A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

English Literature For Boys And Girls

H >> H.E. Marshall >> English Literature For Boys And Girls




"Near yonder copse, where once the garden smiled,
And still where many a garden flower grows wild;
There, where a few torn shrubs the place disclose,
The village preacher's modest mansion rose.
A man he was to all the country dear,
And passing rich with forty pounds a year;
Remote from towns he ran his godly race,
Nor e'er had changed, nor wish'd to change, his place:
Unpractis'd he to fawn, or seek for power,
By doctrines fashion'd to the varying hour;
Far other aims his heart had learn'd to prize,
More skill'd to raise the wretched than to rise.
His house was known to all the vagrant train;
He chid their wand'rings, but relieved their pain:
The long-remember'd beggar was his guest,
Whose beard descending swept his aged breast;
The ruin'd spendthrift, now no longer proud,
Claim'd kindred there, and had his claims allow'd;
The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay,
Sat by his fire, and talk'd the night away,
Wept o'er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done,
Shoulder'd his crutch, and shoed how fields were won.
Pleased with his guests, the good man learn'd to glow,
And quite forgot their vices in their woe;
Careless their merits or their faults to scan,
His pity gave ere charity began.
Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride,
And ev'n his failings lean'd to virtue's side;
But in his duty prompt, at every call,
He watch'd and wept, he pray'd and felt for all;
At church, with meek and unaffected grace,
His looks adorn'd the venerable place;
Truth from his lips prevail'd with double sway,
And fools, who came to scoff, remain'd to pray.
The service past, around the pious man,
With steady zeal, each honest rustic ran;
Ev'n children followed with endearing wile,
And pluck'd his gown, to share the good man's smile.
His ready smile a parent's warmth exprest;
Their welfare pleased him, and their cares distrest:
To them his heart, his love, his griefs were given,
But all his serious thoughts had rest in heaven.
As some tall cliff that lifts its awful form,
Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm,
Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread,
Eternal sunshine settles on its head."

Goldsmith's last great work was a comedy named She Stoops to
Conquer. It is said that the idea for this play was given to him
by something which happened to himself when a boy.

The last time that Goldsmith returned home from school he made
his journey on horseback. The horse was borrowed or hired, but
he had a guinea in his pocket, and he felt very grown up and
grand. He had to spend one night on the way, and as evening came
on he asked a passing stranger to direct him to the best house,
meaning the best in the neighborhood. The stranger happened to
be the village wag, and seeing the schoolboy swagger, and the
manly airs of sixteen, he, in fun, directed him to the squire's
house. There the boy arrived, handed over his horse with a
lordly air to a groom, marched into the house and ordered supper
and a bottle of wine. In the manner of the times in drinking his
wine he invited his landlord to join him as a real grown-up man
might have done. The squire saw the joke and fell in with it,
and not until next morning did the boy discover his mistake. The
comedy founded on this adventure was a great success, and no
wonder, for it bubbles over with fun and laughter. Some day you
will read the play, perhaps too, you may see it acted, for it is
still sometimes acted. In any case it makes very good reading.

But Goldsmith did not long enjoy the new fame this comedy brought
him. In the spring of 1774, less than a year after it appeared,
the kindly spendthrift author lay dead. He was only forty-five.

The beginning of Goldsmith's life had been a struggle with
poverty; the end was a struggle with debt. By his writing he
made what was in those days a good deal of money, but he could
not keep it. To give him money was like pouring water into a
sieve. "Is your mind at ease," asked his doctor as he lay dying.
"No, it is not," answered Goldsmith. Those were his last words.

"Of poor dear Dr. Goldsmith," wrote Johnson, "there is little to
be told more than the papers have made public. He died of a
fever, made, I am afraid, more violent by uneasiness of mind.
His debts began to be heavy, and all his resources were
exhausted. Sir Joshua* is of opinion that he owed not less than
two thousand pounds. Was ever poet so trusted before?"

*Sir Joshua Reynolds, the famous painter.

Goldsmith was buried in the graveyard of the Temple church, but
his tomb is unmarked, and where he lies no one knows. His
sorrowing friends, however, placed a tablet to his memory in
Westminster, so that his name at least is recorded upon the roll
of the great dead who lie gathered there.

