![]() ![]() He is a man of the most impassioned temper, with passions not strong only, but noble, and of the sort in which great virtues and great poems take their rise. In his letters the style is simple, vigorous, expressive, sometimes even beautiful. Poverty is indeed his companion, but Love also, and Courage… The rough scenes of Scottish life, not seen by him in any Arcadian illusion, but in the rude contradiction, in the smoke and soil of a too hard reality, are still lovely to him. The ill-starred Burns was gifted by nature in her bounty, but destiny, his faults, the faults of others, proved too hard for him, and that spirit that might have soared soon sank to the dust, and its glorious faculties died in the blossom…īased on his letters he seems so kind and warm a soul, so full of inborn riches, of love to all living and lifeless things, especially how his heart flows out in sympathy over universal nature. ![]() ![]() True and genial as his poetry ought to appear, it is not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that he interests and affects me. And love and pity are prone to magnify by reading more and more letters written by him. Upon closing this small book, my first impression is telling me that I am anxious not to exaggerate, yet to avoid some tendency to that side is no easy matter. ![]()
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