply this. Sup- 
 pose Lear and Hamlet and Othello and Macbeth, 
 suppose Oedipus and Tristram and Launcelot 
 and Faust had possessed "obedient passions and 
 a will resigned"! The question answers itself. 
 No ! with all its praiseworthy effort to see things 
 as they are, the eighteenth century shut its eyes 
 to one of the most fundamental facts of all — to 
 those deep-rooted and elemental impulses whose 
 clash and often tragic struggle purge and uplift 
 through pity and terror. Clever and often 
 masterly as its craftsmanship was ; clear-eyed 
 and shrewd and sane as many of its judgments 
 were, the period hermetically sealed itself against 
 the great winds of the spirit. 
 
 But that was not all. Not only was the range 
 of human interest notably restricted, but the 
 splendid freedom of poetic form that had 
 characterized the earlier days was gone as well. 
 Upon that superb creature, the spirit of English 
 poetry, there was imposed the strait- jacket of 
 what was virtually a single metre; the thing 
 was cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in, by 
 the limits of the decasyllabic couplet. Now one 
 may grant at once that to certain purposes no 
 instrument could be more exquisitely adapted 
 than the heroic couplet. But, as in so many 
 instances, the difficulty lay not in the use, but in 
 the abuse of the medium; and a measure which 
 fits an epigram like a glove is not for that reason 
 necessarily adapted to voice the poignant out- 
 cry of a tortured soul. But, after all, precisely 
 one trouble with the eighteenth century was the 
 fact that it didn't greatly vex its soul ; and one 
 result of its coolly rationalistic attitude toward 
 
 11 
 
life, coupled with the influence of the amazing 
 craftsmanship of Pope, was a devastating mo- 
 notony of heroic couplets, which spread over 
 English poetry hke a flood, with only the tip of 
 an occasional Ararat projecting above the waves. 
 I know I am painting in too broad lines, in too 
 high lights ; but this is after dinner, and I am, 
 I think, telling the essential truth. 
 
 But still another count has to be added to the 
 indictment. For no less fatal than the relentless 
 vogue of the couplet was the prevalence of a so- 
 called "poetic diction." The age revelled in 
 conventional stock terms for things. To call a 
 spade by its proper name was like presenting 
 oneself in company in puris naturalibus. It is 
 all very hke Bottom and Snout and the lion in 
 the Midsummer Night's Dream. "To bring in 
 a hon," says Bottom, "To bring in— God shield 
 us !— a hon among ladies is a most dreadful thing • 
 for there is not a more fearful wild fowl th^n' 
 your hon living." "Therefore," says Snout 
 another prologue must tell that he is not a lion " 
 And so, for the benefit of artistic sensibilities 
 in the poetry we are considering, the lions roar 
 as gently as any sucking doves. The wind is^ 
 softened to "the trembling zephyr" or "the 
 fragrant gale." Shakespeare's "Cradle of the 
 rude imperious surge" becomes "the sprightlv 
 flood," or "swelling tide"; a boot is "the shin- 
 ing leather that encased the limb"; a pipe is 
 'the short tube that fumes beneath the nose " 
 Does one make cofifee.? Then. "From silver 
 spouts the grateful liquors glide. And China's 
 earth receives the smoking tide." Does one 
 stab? Why then, one "with steel invades the 
 
 12 
 
life." In a word, the poetry of the eighteenth 
 century was doomed to go in periwig and small 
 clothes; the superb forthrightness and direct- 
 ness and poignancy of the virile speech of deep 
 feeling or compelling passion was to it an un- 
 known tongue. 
 
 And in upon all that formalism and conven- 
 tion and repression came Robert Burns — "Neither 
 eighteenth century nor nineteenth century" (as 
 Arthur Symons put it a year or so ago) ; "neither 
 local nor temporary, but the very flame of man, 
 speaking as a man has only once or twice spoken 
 in the world." And now, perhaps, we may see 
 more clearly some elements of his significance. 
 
 "The very flame of man" — that puts the essen- 
 tial thing, I think, as well, perhaps, as words 
 after all can express it. For what one thinks of 
 first in Burns's work is its throbbing, pulsing 
 life, which fuses at white heat whatever inert 
 stuff comes into his alembic. The eighteenth 
 century was interested, in its cold methodical 
 way, in abstract truth. Burns' passion for 
 reality, for the true thing, was like a consuming 
 fire, and Holy Willie's Prayer, and the Address 
 to the Deil, and the Address to the Unco Guid 
 in their trenchant lines strip sham and hypocrisy 
 stark naked, and leave them shivering. The 
 eighteenth century had its theories, pleasing 
 enough, about the rights of man. Burns did 
 what Wordsworth rightly insisted every true 
 poet must do — he "carried the thing alive into 
 the heart by passion," and "A man's a man for 
 a' that" — and I should even say The Jolly 
 Beggars, too, — is worth all the volumes of ab- 
 stract theorizing that preceded it. The eighteenth 
 
 13 
 
century took little stock in nature. That line 
 in The Rape of the Lock — "Sol through white 
 curtains shot a timorous ray" — has always 
 seemed to me rather engagingly symbolic of the 
 whole period; it loved to look at nature, when 
 it looked at all, through curtained windows, and 
 the couplet was quite large enough for what it 
 saw. But to Burns the world of nature, animate 
 and inanimate, and the world of human life 
 were bone of one bone and flesh of one flesh. 
 There could scarcely be two men more essen- 
 tially unlike at most points than St, Francis of 
 Assissi and Robert Burns, yet at one point there 
 is an almost startling kinship between the two. 
 Some of you will recall St. Francis's wonder- 
 ful Canticle of the Sun : 
 
 "Praised be my Lord God with all his 
 creatures ; and especially our brother the sun, 
 who brings us the day, and who brings us the 
 light ; fair is he, and shining with a very great 
 splendor: Oh Lord, he signifies us to Thee. 
 
 "Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, 
 and for the stars, the which he has set clear and 
 lovely in heaven. 
 
 "Praised be my Lord for our brother the zvind, 
 and for air and cloud, calms and all weather, by 
 the which thou upholdst in life all creatures. 
 
 "Praised be my Lord for our sister water, 
 who is very serviceable to us, and humble, and 
 precious, and clean. 
 
 "Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, 
 through whom thou givest us light in the dark- 
 ness; and he is bright, and pleasant, and very 
 mighty and strong." 
 
 14 
 
It is that same vivid sense of the brotherhood 
 of all things that are, that is Burns's avithentic 
 note: 
 
 Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie, 
 O, M^hat a panic's in thy breastie ! 
 Thou need na start awa sae hasty, 
 
 Wi' bickering brattle ! 
 I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee, 
 
 Wi' murd'ring pattle ! . . . 
 
 Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin ! 
 Its silly wa's the win's are strewin ! 
 An' naething, now, to big a new ane, 
 
 O' foggage green ! 
 
 An' bleak December's winds ensuin, 
 Baith snell an' keen! 
 
 The eighteenth century was little disturbed bj 
 love. It could "die of a rose in aromatic pain" 
 — but it died in an epigram! The passion that 
 surged through the Elizabethan and Jacobean 
 lyrics and plays had beat itself out; in Pope's 
 hands even the tragic agony of Eloisa and Abe- 
 lard is softened into a mild regret; the theme 
 is played on muted strings. Nobody sang in 
 those days as when, in the greater days before, 
 "wild music burthened every bough." One 
 doesn't sing satire and epigram and critique. 
 But with Burns human passion came again to 
 its own. For, strange as it is, it is no less 
 true, that it isn't what men think, but what they 
 feel that lasts. What Thales and all the Seven 
 Sages thought out "mit Miihe und Not" is as 
 obsolete as the implements forged by Tubal Cain, 
 
 15 
 
while Sapho's handful of mutilated, fragmentary 
 lines that have survived are contemporary with 
 Shelley and with Poe, And in Burns this same 
 elemental human note makes itself heard again. 
 Imagine Dryden or Pope or Doctor Johnson, 
 or even Goldsmith or Gray or Cowper writing: 
 
 "O, my love's like a red, red rose, 
 That's newly sprung in June !" 
 
