The Highlander, the bitterest foe
To modern laws, has felt their blow,
Consented to be taxed, and vote,
And put on pantaloons and coat,
And leave off cattle-stealing:
Lord Stafford mines for coal and salt,
The Duke of Norfolk deals in malt,
The Douglass in red herrings;
And noble name and cultured land,
Palace, and park, and vassal-band,
Are powerless to the notes of hand
Of Rothschild or the Barings.

You'll ask if yet the Percy lives

In the armed pomp of feudal state?
The present representatives

Of Hotspur and his "gentle Kate"
Are some half-dozen serving men,
In the drab coat of William Penn;

A chamber-maid, whose lip and eye,

And cheek, and brown hair, bright and curling,

Spoke Nature's aristocracy;

And one, half groom, half seneschal,

Who bowed me through court, bower, and hall,

From donjon-keep to turret-wall,

For ten-and-sixpence sterling.

FROM ROBERT BURNS,

THERE have been loftier themes than his,
And longer scrolls, and louder lyres,
And lays lit up with Poesy's

Purer and holier fires.

Yet read the names that know not death

;

Few nobler ones than Burns are there;

And few have won a greener wreath

Than that which binds his hair.

His is that language of the heart

In which the answering heart would speak; Thought, word, that bids the warm tear start, Or the smile light the cheek.

And his that music to whose tone

The common pulse of man keeps time

In cot or castle's mirth or moan,

In cold or sunny clime.

And who hath heard his song, nor knelt
Before its spell with willing knee,
And listened, and believed, and felt
The Poet's mastery?

O'er the mind's sea, in calm and storm,
O'er the heart's sunshine and its showers,
O'er Passion's moments, bright and warm,
O'er Reason's dark, cold hours.

On fields where brave men "die or do,"

In halls where rings the banquet's mirth, Where mourner's weep, where lovers woo, From throng to cottage hearth!

What sweet tears dim the eyes unshed,

What wild vows falter on the tongue, When "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," Or "Auld Lang Syne" is sung!

Pure hopes, that lift the soul above,

Come with the Cotter's hymn of praise; And dreams of youth, and truth, and love, With Logan's" banks and braes.

And when he breathes his master-lay
Of Alloway's witch-haunted wall,

All passions in our frames of clay
Come thronging at his call.

Imagination's world of air,

And our own world, its gloom and glee Wit, pathos, poetry, are there,

And death's sublimity.

And Burns, though brief the race he ran, Though rough and dark the path he trod, Lived - died- in form and soul a Man,

The image of his God.

Through care, and pain, and want, and woe,

With wounds that only death could heal Tortures, the poor alone can know,

The proud alone can feel —

He kept his honesty and truth,

His independent tongue and pen, And moved, in manhood as in youth, Pride of his fellow-men.

Strong sense, deep feeling, passions strong,
A hate of tyrant and of knave,

A love of right, a scorn of wrong,
Of coward and of slave —

A kind, true heart, a spirit high,

That could not fear and would not bow, Were written in his manly eye,

And on his manly brow.

Praise to the bard! His words are driven,
Like flower-seeds by the far winds sown,
Where'er beneath the sky of heaven.
The birds of fame have flown.

Praise to the man! A nation stood
Beside his coffin with wet eyes,
Her brave, her beautiful, her good,
As when a loved one dies.

And still, as on his funeral day,

Men stand his cold earth-couch around,

With the mute homage that we pay
To consecrated ground.

And consecrated ground it is,

The last, the hallowed home of one
Who lives upon all memories,
Though with the buried gone.

Such graves as his are pilgrim shrines,
Shrines to no code or creed confined -

The Delphian vales, the Palestines,
The Meccas of the mind. . . . .

All ask the cottage of his birth,

Gaze on the scenes he loved and sung,
And gather feelings not of earth
His fields and streams among.

They linger by the Doon's low trees,
And pastoral Nith, and wooded Ayr,
And round thy sepulchres, Dumfries!
The Poet's tomb is there.

But what to them the sculptor's art,

His funeral columns, wreaths, and urns?

Wear they not graven on the heart
The name of Robert Burns?

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