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Page 43
Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
Its silly wa's the win's are strewin'!
An' naething, now, to big anew ane,
O' foppage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin',
Baith snell and keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin' fast,
An' cozie here beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.
That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou's turned out, for a' thy trouble,
Nor house nor hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble
An' cranreuch cold!
But, mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promised joy.
Still thou art blest, compared with _me!_
The _present_ only toucheth thee:
But och! I _backward_ cast my e'e,
On prospects drear;
An' _forward_, though I canna see,
I guess and fear!
Poor Burns! Seventy years and more have passed since that cold November
morning on which he sang this simple and tender song, yet it is as fresh
in its rustic pathos, bathed in the quickening dews of the poet's heart,
as if it had sprung from the soul but an hour since: and fresh it will
still be long after the fragile hand now tracing this tribute to the
heart of love from which it flowed shall have been cold in an unknown
grave!
Such poems are worth folios of the erudite and stilted pages which are
now so rapidly pouring their scoria around us. Men seem ashamed now to
be simply natural. Either they have ceased to love, or to believe in the
dignity of loving. The great barrier to all real greatness in this
present age of ours is the fear of ridicule, and the low and shallow
love of jest and jeer, so that if there be in any noble work a flaw or
failing, or unclipped vulnerable part where sarcasm may stick or stay,
it is caught at, pointed at, buzzed about, and fixed upon, and stung
into, as a recent wound is by flies, and nothing is ever taken seriously
or as it was meant, but always perverted and misunderstood. While this
spirit lasts, there can be no hope of the achievement of high things,
for men will not open the secrets of their hearts to us, if we intend to
desecrate the holy, or to broil themselves upon a fire of thorns.
As the poet is full of love for all that God has made, because his
imagination enables him to seize it by the heart, he would in this love
fain gift the inanimate things of creation with life, that he might find
in them that happiness which pertains to the living; hence the constant
_personification_ of all that is in his pages. He personifies, he
individualizes, he gifts creation with life and passion, not willingly
considering any creature as subordinate to any purpose quite out of
itself, for then some of the pleasure he feels in its beauty is lost,
for his sense of its happiness is in that case destroyed, as its
emanation of inherent life is no longer pure. Thus the bending trunk,
waving to and fro in the wind above the waterfall, is beautiful because
it seems happy, though it is, indeed, perfectly useless to us. The same
trunk, hewn down and thrown across the stream, has lost its beauty. It
serves as a bridge--_it has become useful_, it lives no longer _for
itself_, and its pleasant beauty is gone, or that which it still retains
is purely typical, dependent on its lines and colors, not on its
functions. Saw it into planks, and though now fitted to become
permanently _useful_, its whole beauty is lost forever, or is to be
regained only in part, when decay and ruin shall have withdrawn it again
from _use_, and left it to receive from the hand of Nature the velvet
moss and varied lichen, which may again suggest ideas of inherent
happiness, and tint its mouldering sides with hues of life. For the
Imagination, unperverted, is essentially _loving_, and abhors all
utility based on the pain or destruction of any creature. It takes
delight in such ministering of objects to each other as is consistent
with the essence and energy of both, as in the clothing of the rock by
the herbage, and the feeding of the herbage by the stream.
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