 And that brings us to another thing. 
 
 New wine won't go into old bottles — and here, 
 emphatically, was new wine. What was to hap- 
 pen? Well, that happened which has happened 
 again and again. It happened when, with only the 
 measured, balanced cadences of classical prosody 
 to express it, there came into the world that 
 passionate thing — for that certainly is what it 
 was — that found its most marvelous expression 
 in the close of the eighth chapter of the letter 
 to the Romans. Could that find room in the 
 stately, serene hexameters of Virgil, or in the 
 graceful stanzas of the Horatian ode? It 
 couldn't, and it didn't; it beat its own music 
 out, and we have, as the result of it, the 
 poignant, plangent measures of the Latin hymns. 
 The new and deeper passion had forged for it- 
 self a new and marvelous measure, that has in- 
 fluenced the poets ever since. Could Beethoven's 
 stormy and tragic meaning cramp itself within 
 the conventional rondo of Hayden or even 
 Mozart? Play one of these, and then listen to 
 the scherzos — the same fundamental form, but 
 qiiatn mutatus ab illo! — the scherzos of the great 
 symphonies, with their rollicking gayety, grim 
 16 
 
mystery, and tragic portent. And so, When 
 Burns appeared, the day of the heroic couplet 
 was done — done because the winged, flame-Hke 
 thing he brought could not be caged within it, 
 any more than Lear's ravings, or the sea-music 
 of Pericles, or the something rich and strange 
 of the Tempest could be put in Shakespeare's 
 earlier blank verse. 
 
 And as he brought freedom of rhythm once 
 more, so with him came back again to English 
 poetry a diction, fresh and masculine and vigor- 
 ous. "Paul's words," said Luther, "are alive: 
 they have hands and feet; if you cut them they 
 bleed." And Burns's words are no less alive, 
 and they are besides racy with the tang of the 
 soil. They are like the speech that Montaigne 
 loved: "It is a natural, simple, and unaffected 
 speech that I love," wrote Montaigne, "so 
 written as it is spoken, and such upon the paper 
 as it is in the mouth, a pithie, sinnowie, full, 
 strong, compendious and material speech." And 
 with Tam O'Shanter, far more than with Words- 
 worth's amiable experiments, the reign of the old 
 poetic diction was at an end. 
 
 "The very flame of man speaking as a man has 
 only spoken once or twice in the world" — that 
 was Robert Burns. And this authentic speech 
 of his proclaimed for English poetry the dawn 
 of a new day. 
 
 17 
 
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Midway in a mile of St. Louis culture stands the 
 quaint Artists' Guild. This mile begins with the 
 monumental entrances of Westmoreland and Portland 
 Places, through which are vistas of parking between 
 double drives bordered by mansions. Then come 
 towering apartment houses of the highest class. A 
 few steps farther, on the left, are the great gateways of 
 Kingsbury Place and Washington Terrace, while east- 
 ward Westminster and Washington Boulevards seem- 
 ingly narrow in the distance to lanes with overhang- 
 ing trees. Beyond is a group of churches, varied in 
 architecture and creed — Christian, Unitarian and Con- 
 gregational. Sandwiched between two of them is this 
 club house and art gallery of the Artists' Guild, the 
 home of the Burns Club and of tlie Franklin Club. 
 In close alignment are the Soldan High School and 
 the William Clark Grammar School, latest and best 
 of public school architecture and equipment in the 
 country. Clustered opposite and in the immediate 
 vicinity are the Smith Academy and the Manual Train- 
 ing School of Washington University and two of the 
 academies of the Catholic sisterhoods — Visitation and 
 St. Philomena. Windermere and Cabanne Places, with 
 their fine residences, are laterals. Cabanne Library, 
 the Model Police Station and the great St. Ann Asylum 
 complete this mile of St. Louis culture. Well-named 
 Union Avenue ! What a fitting center for a shrine to 
 Robert Burns ! 
 
 19 
 
Like unto Isaiah, Judge Moses N. Sale compared 
 Burns when the Club observed the 151st anniversary of 
 the birth of the poet. He found in Burns the gift of 
 tongues and of prophesy for men of every clime and 
 all times. He drew parallels between the words of the 
 ancient prophet in Israel and those of him who 
 "scotched" the Pharisees, the "unco guid" of a later 
 generation. He rebuked in scathing terms those who 
 question the religious nature of Burns and who see 
 in the "Cotter's Saturday Night" and other Burns 
 poems of like nature only "recoil from excesses oi 
 the flesh." The straight-from-the-shoulder sentences 
 of Judge Sale found quick-answering echo in stand- 
 ing vote of the Club, and in the first suggestion to print 
 this volume of Burns Nights in St. Louis. 
 
 20 
 
BURNS, THE PROPHET. 
 
 By Moses N. Sale, 
 Late Judge of the Circuit Court of St. Louis, 
 
 January 25, ]910. 
 
 My apology is due to the members of the 
 club for reading from my manuscript on this 
 occasion. I might tell you, and you would 
 doubtless believe me, that the duties of office 
 and a self-assumed obligation to a body of young 
 men, anxious to improve themselves as lawyers, 
 have not given me the time since I was notified 
 by our secretary, of the part assigned to me on 
 this occasion. These reasons would form a 
 durable foundation for my apology, and they 
 certainly bear the appearance of being solid. 
 They seem to me to be apparently valid excuses 
 for my not being able to deliver to you an ex- 
 temporaneous address, conceived on the spur of 
 the moment and inspired by the occasion itself, 
 after days of deliberation. These reasons, how- 
 ever, are apparent and not real. Stage fright, a 
 form of nervousness, known to those learned in 
 medical jargon as "amnesic aphasia" — the chief 
 symptom of which is the inability on the part of 
 the patient to call to mind the exact word he 
 wants, although recognizing it and able to pro- 
 nounce it when found or when suggested. This 
 is the real reason for my putting on paper, my 
 thoughts, concerning Scotland's greatest poet, 
 and one of the world's great poets. I hope you 
 will detect, concealed in that reason, my great 
 respect for the members of the Burns Club. 
 21 
 
Before entering, however, on the subject as- 
 signed to me, there is another matter which has 
 long lain on my mind, and which has troubled 
 me no little. I disavow sincerely and earnestly 
 any desire to pose as a reformer or to act as a 
 censor in matters of social etiquette; yet it 
 strikes me that on occasions of this kind, chaos 
 is substituted for cosmos. Like him whose 
 birthday we celebrate this evening, I am ordinar- 
 ily a sociable animal ; I enjoy the good things 
 of life that so sparingly fall to my lot, but I find 
 it beyond me altogether to be my natural self, 
 I find it impossible to be sociable, to enjoy my- 
 self and to contribute my share to the enjoyment 
 of others when I sit down to a table laden with 
 good things to whet and satisfy the appetite, 
 knowing all the while that the sword of Damocles 
 hangs over my head ready to drop at the word 
 of the presiding genius. Foreknowledge of com- 
 ing events on those occasions aggravates every 
 symptom of my disease; and I am, therefore, 
 driven to the necessity of putting my words on 
 paper in order to make myself intelligible. If 
 I permit my dirt-self to enjoy the eating and 
 drinking, I do so at the expense of my psychic- 
 self. I always envied the man, who, knowing 
 he was to be called upon after his dinner for a 
 speech, could yet enjoy himself as fully and 
 freely as if nothing direful was impending. I 
 confess that on these occasions my bodily and 
 my mental self get into a fracas, and I am un- 
 able to extricate the one from the other until I 
 am on my way home, walking in the cool of the 
 night air, when my mental-self reasserts its 
 dominion, and I recall to mind the splendid 
 22 
 
speech I had intended to make, but forgot; and 
 then I see all too clearly, what a glorious op- 
 portunity I missed of talking myself into local 
 fame. This confession, publicly made, together 
 with the slight pressure of official work, and my 
 profound respect for the Burns Club, are my 
 justification for reading my address. 
 