BOOK TO READ

The Vicar of Wakefield (Everyman's Library).







Chapter LXXII BURNS--THE PLOWMAN POET

SHOULD auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to min'?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o' lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

We twa hae run about the braes,
And pu'd the gowans fine;
But we've wander'd mony a weary foot,
Sin auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, etc.

We twa hae paidl't i' the burn,
Frae mornin' sun til dine:*
But seas between us braid hae roar'd,
Sin auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, etc.

And here's a hand, my trusty fiere,**
And gie's a hand o' thine;
And we'll tak a right guid-willie waught,***
For auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, etc.

And surely ye'll be your pint-stowp,****
And surely I'll be mine;
And we'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

*Dinner.
**Companion.
***Drink.
****Measure.

NO song, perhaps, is so familiar to English-speaking people as
that with which this chapter begins. In the back woods of
Canada, in far Australia, on the wide South African veldt,
wherever English-speaking people meet and gather, they join hands
to sing that song. To the merriest gathering it comes as a
fitting close. It is the hymn of home, of treasured friendships,
and of old memories, just as "God save the King" is the hymn of
loyalty, and yet it is written in Scots, which English tongues
can hardly pronounce, and many words of which to English ears
hardly carry a meaning. But the plaintive melody and the
pathetic force of the rhythm grip the heart. There is no need to
understand every word of this "glad kind greeting"* any more than
there is need to understand what some great musician means by
every note which his violin sings forth.

*Carlyle.

The writer of that song was, like Caedmon long ago, a son of the
soil, he, too, was a "heaven-taught ploughman."*

*Henry Mackenzie.

While Goldsmith lay a-dying in London, in the breezy Scottish
Lowlands a big rough lad of fifteen called Robert Burns was
following his father's plow by day, poring over Shakespeare, the
Spectator, and Pope's Homer, of nights, not knowing that in years
to come he was to be remembered as our greatest song writer.
Robert was the son of a small farmer. The Burns had been farmer
folk for generations, but William Burns had fallen on evil days.
From his northern home he drifted to Ayrshire, and settled down
in the village of Alloway as a gardener. Here with his own hands
he built himself a mud cottage. It consisted only of a "room"
and a kitchen, whitewashed within and without. In the kitchen
there was a fireplace, a bed, and a small cupboard, and little
else beyond the table and chairs.

And in this poor cottage, in the wild January weather of 1759,
wee Robert was born. Scarcely a week later, one windy night, a
gable of his frail home was blown in. So fierce was the gale
that it seemed as if the whole wall might fall, so, through the
darkness, and the storm, the baby and his mother were carried to
a neighbor's house. There they remained for a week until their
own cottage was again made fit to live in. It was a rough entry
into the world for the wee lad.

For some time William Burns went on working as a gardener, then
when Robert was about seven he took a small farm called Mount
Oliphant, and removed there with his wife and family.

He had a hard struggle to make his farm pay, to feed and clothe
little Robert and his brothers and sisters, who were growing up
fast about him. But, poor though he was, William Burns made up
his mind that his children should be well taught. At six Robert
went daily to school, and when the master was sent away somewhere
else, and the village of Alloway was left without any teacher,
William Burns and four neighbors joined together to pay for one.
But as they could not pay enough to give him a house in which to
live, he used to stay with each family in turn for a few weeks at
a time.

Robert in those days was a grave-faced, serious, small boy, and
he and his brother Gilbert were the cleverest scholars in the
little school. Chief among their school books was the Bible and
a collection of English prose and verse. It was from the last
that Burns first came to know Addison's works for in this book he
found the "Vision of Mirza" and other Spectator tales, and loved
them.

