The Life of Robert Burns

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G. Bell, 1882 - 349 pages
 

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Page 194 - JEolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident; or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities: a God that made all things, man's immaterial and immortal nature, and a world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave.
Page 95 - My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream, Flow gently, sweet Afton...
Page 274 - THESE, as they change, ALMIGHTY FATHER, these Are but the varied God. The rolling year Is full of THEE. Forth in the pleasing Spring THY beauty walks, THY tenderness and love. Wide flush the fields ; the softening air is balm ; Echo the mountains round ; the forest smiles ; And every sense, and every heart is joy. Then comes THY glory in the Summer months, With light and heat refulgent.
Page 178 - To make a happy fire-side clime To weans and wife, That's the true pathos and sublime Of human life.
Page 269 - ... ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet...
Page 112 - Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather the ideas which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed tears. He asked whose the lines were, and it chanced that nobody but myself remembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's called by the unpromising title of 'The Justice of the Peace'.
Page 181 - Is ever wi' my Jean. I see her in the dewy flowers, I see her sweet and fair : I hear her in the tunefu...
Page 111 - I may truly say, Virgilium vidi tantum. I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-7, when he came first to Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling enough to be much interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him; but I had very little acquaintance with any literary people, and still less with the gentry of the west country, the two sets that he most frequented. Mr. Thomas Grierson was at that time a clerk of my father's. He knew Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings to dinner, but...
Page 7 - Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an excellent English scholar; and by the time I was ten or eleven years of age, I was a critic in substantives, verbs, and particles.
Page 112 - Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain ; Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, Gave the sad presage of his future years, The child of misery baptized in tears.

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