 I want to make the suggestion now to mem- 
 bers of the Burns Club, that hereafter, at these 
 annual commemorations, the order of business 
 be so changed as to make it possible for the 
 speakers to enjoy the dinner by giving them 
 the opportunity of emptying themselves of their 
 speeches, so as to make room for the dinner. 
 Speeches first, dinner next. 
 
 May I not modestly ask, "What was I or my 
 generation that I should get sic exaltation" as 
 to be selected by the club for the honor of speak- 
 ing to you of Robert Burns on the 151st an- 
 niversary of his birth? I am honored beyond 
 my meed. I have frequently spoken in terms of 
 profound admiration of the work of Burns and 
 of my deep sympathy with his short and wonder- 
 ful career. I have thus spoken in the presence of 
 some of my friends, who were so fortunate as to 
 have been born in Scotland or descended from 
 Scotch ancestors, and doubtless my talking in 
 such presence is responsible for my plight to- 
 night. 
 
 1 cannot now recall when I first began to read 
 Burns. Except in a general way I cannot now 
 say what first attracted or drew me towards him. 
 I do know what continues to draw me in that 
 direction and what will hold me fast to him as 
 a friend so long as life continues. I am not quite 
 
 23 
 
sure, but I am inclined to believe that his Ode 
 to Poverty was the first of his minor poems 
 -w hich I read or heard read, and I was so charmed 
 with its truth and earnestness that I began to 
 read and study the poet. The Doric dialect of 
 South Scotland, in which Burns wrote, only in- 
 creased the charm of his writing for me. The 
 more of him I read the more I wanted to read; 
 the stronger grew my admiration as 1 read, and 
 my love for him as an older brother, who suffered 
 much, who endured poverty and hardship, an 1 
 yet during his all too brief life set beacon lights 
 along the path of human life, to warn his fellow 
 men of the pit-falls into which he, himself, had 
 so frequently fallen. 
 
 My slight knowledge of the German language 
 made it easier for me to understand the Scotch 
 dialect, I always found an exquisite pleasure in 
 tracing the wandering of words from people to 
 people, from language to language. History 
 furnishes no stronger proof than language that 
 the time was when man to man the world o'er 
 were brothers. The poet says: "Go fetch to me 
 a pint of wine, and fill it in a silver tassie." 
 "Tassie" is the German "tasse," English "cup." 
 In the song of Burns where the young lassie con- 
 siders what she could best do with her auld man, 
 the young wife complains that "he hosts and he 
 hirples;" "Hosts" is the German "Husten," to 
 cough. You remember "That sark she coft for 
 her wee Nannie." "Coft" is the German 
 "kaufen," to buy. I rede ye — rede, the German 
 "rede" — English, speech or discourse. "May 
 you better reck the rede than ever did the ad- 
 viser." "Reck" is the German "rechen," which 
 24 
 
means to count or calculate. "Skaith," Scotch — 
 for injury, is the German word "schade." ("The 
 Deil he could na skaith thee") as the Scotch 
 "blate" is the German "bloede;" — "sicker" — se- 
 cure ; — "unsicker" — insecure — German sicher. 
 "Geek" — {"ye geek at me because I'm poor") — 
 German gucken. The Cotter "zvales" a portion 
 of the big Ha' Bible, with judicious care — Ger- 
 man Wahlen — choose. 
 
 These are simply illustrations of what to me 
 was an additional charm in the language of 
 Burns. Burns has sung himself into the hearts 
 of men and women the world over, and he will 
 remain there enshrined until time is no more. 
 Every great poet is a prophet. Burns was such. 
 "He smote the earth with the rod of his mouth, 
 and with the breath of his lips did he slay the 
 wicked." He had a message to deliver. He ex- 
 pressed it throughout his poems in manifold 
 ways. 
 
 In the ode to General Washington's birthday, 
 he expresses it thus : 
 "But come ye Sons of Liberty, 
 Columbia's offspring, brave as free. 
 In danger's hour still flaming in the van. 
 Ye know, and dare maintain the Royalty of Man." 
 and again : 
 
 "Is there for honest poverty 
 That hangs his head an' a' that 
 The coward slave — we pass him bv, 
 We dare be poor for a' that! 
 For a' that, an' a' that. 
 Our toils obscure an' a' that, 
 The rank is but the guinea's stamp, 
 The man's the gozvd for a' that." 
 
 25 
 
The pith of sense and pride of worth, the 
 genuine in man as against cant and hypocrisy, 
 the false in man, are the chief notes of his song. 
 In a broad sense, he sang and taught the worth 
 of man ; that life is worth the living, if lived 
 worthily. 
 
 As his great countryman expresses it: 
 
 "To the ill-starred Burns was given the power 
 of making man's life more venerable, but that 
 of wisely guiding his own life was not given," 
 
 You may sing loud and you may sing long, 
 but unless there is sweetness and truth — I should 
 say the sweetness of truth — in the voice that 
 sings, the louder you sing, the smaller will your 
 audience become until it dwindles to the singer 
 alone. 
 
 That Burns sang the truth sweetly, is not only 
 demonstratable from his own writings, but is like- 
 wise proven by his constantly growing audience. 
 
 Commencing, as he did, with a few peasant 
 listeners in his Ayrshire home, he had before his 
 death an audience wide as the confines of the 
 English language, which since his death has 
 swollen into a loving and reverent audience, em- 
 bracing the civilized world wherever an articu- 
 late tongue is spoken. His poems have been 
 translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, 
 Dutch, Danish, Hungarian, Swiss and even into 
 Latin verse — aye, even into Russian ; and who 
 knows, but that the leaven of his cry for the 
 royalty, the worth of man — as man, is to-day 
 working in that semi-civilized country, teaching 
 the Russian peasant that it is man's inhumanity 
 to man makes countless thousands mourn, and 
 that the pith of sense and pride of worth are 
 higher rank than a belted knight. 
 
 26 
 
In 1786 the first edition of his poems was pub- 
 lished, known as "The Kilmarnock Edition." 
 Every year since that memorable year, 1786, al- 
 most without exception, somewhere among the 
 sons of men whom Burns so loved, some volume 
 by Burns or concerning him has been published, 
 and in some of those years many volumes were 
 published, until now the bibliography of Burns, 
 things written by and of him, in the various 
 quarters of the globe, including only single copies 
 of each edition of such publications, would con- 
 stitute a library of more than one thousand 
 volumes. 
 
 What does all this mean? It can have only 
 one significance, and that is, that Burns had a 
 world-wide message to deliver, which men were 
 eager to hear, and for which the human soul 
 hungered ; that his message was true and came 
 from the heart of one man to the hearts of his 
 fellow-men, not only to his fellow-Scot, but to 
 his fellow-man the world over. 
 
 If it could ever be said truthfully of any poet 
 in any language, it must be said of Burns that 
 he, indeed, "found tongues in trees, books in the 
 running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in 
 everything." Notwithstanding the truth of this 
 assertion it may not be unbecoming in me to 
 say, since the local press has been discussing a 
 censorship of the stage, that our own beloved 
 poet would have been put in the index libronim 
 prohihitortim or at least in the index expurga- 
 torins long, long ago, if orthodoxy had its way; 
 and this is quite evident from a pamphlet pub- 
 lished in 181 1 entitled, "Burnsiana, addressed to 
 real christians of every denomination," by the 
 
 27 
 
Rev. William Peebles, and another pamphlet 
 published in 1869, entitled, "Should Christians 
 commemorate the birthday of Robert Burns," by 
 the Rev, Fergus Ferguson. I have never read, 
 nor have I ever seen a copy of either of these 
 oblivion-seeking publications ; and the publica- 
 tions, except to the curious students of Burns, 
 have dropped where they belong, into "the in- 
 satiate maw of oblivion" ; but if there had been 
 a censorship of the press in Burns' day, Burns 
 would have been barred. The very names of 
 Rev. Fergus Ferguson and the Rev. William 
 Peebles sound strange to our ears, and except 
 for the fact that each of these reverend gentle- 
 men, during a long and useful life, wrote a mono- 
 graph upon a subject connected with the name 
 of Robert Burns, they would now be buried so 
 deep in the bottomless pit of oblivion that the 
 trumpet of the Angel Gabriel would not disturb 
 their rest. 
 
