Page:Interesting history of Robert Burns (1).pdf/16

to those who are denied, and may feel disposed to envy, sueh dangerous gifts. “The fate and charaeters of the rhyming tribe,” thus writes the poet himself in 1793, “often employ my thoughts when I am disposed to be melaneholy. There is not among all the martyrologies that ever were penned so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets. In the eomparative view of wretches, the eriterion is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a being of our kind, give him a stronger imagination and a more delieate sensibility, which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable set of passions than are the usual lot of man; implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, such as arranging wild-flowers in fantastie nosegays, traeing the grasshopper to his haunt by his ehirping song, watehing the frisks of the little minnows in the sunny pool, or hunting after the intrigues of butterflies— in short, send him adrift after some pursuit whieh shall eternally mislead him from the paths of lucre, and yet eurse him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that luere can purchase; lastly, fill up the measure of his woes by bestowing on him a spurning sense of his own dignity, and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a poet.” In these short sentences