Robert had a splendid memory. In school hours he stored his mind
with the grand grave tales of the Bible, and with the stately
English of Addison; out of school hours he listened to the tales
and songs of an old woman who sang to him, or told him stories of
fairies and brownies, of witches and warlocks, of giants,
enchanted towns, dragons, and what not. The first books he read
out of school were a Life of Hannibal, the great Carthagenian
general, and a Life of Wallace, the great Scottish hero; this
last being lent him by the blacksmith. These books excited
little Robert so much that if ever a recruiting sergeant came to
his village, he would strut up and down in raptures after the
drum and bagpipe, and long to be tall enough to be a soldier.
The story of Wallace, too, awoke in his heart a love of Scotland
and all things Scottish, which remained with him his whole life
through. At times he would steal away by himself to read the
brave, sad story, and weep over the hard fate of his hero. And
as he was in the Wallace country he wandered near and far
exploring every spot where his hero might have been.

After a year of two the second schoolmaster went away as the
other had done. Then all the schooling the Burns children had
was from their father in the long winter evenings after the farm
work for the day was over.

And so the years went on, the family at Mount Oliphant living a
hard and sparing life. For years they never knew what it was to
have meat for dinner, yet when Robert was thirteen his father
managed to send him and Gilbert week about to a school two or
three miles away. He could not send them both together, for he
could neither afford to pay two fees, nor could he spare both
boys at once, as already the children helped with the farm work.

At fifteen Robert was his father's chief laborer. He was a very
good plowman, and no one in all the countryside could wield the
scythe or the threshing-flail with so much skill and vigor. He
worked hard, yet he found time to read, borrowing books from
whoever would lend them. Thus, before he was fifteen, he had
read Shakespeare, and Pope, and the Spectator, besides a good
many other books which would seem to most boys of to-day very
dull indeed. But the book he liked best was a collection of
songs. He carried it about with him. "I pored over them," he
says, "driving in my cart, or walking to labour, song by song,
verse by verse."

Thus the years passed, as Burns himself says, in the "cheerless
gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing toil of a galley-slave."
Then when Robert was about nineteen his father made another move
to the farm of Lochlea, about ten miles off. It was a larger and
better farm, and for three or four years the family lived in
comfort. In one of Burns's own poems, The Cotter's Saturday
Night, we get some idea of the simple home life these kindly God-
fearing peasants led--

"November chill blaws loud wi' angry sugh;*
The short'ning winter-day is near a close;
The miry bests retreating frae the pleugh;
The black'ning trains o' craws to their repose;
The toil-worn Cotter Frae his labour goes,

This night his weekly moil is at an end,
Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes,
Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend,
And weary, o'er the moor, his course does hameward bend.

*Whistling sound.

"At length his lonely cot appears in view,
Beneath the shelter of an aged tree;
Th' expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher* through
To meet their dad, wi' flichterin** noise and glee.
His wee bit ingle, blinkin bonnily,
His clean hearth-stane, his thriftie wifie's smile,
The lisping infant prattling on his knee,
Does a' his weary carking care beguile,
An' makes him quite forget his labour and his toil.

*Stagger.
**To run with outspread arms.

Belyve,* the elder bairns come drapping in,
At service out, amang the farmers roun';
Some ca' the pleugh, some herd, some tentie** rin
A cannie*** errand to a neebor town:
Their eldest hope, their Jenny, woman grown,
In youthfu' bloom, love sparkling in her e'e
Comes hame, perhaps, to show a braw new gown,
Or deposite her sair-won penny-fee,****
To help her parents dear, if they in hardship be.

*In a little.
**Carefully.
***Not difficult.
****Wages paid in money.

"With joy unfeign'd, brothers and sisters meet,
An' each for other's weelfare kindly spiers:*
The social hours, swift-wing'd, unnotic'd, fleet;
Each tells the uncos** that he sees or hears;
The parents, partial, eye their hopeful years;
Anticipation forward points the view.
The mother, wi' her needle and her sheers,
Gars auld claes look amaist as weel's the new:***
The father mixes a' wi' admonition due.

*Asks after.
**Strange things.
***Makes old clothes look almost as good as new.
. . . . . . .
"The cheerfu' supper done,, wi' serious face,
They, round the ingle, form a circle wide;
The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace,
The big ha'-Bible, ance his father's pride:
His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside,
His layart haffets* wearing thin an' bare;
Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,
He wales** a portion with judicious care;
And "Let us worship God!" he says, with solemn air.