 In 1859 a chronicle of the hundredth birthday 
 of Burns was published at Edinburgh, contain- 
 ing an account of more than eight hundred meet- 
 ings held in various parts of the English-speak- 
 ing world, together with the most important 
 speeches delivered at such meetings. Here one 
 hundred years after the birth of Burns was an 
 answer to the Rev. Fergus Ferguson, an answer 
 unanimously in the affirmative, that Christians — 
 genuine Christians — not necessarily those who 
 wear the garb of sanctity, should commemorate 
 the birthday of Robert Burns, and in behalf of 
 at least a portion of the non-Christian population 
 of the universe, I affirm that the Jews should 
 likewise commemorate the birthday of Robert 
 28 
 
Burns; Robert Burns was a prophet in Israel, 
 and like a veritable prophet, he speaks to the 
 genuine man of every clime and all times, to all 
 those who answer in the affirmative, the ques- 
 tions, "Have we not all one Father?" "Hath 
 not one God created us all?" Cunning and 
 hypocrisy had invaded the Church of Scotland 
 in Burns' day, as they had churches in other 
 days, and as they will continue to invade the 
 church in yet other days. Burns had little pa- 
 tience with public censors — those who had 
 "naught to do but mark and tell their neighbors' 
 faults and follies." Every age is afflicted with the 
 pestiferous censor — the man who wants to cut 
 and determine for his supposed weaker brothers, 
 the pattern of a moral life ; unfortunately these 
 pattern makers do little else than make patterns. 
 Now, a pattern is in and of itself worthless, un- 
 less you fashion something useful by means of 
 it. The iron-worker uses his mold, but you can't 
 use the mold or pattern for building a structure 
 and if the iron-worker did no more than make 
 patterns, he would live a very useless life. He 
 must do something with his pattern, he must 
 make articles of utility or of beauty, and if he 
 did nothing more than stand idly by and criticise 
 the work of others he is fulfilling not the purpose 
 of the creator — who only criticised his own work, 
 and that after it was completed and done — but 
 he is following the example of old Hornie, Satan, 
 Nick or Clootie, whatever his title may be — 
 creating nothing, but always seeking "to scaud 
 poor wretches." 
 
 Burns scotched the Pharisees, the rigidly 
 righteous of his day — the attendants at the 
 
 29 
 
solemn meetings — those, who "for a pretence 
 make long prayers"; as did Isaiah his hypo- 
 critical contemporaries; as Jesus of Nazareth 
 flayed the same everlasting species in his day. 
 "The blind guides which strain at a gnat, and 
 swallow a camel" — "the hypocrites who pay their 
 tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and omit 
 the weightier matters of the law"; "those who 
 do all their work for to be seen of men," "those 
 who sit in the chief seats of the synagogues," 
 who occupy the front pews, the choice pews of 
 the church — those in short, who have "devo- 
 tions' every grace, except the heart" — these, all 
 these and their name is legion, were scourged by 
 Burns with true prophetic fire — and these self- 
 same Scribes and Pharisees are those who speak 
 and write of Burns' irreligiousness. A brother 
 prophet in Israel had sung: 
 
 "The ox knozveth its ozvner, and the ass his 
 master's crib; but Israel doth not knozv; my 
 people doth not consider." 
 
 "Bring no more vain oblations," sang Isaiah. 
 "Incense is an abomination unto inc. The new 
 moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies 
 (church meetings) I cannot endure. It is in- 
 iquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moon 
 and your appointed feasts my soid hateth. They 
 are a trouble unto me; I am zveary to bear them. 
 And when you spread forth your hands I zvill 
 hide mine eyes from you; yea, when you make 
 many prayers I will not hear. Your hands are 
 full of blood, zvash ye! Make yourselves clean; 
 Put away the evil of your doings from before 
 mine eyes; Cease to do evil; Learn to do zvell; 
 Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the 
 
 20 
 
fatherless, plead for the widow. The princes are 
 rebellions and companions of thieves. Everyone 
 loves gifts and followeth after rezvards. (Just 
 as the boodlers of our day.) They judge not 
 the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the 
 widow come unto them." 
 
 Thus sang the old Hebrew prophet. It is 
 easily imaginable that if we had all that was 
 written by some of the orthodox ministers, (some 
 of the "unco guid") of and concerning Isaiah, 
 there would be found among the lot one with 
 the title page, "Should Israelites commemorate 
 the birth-day of Isaiah?" 
 
 Burns might have written the foregoing quota- 
 tion from Isaiah. He did write so many like 
 it that the preachers in his day thought doubt- 
 less — as the priests did of Isaiah, that Burns was 
 irreligious. Many so-called critics of Burns at- 
 tribute his attacks on the church to motives of 
 personal rancor; but how little they understand 
 the poet! The true poet sees the very soul of 
 things. The rottenness was in the church, and 
 it was this corruption, this humbug and hy- 
 pocrisy within the church that stirred the ire 
 of Burns as it stirred the soul of the ancient 
 prophet under similar circumstances in the re- 
 ligion of Israel. 
 
 Burns had no patience with the new moon, the 
 sabbath, the appointed feasts, the solemn meet- 
 ings, and the many prayers uttered from the 
 lips. They were to him as they were to Isaiah 
 an abomination, because, in the language of 
 Burns, these things were done : 
 31 
 
"In all the pomp of method and of art, 
 When men display to congregations wide, 
 Devotion's every grace, except the heart. 
 
 He had no patience with such lip service, but 
 that he was devoutly truly religious, his poems 
 abundantly prove. No one can read "The Cot- 
 ter's Saturday Night," which contains that 
 beautiful description of religious life in the home 
 of the poor peasant — his own father's home — 
 without feeling that Burns was essentially and 
 truly religious. 
 
 In his epistle to the Rev. John McMath, he 
 says: 
 
 "I gae mad at their grimaces. 
 Their sigh'n, cantin' grace — proud faces, 
 Their three-mile prayers and half-mile graces." 
 
 And in this same epistle he apostrophizes thus : 
 
 "All Hail, Religion, Maid Divine, 
 Pardon a muse so mean as mine, 
 Who in her rough, imperfect line, 
 Thus dares to name thee. 
 To stigmatize false friends of thine, 
 Can ne'er defame thee." 
 
 It seems to me quite obvious that Burns, like 
 the earlier prophets was fighting the devil and 
 his imps, even though such imps were dressed 
 in cloth and wore the livery of heaven. It 
 seems to me that he was only proving how truly 
 religious he was when fighting and opposing, 
 tooth and nail, as he always did, sham and cant, 
 and those, as he puts it, 
 ■32 
 
"Who take Religion in their month, hut never 
 have it elsewhere." 
 
 This seems so plain to me that it is hard for 
 me, not wearing orthodoxy's hood, to under- 
 stand how anyone could ever have questioned 
 Burns' religious nature. If Burns had never 
 known and felt the purity and holiness of re- 
 ligion, if he had never known religion in its 
 reality, he could never have satirized its bastard 
 offspring as he did in "The Holy Tulyie," "Holy 
 Willie's Prayer," "The Holy Fair," and the 
 address to the "Unco Guid." If his own re- 
 ligious feeling was not genuine, whence came 
 his burning indignation at the "false sighin', 
 cantin', grace-proud faces, three-mile prayers 
 and half-mile graces." 
 
 Burns did not believe in the orthodox Hell, 
 nor in the doctrine of eternal damnation as 
 taught by the church; 
 
 "The fear o' Hell's a hangman's whip. 
 To baud the wretch in order, 
 But where ye feel your Honor grip, 
 Let that ay be your border." 
 
