HOW TO GET STRONG
Too busy a worker to ever get any flesh, this precocious financier, soldier, statesman, jurist, patriot, belonged physically to the same class as Paul, Wesley, Napoleon, Grant, and the others of medium height—not little men at all—with the heads of big men and bodies of steel wire, tireless when hard work is on hand, outlasting all around them. Had he been a better shot; had the duel gone the other way; his name, great as it is, might have been among those which have filled the chair of our Chief Executive.
ROBERT BURNS (1759–1796)
"A man's a man for a' that."—Burns.
Born of poor peasant parents, near Ayr, Scotland; by rare self-denial they gave him the rudiments of education; working on the farm, he snatched such time as he could for reading the Bible, Mason's Collection of Prose and Verse; the life of Hannibal and of Sir William Wallace; The Spectator; Pope; and Shakespeare; first wrote poetry at sixteen: "A Bonnie, Sweet Sonsie Lass," he wrote to Moore, "who was coupled with him in the labors of the hay-harvest," awakening his early inspirations; employed by his father as a day-laborer till nineteen at £7 a year, during which period he wrote "John Barleycorn," the "Dirge of Winter," and other poems. At twenty-two learned the flax-dresser's trade; next year hired a farm, and at intervals wrote many poems, among them "To a Mountain Daisy," "The Cotter's Saturday Night," and numerous love songs; failed at farming, and was about starting for Jamaica, but his published poems brought him applause, money, and a year of fêting in London drawing-rooms; returned to his farm; was made collector of excise, which, with his convivial habits, so interfered with his farming that he gave it up. Intemperance, exposure, and disappointment undermined his constitution, and he died at thirty-seven, a vast multitude attending his funeral.
"A song-writer must always be a warm-hearted man. A cold song is inconceivable; but he is not always a strong man—he may be weak with all his warmth. Not
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