*The gray hair on his temples.
**Chooses.
. . . . . . .
"Then homeward all take off their sev'ral way;
The youngling cottagers retire to rest:
The parent-pair their secret homage pay,
And proffer up to Heaven the warm request,
That He who stills the raven's clam'rous nest,
And decks the lily fair in flow'ry pride,
Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best,
For them and for their little ones provide;
But, chiefly, in their hearts with grace divine preside."

As Robert grew to be a man the changes in his somber life were
few. But once he spent a summer on the coast learning how to
measure and survey land. In this he made good progress. "But,"
he says, "I made a greater progress in the knowledge of mankind."
For it was a smuggling district. Robert came to know the men who
carried on the unlawful trade, and so was present at many a wild
and riotous scene, and saw men in new lights. He had already
begun to write poetry, now he began to write letters too. He did
not write with the idea alone of giving his friends news of him.
He wrote to improve his power of language. He came across a book
of letters of the wits of Queen Anne's reign, and these he pored
over, eager to make his own style good.

When Robert was twenty-two he again left home. This time he went
to the little seaport town of Irvine to learn flax dressing. For
on the farm the father and brothers had begun to grow flax, and
it was thought well that one of them should know how to prepare
it for spinning.

Here Robert got into evil company and trouble. He sinned and
repented and sinned again. We find him writing to his father,
"As for this world, I despair of ever making a figure in it. I
am not formed for the bustle of the busy, nor the flutter of the
gay. I shall never again be capable of entering into such
scenes." Burns knew himself to be a man of faults. The
knowledge of his own weakness, perhaps, made him kindly to other.
In one of his poems he wrote--

"Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang,*
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark,
The moving why they do it;
And just as lamely can ye mark
How far perhaps they rue it.

*A very little wrong.

"Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us:
He knows each chord, its various tone,
Each spring its various bias:
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted."

Bad fortune, too, followed Burns. The shop in which he was
engaged was set on fire, and he was left "like a true poet, not
worth a sixpence."

So leaving the troubles and temptations of Irvine behind, he
carried home a smirched name to his father's house.

Here, too, troubles were gathering. Bad harvests were followed
by money difficulties, and, weighed down with all his cares,
William Burns died. The brothers had already taken another farm
named Mossgiel. Soon after the father's death the whole family
went to live there.

Robert meant to settle down and be a regular farmer. "Come, go
to, I will be wise," he said. He read farming books and bought a
little diary in which he meant to write down farming notes. But
the farming notes often turned out to be scraps of poetry.

The next four years of Burns's life were eventful years, for
though he worked hard as he guided the plow or swung the scythe,
he wove songs in his head. And as he followed his trade year in
year out, from summer to winter, from winter to summer, he
learned all the secrets of the earth and sky, of the hedgerow and
the field.

How everything that was beautiful and tender and helpless in
nature appealed to him we know from his poems. There is the
field mouse--the "wee sleekit,* cow'rin', tim'rous beastie,"
whose nest he turned up and destroyed in his November plowing.
"Poor little mouse, I would not hurt you," he says--

*Smooth.

"Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin;
Its silly wa's the win's are strewin'!"

And thou poor mousie art turned out into the cold, bleak, winter
weather!--

"But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In providing foresight may be vain;
Gang aft agley,*
An' lea'e us nought but grief and pain
For promised joy."

*Go often wrong.

It goes to his heart to destroy the early daisies with the plow--


"Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow'r,
Thou's met me in an evil hour;
For I maun crush amang the stoure
Thy slender stem.
To spare thee now is past my pow'r,
Thou bonnie gem.

"Alas! it's no thy neebor sweet,
The bonnie lark, companion meet,
Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet,
Wi' spreckl'd breast,
When upward springing, blythe, to greet
The purpling east.

"Cauld blew the bitter-biting North
Upon thy early, humble birth;
Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth
Amid the storm,
Scarce rear'd above the parent earth
Thy tender form.

"The flaunting flow'rs our gardens yield,
High shelt'ring woods and wa's maun shield;
But thou, beneath the random bield*
O' clod or stane,
Adorns the histie stibble-field,**
Unseen, alane.