 I conclude by calling your attention to a 
 scurvy screed written by Elbert Hubbard, a king 
 among fakirs, who makes books for a living. 
 The screed is one of his little journeys, entitled 
 "Robert Burns." It should be entitled "Elbert 
 Hubbard," for, it is evidently evolved from his 
 inner consciousness, is not based on the life and 
 work of Burns, and is so palpably an effort on 
 the part of Hubbard to drag the gifted Burns 
 33 
 
down to his own level that the pamphlet is posi- 
 tively disgusting. It is so flattering to a small 
 soul to find that Burns went a kennin wrang, but 
 the poor fellow whose morals are so frayed and 
 tattered, and whose vision is so blurred and 
 dimmed as to be able to see in the "Cotter's 
 Saturday Night" only a tip to t'other side, that 
 is, the side of excess and vice, is, indeed, to be 
 pitied. This poem, Hubbard says, was written 
 after a debauch, just as after a debauch a man 
 might sign a pledge and swear off, and that this 
 is true of all of Burns' religious poems. This 
 great critic at East Aurora says that all of Burns' 
 religious poems were simply a recoil from ex- 
 cesses of the flesh ; and thus hath another self- 
 appointed commentator on Burns damned him- 
 self out of his own mouth. 
 
 Burns has been criticised, his life and his life's 
 work discussed by a number of the British es- 
 sayists, including Lord Jeffrey, Christopher 
 North, Thomas Carlyle and Robert Louis 
 Stevenson ; his work as a poet has been dis- 
 cussed by professors of universities, bearing all 
 kinds of degrees, and it remains for this wise 
 man at East Aurora, in the State of New York, - 
 to discover the real origin of Burns' greatness 
 as a poet. 
 
 Christopher North, in his "Recreations," said 
 of Burns : "When he sings, it is like listening to 
 a linnet in the broom, a blackbird in the brake, 
 a laverock in the sky; they sing in the fullness 
 of their joy, as nature teaches them ; and so did 
 he ; and the man, woman or child, who is de- 
 lighted not with such singing, be their virtues 
 what they may, must never hope to be in Heaven." 
 
 34 
 
And so I may well say of the man who in all 
 seriousness writes and publishes in this day and 
 generation that the "Cotter's Saturday Night" 
 is the result of a debauch, he can never hope to 
 escape Hell — he is already there. 
 
 35 
 
tt. 
 
 y s 
 
The Burns Club of St. Louis is rich in Burnsiana. 
 Among the relics which furnish the unique club room 
 are a table which was owned by Burns when he lived 
 at Dumfries, a table from the Tarn O'Shanter inn, 
 a third table made of wood from St. Michael's church 
 at Dumfries, a little chair which was the favorite seat 
 of Burns in his childhood, another chair from the 
 cottage in Ayr and the old arm chair of Mrs. Tam 
 O'Shanter, 
 
 Where sits our sulky, sullen dame, 
 Gathering her brows like gathering storm. 
 Nursing her wrath to keep it warm. 
 
 The great chimney and fireplace at one end of the 
 long club room provide the ingle-nook which is oc- 
 cupied by an old spinning wheel and reel of the Armour 
 family. On the opposite side is the "dresser" or side- 
 board with an array of the Club's tableware — quaint 
 bowls and plates and ashets. 
 
 Upon the mantel, over the fireplace, are candlesticks 
 of Burns' time, and near by hang "Bonnie Jean's" 
 iron holder and the "girdle" on which the cakes were 
 baked. "Bonnie Jean's" milking stool, a cupboard and 
 table which belonged to a family where Burns visited 
 much, a chair that was used often by the poet, and 
 the eight-day clock one hundred and thirty years old 
 give atmosphere to this home of the Burns Club of St. 
 Louis. 
 
 The halls of the chamber are hung with reminders 
 of Burns. There are the original drawings made by 
 John Burnet to illustrate Tam O'Shanter, an oil paint- 
 ing of the Burns Cottage at the World's Fair, facsimiles 
 of many of the best known poems of Burns in his hand- 
 writing, prints and sketches of Scottish scenes made 
 familiar by the poet. 
 
 No Burns Night in St. Louis passes without additions 
 to this already notable collection of Burnsiana. 
 
 37 
 
Chang Yow Tong, of the Chinese Imperial Com- 
 mission, wrote "Human Progress as Shown at the 
 World's Fair in St. Louis." He dedicated his volume 
 of graceful verse "To Universal Peace." The opening 
 of the Exposition drew from him "China's Message to 
 Columbia." The dedication of the Burns Cottage was 
 on the 24th of June, 1904, which was Bannockburn 
 Battle day. Sir Hugh Gilzean-Reid, president of the 
 World's Press Parliament, delivered the address. 
 Among the guests was Chang Yow Tong who was 
 inspired by the occasion to write his "Lines to Burns." 
 
 38 
 
LINES TO BURNS. 
 
 By Chang Yow Tong, 
 
 Chinese Imperial Commissioner, 
 
 Inspired by the Burns Cottage, World's Fair, 1904. 
 
 O! kindred soul of humble birth, 
 Divine, though of the lowly earth, 
 Forgotten thou art not to-day, 
 Nor yet neglected — here's thy bay! 
 
 Thy cottage-home, hid from the proud. 
 Nor thought of by the vulgar crowd, 
 In thine own time has claimed a place 
 On which the world's eyes now gaze. 
 
 Nor changed its homely, rugged lines, 
 Where closely crept thy tender vines ; 
 But men have changed : nor yet deplore — 
 Where once they spurned we now adore. 
 
 Thy life and work and destiny 
 Contain a meaning deep for me ; — 
 Though fame be darkened by a fate, 
 The laurel-wreath comes soon or late. 
 
 Thy splendid fame shall ever rise 
 With undimm'd glory o'er the skies ;— 
 To struggling souls a hope shall yield 
 On sailing seas and ploughing field. 
 
 I am a foreign, unknown bard. 
 Whose devious course is rough and hard ; 
 But cheered at times by thy sweet song, 
 I sing away, nor mind the throng. 
 
 Like thee, I'll toil with manly hand. 
 
 Like thee, by manhood ever stand; 
 
 And, guided by thy spirit brave, 
 
 Shall wait for verdict at the grave. 
 
 — Chang Yow Tong. 
 39 
 
Scottish Day at the World's Fair was celebrated 
 August 15, 1904, the anniversary of the birth of Sir 
 Walter Scott. A company of Highlanders escorted 
 other Scottish organizations of St. Louis through the 
 grounds to the Burns Cottage where President David 
 R. Francis extended a welcome in behalf of the Ex- 
 position management. W. R. Smith, curator of the 
 Botanical Gardens at Washington, a lover of Burns, of 
 international fame, responded. The Scottish flag was 
 raised. Auld Lang Syne was sung. In the Hall of 
 Congresses, the celebration was continued, with Joseph 
 A. Graham presiding. A poem on Robert Burns, by 
 Willis Leonard McClanahan, was read by Maye Mc- 
 Camish Hedrick. Ingersoll's tribute to "The Place 
 Where Burns was Born" was read. Frederick W. 
 Lehmann, a member of the Exposition board and chair- 
 man of the committee on International Congresses, 
 since appointed solicitor general of the United States, 
 delivered the address. 
 
 40 
 
BURNS OF THE "AULD CLAY 
 BIGGIN." 
 
 By Frederick W. Lehmann, 
 Solicitor General of the United States, 
 
 Scottish Day. August 15. 1904. 
 
