sphere-kindliness becomes love, and gratitude passion : Here's a health to ane I lo'e dear; Here's a health to ane I lo'e dear; Thou art sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, Altho' thou maun never be mine, Altho' even hope is denied; Than aught in the world beside-Jessy! I mourn through the gay, gaudy day, I guess by the dear angel smile, 'Gainst fortune's fell cruel decree ?-Jessy! Here's a health to ane I lo'e dear; Here's a health to ane I lo'e dear; Thou art sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, As another instance of the metamorphosis which all his feelings underwent the moment he threw them into the form of song, let us see what he makes of the admiration excited in him by ladies of a rank so far above his own that no thought of winning their affection could enter his mind. Song was, in fact, to him merely the language of love; and whatever he put into his magic cauldron, whether esteem, or respect, or reverence, the result was always the same. Pour what you chose into the conjuror's bottle, nothing came out but love. The beautiful Lucy Johnstone, says Allan Cunningham, married to Oswald, of Auchencruive, was the heroine of "Wat ye wha's in yon town," a lady of lofty station, an heiress, and a toast-and thus she is sung by the married gauger : Now haply down yon gay green shaw, How blest ye birds that round her sing, And doubly welcome be the spring, The sun blinks blithe on yon town, But my delight in yon town, And dearest bliss, is Lucy fair. Without my love, not a' the charms And welcome Lapland's dreary sky! My cave wad be a lover's bower, That I wad tent and shelter there. O sweet is she in yon town, Yon sinkin sun's gane down upon; A fairer than's in yon town If angry For while life's dearest blood is warm, That e’enin sun is shining on. On a visit for a single day to the minister of Lochmaben, Dumfriesshire, he is very much pleased with the beauty and manners of his host's young daughter, the blue-eyed Jean Jeffrey. What was the form this feeling took in song? He threatens, if she refuses his love, to die for her sake! I gaed a waefu' gate yestreen, She talk'd, she smil'd, my heart she wyl'd; Many other instances might be given, but these will suffice to relieve the memory of the poet from the imputation of being a professed Lothario. Burns, in fact, seems to have been a hypocrite the wrong way, and to have affected more vices than he possessed. It is not indeed surprising that the number of those amorous effusions should have given rise to the reports of his dissolute life. He wrote so constantly in the character of a passionate admirer of the fair sex, that at last people thought "himself must be the hero of his story." You may have heard of an actor, who was placed so constantly before the audience in the character of a swindler, and sometimes even as first or second murderer in a melodrama, that he applied to the manager for a change of parts; for the baker had begun to refuse him credit, and his landlady expected to be strangled in her sleep. Burns's reputation suffers from the same cause. If he had written worse amatory poems, he would have been thought a better man. With this explanation we can look on his most rapturous effusions as exercises of his genius, and not manifestations of his inconstancy. "Wilt thou be my Dearie ?" seems rather a free-and-easy question if addressed to any mortal mixture of earth's mould, but soars away into the region where passion loses all its grossness when directed to an abstraction, or even, as the biographers maintain, to the mother of a belted earl :— Wilt thou be my dearie? When sorrow wrings thy gentle heart, Only thou, I swear and vow, Shall ever be my dearie. Lassie, say thou lo’es me; Or if thou wilt no be my ain, |