"There, in thy scanty mantle cauld,
Thy snawie bosom sunward spread,
Thou lifts thy unassuming head
In humble guise;
But now the share uptears thy bed,
And low thou lies!"

*Shelter.
**Bare stubble field.

Burns wrote love songs too, for he was constantly in love--often
to his discredit, and at length he married Jean Armour, Scots
fashion, by writing a paper saying that they were man and wife
and giving it to her. This was enough in those days to make a
marriage. But Burns had no money; the brothers' farm had not
prospered, and Jean's father, a stern old Scotsman, would have
nothing to say to Robert, who was in his opinion a bad man, and a
wild, unstable, penniless rimester. He made his daughter burn
her "lines," thus in his idea putting an end to the marriage.

Robert at this was both hurt and angry, and made up his mind to
leave Scotland for ever and never see his wife and children more.
He got a post as overseer on an estate in Jamaica, but money to
pay for his passage he had none. In order to get money some
friends proposed that he should publish his poems. This he did,
and the book was such a success that instead of going to Jamaica
as an unknown exile Burns went to Edinburgh to be entertained,
fêted, and flattered by the greatest men of the day.

All the fine ladies and gentlemen were eager to see the plowman
poet. The fuss they made over him was enough to turn the head of
a lesser man. But in spite of all the flattery, Burns, though
pleased and glad, remained as simple as before. He moved among
the grand people in their silks and velvets clad in homespun
clothes "like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the
laird"* as easily as he had moved among his humble friends. He
held himself with that proud independence which later made him
write--

*Scott.

"Is there for honest poverty
That hangs his head, and a' that?
The coward slave, we pass him by,
We dare to be poor for a' that!
For a' that, and a' that,
Our toils obscure, and a' that,
The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man's the gowd for a' that.

"What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hodden grey, and a' that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,
A man's a man for a' that:
For a' that and a' that,
Their tinsel show, and a' that;
The honest man, though e'er sae poor,
Is king o' men for a' that."

After spending a brilliant winter in Edinburgh, Burns set off on
several tours through his native land, visiting many of the
places famous in Scottish history. But, as the months went on,
he began to be restless in his seeming idleness. The smiles of
the great world would not keep hunger from the door; he feared
that his fame might be only a nine days' wonder, so he decided to
return to his farming. He took a farm a few miles from Dumfries,
and although since he had been parted from his Jean he had
forgotten her time and again and made love to many another, he
and she were now married, this time in good truth. From now
onward it was that Burns wrote some of his most beautiful songs,
and it is for his songs that we remember him. Some of them are
his own entirely, and some are founded upon old songs that had
been handed on for generations by the people from father to son,
but had never been written down until Burns heard them and saved
them from being forgotten. But in every case he left the song a
far more beautiful thing than he found it. None of them perhaps
is more beautiful than that he now wrote to his Jean--

"Of a' the airts* the wind can blaw,
I dearly like the wet,
For there the bonnie lassie lives,
The lassie I lo'e best:
The wild-woods grow and rivers row,**
And mony a hill between;
But day and night my fancy's flight
Is ever wi' my Jean.

"I see her in the dewy flowers,
I see her sweet and fair:
I hear her in the tunefu' birds,
I hear her charm the air;
There's not a bonnie flower that springs
By fountain, shaw,*** or green,
There's not a bonnie bird that sings
But minds me o' my Jean."

*Directions.
**Roll.
***Wood.

But farming and song-making did not seem to go together, and on
his new farm Burns succeeded little better than on any that he
had tried before. He thought to add to his livelihood by turning
an excise man, that is, an officer whose work is to put down
smuggling, to collect the duty on whisky, and to see that none
upon which duty has not been paid is sold. One of his fine
Edinburgh friends got an appointment for him, and he began his
duties, and it would seem fulfilled them well. But this mode of
life was for Burns a failure. In discharge of his duties he had
to ride hundreds of miles in all kinds of weathers. He became
worn out by the fatigue of it, and it brought him into the
temptation of drinking too much. Things went with him from bad
to worse, and at length he died at the age of thirty-six, worn
out by toil and sin and suffering.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.