 Among the many structures which have been 
 reared upon these grounds to illustrate the 
 achievements, during a hundred years, of a free 
 people in a free land, none has more rightful 
 place than that which so faithfully represents the 
 "auld clay biggin" in which Robert Burns was 
 born. Called untimely from this life ere yet the 
 language in which he wrote was heard here, 
 though he himself had never set foot beyond the 
 borders of his own country, the rich fruitage of 
 his genius is none the less a part of the heritage 
 of our people. Throughout the poetry of Burns 
 breathes the spirit of our institutions, the Declara- 
 tion of Independence, the Proclamation of Eman- 
 cipation, and here we have endeavored to realize, 
 as nearly as human effort may, the great truth 
 that 
 
 "The rank is but the guinea's stamp 
 The man's the gowd for a' that." 
 
 The artificial verse of modern pessimism has 
 given us a description of the "man with the hoe," 
 which Burns would not have accepted as a por- 
 trait. When he wrote his "Cotter's Saturday 
 Night," he drew his inspiration not from a 
 foreign canvas, but from his own experience. 
 The cotter he describes was his own father, and 
 of the children who knelt at the ingleside to join 
 41 
 
in the worship of God, Robert was one. The 
 cotter of Burns' inspiring and upHfting poem 
 toiled as hard as ever did Markham's man with 
 the hoe, but he was not a dull soulless clod ; the 
 light of intelligence was in his eye and the fervor 
 of ambition was in his breast. He had been little 
 at school, but he was an educated man. His 
 books were few, but he read and re-read them 
 until he made their learning and wisdom his own. 
 He had strong convictions concerning his posi- 
 tion in the order of the universe, and his sense of 
 nearness to God prevented his abasement in the 
 sight of his fellowmen. As his life darkened to 
 its close, the hope that he had for himself he re- 
 tained for his children, and to the utmost of his 
 ability he strove to fit them for whatever place 
 they might be called to by duty or opportunity. 
 
 At five years of age Robert was sent to school 
 at Alloway Mill, and later the father joined with 
 four of his neighbors to hire a teacher for their 
 children. These early years were well employed. 
 Every moment that could be spared from work 
 was spent in study. He read, not only his school 
 books, but Shakespeare, the Spectator, Pope, 
 Ramsay, and above all, a collection of old 
 Scottish songs. "I pored over them." said he, 
 "driving my cart, or walking to labor, song by 
 song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true, 
 tender or sublime, from affectation and fustian. I 
 am convinced I owe to this practice much of my 
 critic craft, such as it is." His mother was 
 learned in the legends and ballads of her 
 country, and she brightened the evenings of her 
 humble home by recounting them to her 
 children. 
 
 42 
 
There was little variety in this hfe. It was 
 strenuous in its labor and its study, and simple 
 in its recreations. Its burdens were hard to be 
 borne. This showed itself in the early stoop of 
 the poet's shoulders, in his frequent sickness and 
 moods of melancholy. But it was not always 
 dark. He found a charm in the books he pored 
 over so greedily, and a profound pleasure in the 
 companionships which the work and the play of 
 the countryside brought him. 
 
 Much has been written concerning his habits 
 during the years of his early manhood, but the 
 testimony of those who had the best opportuni- 
 ties for observation is that he was not a dissipated 
 man. Indeed, his time must in the main have 
 been well spent. His letters and his conversa- 
 tion showed him to be a man of culture, as surely 
 as his poems showed him to be a man of genius. 
 At the age of twenty-seven, when the mode of his 
 life had changed but little, and certainly not for 
 the better, he went from his farm life in Ayrshire 
 to spend a winter in Edinburgh with the highest 
 fashion of that city, and he towered like Saul 
 among his brethren in a company made up of men 
 like Dugald Stewart and Hugh Blair. He was 
 the center of attraction at every hospitable board, 
 not as a spectacle of nine days' wonder, but as a 
 companion of inspiring presence, not alone to set 
 the table in a roar, but as a man learned among 
 scholars and wise among sages. Into the gay as- 
 semblies of the city where the Duchess of Gordon 
 held sway, he came as a gentleman, and the 
 Duchess herself had to acknowledge that there 
 was no resisting the charm and fascination of his 
 manner. And yet what acquirements and ac- 
 
 43 
 
complishments he had, he got from his farm life, 
 and from that he got all the inspiration of his 
 muse. In no spirit of mock humility did he tell 
 the gentlemen of the Caledonia Hunt that the 
 muse of his country found him at the plough tail. 
 There she found him, and hardly ever seems she 
 to have sought him elsewhere. It is wonderful 
 how little impress his winter in Edinburgh made 
 upon his verse. It may have led him to look a 
 little more to smoothness and polish, but he got 
 from it no inspiration. 
 
 The poet, we were told long ago, is born and 
 not made. We look in vain into the birth and 
 circumstances of the world's greatest children for 
 an explanation of their genius. The unlettered 
 Homer was the great bard of Greece. From 
 among the humblest dwellers on the Avon came 
 the master spirit of our drama, who made the 
 passions of princes and the ambitions of kings the 
 sport of his genius. And from a clay cot near the 
 banks of the Doon the world has gotten its 
 sweetest heritage of song. 
 
 Before Burns was fifteen years old, his powers 
 displayed themselves. In the labors of the har- 
 vest his partner was a beautiful girl a year 
 younger than himself, and she instilled in him, 
 he tells us, "that delicious passion, which in spite 
 of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and 
 book-worm philosophy, I hold to be first of 
 
 human joys Among her love-inspiring 
 
 qualities she sang sweetly; and it was her 
 favorite reel to which I attempted giving an em- 
 bodied vehicle in rhyme Thus with me 
 
 began love and poetry." 
 44 
 
To the gude-wife of Wauchope House he wrote 
 in after years, 
 
 "When first among the yellow corn 
 
 A man I reckoned was, 
 An' wi' the lave ilk merry morn 
 Could rank my rig and lass, 
 
 E'en then a wish, I mind its power, 
 O wish that to my latest hour 
 Shall strongly heave my breast, 
 That I for puir auld Scotland's sake 
 Some useful plan or buik might make, 
 Or sing a sang at least." 
 
 He wrote for years, but without publishing, 
 and such currency as his poems had they got 
 through the circulation of manuscript copies 
 from hand to hand. His reputation grew 
 throughout the countryside. While most of his 
 verses were in praise of his fair friends, some of 
 them were bitter lampoons and biting satires 
 upon those he conceived to be his enemies, and 
 so, while he was loved by some, he was feared 
 and consequently hated by others. In the re- 
 ligious controversies between the Old Light and 
 the New, he took a free part, and there was 
 more than one to harbor resentment for his Holy 
 Fair and Holy Willie's Prayer, and bide his time 
 to indulge it. 
 
 Nor had they long to wait. Burns was soon 
 involved in difficulties from which he saw no 
 escape save in flight. He determined to quit 
 45 
 
Scotland and to try his fortune in the West In- 
 dies. To acquire the means of doing this, and 
 to leave some remembrance of himself in his 
 native land, he ventured upon a publication of 
 his poems. 
 
 In June of 1786, he attended, as he believed, 
 for the last time, the meeting of the Masonic 
 Lodge at Tarbolton, and taking his farewell of 
 them he concluded. 
 
 "A last request permit me here, 
 When yearly ye assemble a' 
 One round, I ask it with a tear, 
 To him, the bard, that's far awa." 
 
 Never was parting prayer more richly answered. 
 The children and the children's children of those 
 who met with him at Tarbolton have been gath- 
 ered to their fathers, and still throughout all Scot- 
 land and in far distant places, wherever Scotia's 
 sons and daughters have wandered, men and 
 women yearly gather to pay the richest meed 
 that genius can win, — the tribute of their affec- 
 tions to his memory. 
 
 Old Fletcher of Saltown said that "if a man 
 were permitted to make all the ballads, he need 
 not care who should make the laws of a nation." 
 Burns wrote the songs, not only of Scotland, but 
 of every English speaking nation, of countries 
 yet unpeopled when he wrote. 
 
 The Kilmarnock edition was published in 1786, 
 when he was twenty-seven years old. The popu- 
 larity of the book was great and instant, and yet 
 he realized from it the meagre sum of twenty 
 pounds, not much more than enough to pay his 
 
 46 
 
expected passage to Jamaica, and less than one- 
 fifth of what would be paid for a single copy of 
 it at the present time. It is not to be wondered 
 at, that with such reward for such work, he was 
 frequently embarrassed and often in despondent 
 mood. He had an aversion to debt amounting to 
 horror, and all his life he was fighting against it. 
 People blamed his want of thrift and his habits 
 of life; it might have served better to extend 
 now and again a helping hand. 
 
 The reception with which the little volume met 
 determined him to stay at home, and to pubHsh 
 a second edition of the book. The printer was 
 willing to risk the expense of the printing, but 
 he insisted on being guaranteed the cost of the 
 paper ; and for this the meagre profits of the first 
 edition were altogether insufficient. 
 
 But now his fame was not confined to Ayrshire, 
 and his ambitious hopes led him to the larger 
 field of the capital. The friends he made there 
 came to his assistance, and the subscriptions, led 
 by the members of the Caledonian Hunt, gave 
 assurance of success in advance. Five hundred 
 pounds were the rewards of this venture, not 
 secured, however, without great delay and diffi- 
 culty, his money being doled out to him from 
 time to time, months elapsing before he was able 
 to get a final settlement with his publisher. Two 
 hundred pounds he gave to his brother, who had 
 undertaken the care of their mother, and the re- 
 mainder he invested in the lease of a farm at 
 Ellisland, the choice of the place being determined 
 rather by the fancy of the poet than by the judg- 
 ment of the farmer. 
 
 47 
 
His improved circumstances on his return from 
 Edinburgh overcame the objections which the 
 parents of Jean Armour had made to him, and 
 his marriage with her, irregularly contracted long 
 before, was now publicly acknowledged and ap- 
 proved by the kirk. 
 
 But the farm was a failure, and the earnings 
 of his literary labors were soon lost upon it, and, 
 much against his will, he accepted a place in the 
 excise at fifty pounds per year. 
 
 What he thought of this work we can guess 
 from what he said, 
 
 "Searching auld wives barrels 
 
 Och on the day! 
 
 That clarty barm should stain my laurels ; 
 
 But — what'U ye say? 
 
 These movin' things ca'd wives and weans. 
 
 Wad move the very heart o' stanes." 
 
 But the best sentiment he expressed on the sub- 
 ject was to the mother of Glencairn, *T would 
 much rather have it said that my profession bor- 
 rowed credit from me, than that I borrowed credit 
 from my profession." 
 
 He left Ellisland, where he had tried in vain 
 to combine the business of farmer and exciseman, 
 and came to Dumfries. Of his life in this city 
 there has been much criticism. He undoubtedly 
 partook sometimes too deeply of the pleasures of 
 the social bowl, but in this he but shared the 
 habits of his time. His companionship was 
 sought by all the free spirits that gathered in 
 the town, for there was none like "rantin', rovin' 
 Robin" to make a night of mirth and merriment. 
 But the reports of his conduct were greatly 
 
 48 
 
exaggerated, not alone by his enemies, but by 
 himself. In his periods of melancholy he was 
 much given to self censure. No man ever 
 acknowledged his faults more freely or more 
 publicly, and if he had said less of his failings, 
 less would have been thought of them. And 
 much of the reproach against him was due to his 
 political views and the freedom with which he 
 expressed them. His heart responded to the 
 rising spirit of independence in France, and it 
 was not in his nature to stifle his convictions. 
 To be a revolutionist was to lose favor in the 
 social realm, and Burns was passed unnoticed, 
 because of his principles, by many who had small 
 occasion to scorn him because of his habits. 
 
 His dependence upon his salary as exciseman 
 irritated him and deepened his despondency. He 
 longed for a competency that he might be in- 
 dependent ; but from the beginning To tlieend 
 fortune mocked his every thrifty endeavor. 
 
 His nature was too sensitive to be indififerent 
 to the treatment he was receiving. A friend met 
 him one day walking alone on the shady side of 
 the street, while the opposite walk was gay with 
 successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, not 
 one of whom seemed willing to recognize the 
 poet. The friend proposed to him to cross, but 
 he answered, "Nay, nay, my young friend, that's 
 all over now," and then quoted a verse from an 
 old ballad, 
 
 "His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow. 
 His auld ane looked better than mony ane's new, 
 But now he let's 't wear ony way it will hing, 
 And casts himself dowie upon the corn bing." 
 
 49 
 
And yet it was during his Dumfries residence 
 that Burns wrote most of his songs. He had 
 been gathering old ballads, altering and adding 
 to them for Johnson's Museum, besides con- 
 tributing some of his own, when George Thom- 
 son entered upon his work of compiling Scottish 
 melodies and having songs written for them by 
 the best writers of the day. He applied to Burns 
 for the help of his genius. Burns answered at 
 once, promising his assistance, and redeemed his 
 promise by contributing some sixty songs, among 
 them the finest efforts of his lyric muse. And, 
 poor as he was, he made it a labor of love. "As 
 to remuneration," he wrote to Thomson, "you 
 may think my songs above price or below price ; 
 but they shall be absolutely one or the other. In 
 the honest enthusiasm with which I embark in 
 your undertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee, 
 hire, etc., would be downright prostitution of 
 soul." 
 
 The man who could write songs like "High- 
 land Mary," "Bannockburn," and "A Man's a 
 Man for a' That," and make them, even when 
 broken with disease and oppressed with poverty, 
 a free gift to his country, is entitled to a charity ' 
 in judgment broad enough to cover more sins 
 than could ever be laid to Burns' charge. 
 
 Not until a few days before his death, when 
 he knew that his end was near, and an im- 
 portunate creditor was threatening him with a 
 process that would cast him in jail, did he alter 
 his purpose. He then wrote to Thomson for five 
 pounds, for which he says, "I promise and en- 
 gage to furnish you with five pounds' worth of 
 the neatest song genius you have seen." With 
 
 50 
 
this letter he enclosed the lines of "Fairest Maid 
 on Devon Banks," Thomson sent the money, 
 the creditor was paid, and within a week Burns 
 was dead. 
 
 "We pity the plumage, and forget the dying 
 bird," cried Shelley, as the brilliant Sheridan lay 
 deserted upon his deathbed. And so it was with 
 Burns. There was a splendid funeral. AU 
 Dumfries marched in procession to his grave, 
 and a great mausoleum was raised above it. And 
 happily better than this, though late it came, his 
 family received the substantial recognition of his 
 labors that was denied to him. 
 
 When he passed away in the prime of his early 
 manhood, his country awoke to the fact that he 
 was the greatest of all her children. No man be- 
 fore, and no man since, has done so much to 
 honor her name. 
 
 He gave to Scottish literature what until then 
 it v/anted, a national quality and character. Men 
 of letters there were before. Hume and Robert- 
 son had written their histories, but for aught 
 that appeared in them, they might have come 
 from south of the Tweed. Stewart and Reid be- 
 long to schools rather than to a nation. Ramsay 
 and Ferguson were not strong enough to make 
 an impression beyond their own time. Before 
 Burns, the Scottish tongue had not attained to 
 the dignity of literary recognition. He chose it 
 deliberately as the medium of his song, and it 
 mastered him as much as he mastered it. Little 
 of what he has written in pure English rises 
 above the level of mediocrity, and it would not 
 be possible to anglicize his Scottish verse with- 
 out distinct impairment of its poetic quality. 
 51 
 
The theme of his verse, like its garb, was 
 Scotch. It was his country and her people, the 
 country as he saw it, the people as he knew them. 
 The scenes he describes are those with which he 
 was familiar, the men and women his every day 
 acquaintances. He never paraphrased books and 
 he never copied pictures. And beyond the con- 
 fines of his country he had never traveled. Was 
 he not, then, narrow and provincial ? In a 
 sense he was, as all genuine men and women 
 are. Just because he knew Scotland so well 
 and loved her so intensely, was he a poet of 
 the world and of humanity. Love of home is 
 a universal quality. Cosmopolitan people are 
 degenerate. They have lost more in depth than 
 they have gained in breadth. The man who 
 «;cGrns his own people is scorned of all others. 
 The ardent patriot who defends his country in 
 every emergency, and not the captious citizen 
 ever ready to confess her faults, is the type of 
 true manhood, understood and appreciated the 
 world over. 
 
 In the poetry of Burns there is no suggestion 
 of the pent atmosphere of the study infected with 
 the smoke of the midnight candle, but it is all 
 fresh with the caller air as it sweeps over heath 
 and moor. His rhymes came to him as he walked 
 the fields and by the streams, and they are the 
 harmonies of nature set to song. 
 
 There is a quick movement in all his composi- 
 tion. He never lingers in description. A line 
 will serve, or, at the most, as in his description 
 of the brook in Hallowe'en, a verse. 
 
 62 
 
"Whyles o'er a linn the burnie plays 
 
 As thro' the glen it wimpelt, 
 
 Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays 
 
 Whyles in a wiel it dimpelt ; 
 
 Whyles glittered to the nightly rays, 
 
 Wi' bickerin' dancin' dazzle, 
 
 Whyles clookit underneath the braes 
 
 Below the spreading hazel." 
 
 In his song of "Westlin Winds" he brings the 
 birds of Scotland before us, each in a line. 
 
 "The partridge loves the fruitful fells, 
 The plover loves the mountains. 
 The woodcock haunts the lonely dells. 
 The soaring hern the fountains ; 
 Through lofty groves the cushat roves, 
 The path of man to shun it ; 
 The hazel bush o'erhangs the thrush. 
 The spreading thorn the linnet." 
 
 The essential qualities of Burns' poems are 
 their truth and humanity. His scenic descriptions 
 are but the framing of some human incident, and 
 he uses bird and beast and flower always to point 
 some moral or adorn some tale of interest to 
 man. He wrote as he felt, and so he wrote some- 
 times sadly and sometimes bitterly ; sadly, for he 
 was often seized with melancholy, and bitterly, 
 because he felt often that he was harshly used. 
 But, fortunately for us and for him, his muse 
 sought him most in his brighter moods, and 
 53 
 
"We see amid the fields of Ayr 
 
 A ploughman who in foul or fair, 
 
 Sings at his task, 
 
 So clear we know not if it is 
 
 The laverock's song we hear or his, 
 
 Nor care to ask." 
 
 In the meanest creature and the humblest in- 
 cident that enters into his life, this ploughman 
 finds a poem, — in the daisy that he upturns, the 
 field mouse, a wounded hare, his aged ewe, his 
 dog, his auld mare, the haggis, and even in the 
 toothache. And a louse upon a lady's bonnet 
 furnishes the occasion of profound moralizing. 
 
 "O wad some power the giftie gie us, 
 To see ourselves as ithers see us, 
 It wad fra mony a blunder free us, 
 And foolish notion." 
 
 In all literature there is no more beautiful 
 picture of humble life than he gives us in the 
 "Cotter's Saturday Night." It has invested the 
 cottage with a charm of interest beyond the 
 romance of the castle. It has lightened the 
 task of many a weary toiler and kept hope in the 
 heart of the heavy laden, and above all, it has 
 taught that 
 
 "To make a happy fireside clime 
 
 For weans and wife, 
 That's the true pathos and sublime 
 
 Of human life." 
 
 54 
 
Had Burns lived longer, or had his circum- 
 stances in life been different, he might have given 
 us some great epic or dramatic work. He con- 
 templated one but it was never begun. That a 
 great lyric drama was within the reach of his 
 powers, his cantata of "The Jolly Beggars" 
 abundantly proves. But "Tam O'Shanter" was 
 his most ambitious production, and this, for 
 picturesque description, for rapid transitions, and 
 for a wonderful blending of mirth and morality, 
 is not to be surpassed. 
 
 The austere critic thinks that Burns deals too 
 lightly with Tam's foibles, and so he thinks of 
 Shakespeare in his dealing with Falstaff. But 
 these great natures were kindly both, and could 
 see the soul of goodness in things evil, and their 
 teaching loses nothing of its force because of its 
 gentleness. 
 
 Burns could not even rail at the devil without 
 speaking at least one word of kindly admonition. 
 
 "Fare you weel, auld nickie ben! 
 O wad ye tak a thought an' men ! 
 Ye aiblins might, I dinna ken. 
 
 Still hae a stake 
 I'm wae to think upo' yon den, 
 
 Even for your sake." 
 
 The songs of Burns will always be the chief de- 
 light of his readers, for they run the whole gamut 
 of human passion and sentiment. 
 
 He sings of woman, and of every woman that 
 ever touched his heart or caught his fancy, and 
 then, lest some one might feel slighted, he sang 
 
 55 
 
to all the sex in his "Green grow the rashes O !" 
 Criticism of these songs is impossible. They 
 must be read, or, better, they must be sung by 
 some loved voice, and then the heart will feel 
 their power. To no mere trick of verse do they 
 owe their charm. It is the genuineness of their 
 sentiment, the reality of their passion, which 
 holds us in thrall. It has been noted that in 
 "Highland Mary" there is not a single perfect 
 rhyme, and this is true, but who cares for that, 
 it is none the less the sweetest song ever written 
 by man to commemorate a pure and a lost love. 
 
 And where is there such a song of that love 
 which never grows old as "John Anderson, My 
 Jo?" 
 
 In other fields of lyric verse, he is also the 
 master. What drinking song better than "Willie 
 brewed a peck of maut ;" what battle hymn 
 more inspiring than "Bannockburn ?" Who has 
 sounded in such trumpet tones the principles of 
 equality as he in "A man's a man for a' that?" 
 And when, among the many millions who speak 
 the English tongue, friends are gathered to- 
 gether, in what song do they pour out their glad- 
 ness, but "Auld Lang Syne?" 
 
 He pictured himself often as a wreck upon 
 life's sea, and envied sometimes those whose 
 "prudent, cautious self control," kept them from 
 the rocks ; and yet, of all the merchant argosies 
 that, sailing under summer skies and over sum- 
 mer seas, came safely into the port of their 
 destiny, how many, aye, were there any, bearing 
 in their holds a freight so precious to humanity 
 as the flotsam and the jetsam cast ashore by the 
 wreck of Robert Burns? 
 
 56 
 
But it is not for us to speak of his life as a 
 wreck. Although he died while his manhood was 
 in its early prime, he had realized the inspiring 
 wish of his youth, some useful plan or book to 
 make or sing a song at least. He made the 
 book; he sang the song and the book is read 
 and the sang is heard the wide world over. 
 
 57 
 
On the Burns Night of 1911, the Club recorded 
 tribute to the memory of a late member, Joseph A. 
 Graham, who had been one of the zealous, steadfast 
 promoters of the Burns Cottage at the World's Fair: 
 
 "He was of that nature to which the gospel of Burns 
 appealed strongly. He viewed men with the tolerance 
 bred of a newspaper life. He loved dogs. We, of the 
 Burns Club, recall fondly the charming personality of 
 our late associate and we voice our tribute to his 
 memory, borrowing the lines : 
 
 Heav'n rest his saul, whare'er he be! 
 Is the wish o' mony mae than me; 
 He had twa faults, or may be three, 
 
 Yet what remead? 
 Ae social, honest man want we. 
 
 Tam Samson's dead." 
 
 58 
 
THE BURNS CLUB OF ST. LOUIS. 
 
 W. K. Bixby 
 Scott Blewett 
 Hanford Crawford 
 Archibald W. Douglas 
 David R. Francis 
 Robert Johnston 
 Frederick W. Lehmann 
 Edward S. Robert 
 Saunders Norvell 
 
 George M. 
 
 Ben Blewett 
 David R. Calhoun 
 J. W. Dick 
 Franklin Ferriss 
 George S. Johns 
 Henry King 
 W. M. Porteous 
 M. N. Sale 
 Walter B. Stevens 
 Wright. 
 
 59