Throughout the winter of 1795 and spring of 1796, he could only keep up an irregular correspondence with Thomson. 'Alas!' he wrote in April, 'I fear it will be long ere I tune my lyre again. I have only known existence by the pressure of the heavy hand of sickness, and counted time by the repercussion of pain. I close my eyes in misery and open them without hope.' Yet it was literally on his deathbed that he composed the exquisite song, O wert thou in the Cauld Blast, in honour of Jessie Lewars, who waited on him so faithfully. In June he wrote: 'I begin to fear the worst. As to my individual self I am tranquil, and would despise myself if I were not; but Burns's poor widow and half a dozen of his dear little ones—helpless orphans!—there, I am weaker than a woman's tear.'
From Brow, whither he had gone to try the effect of sea-bathing, he wrote several letters all in the same strain, one to Cunningham; a pathetic one to Mrs. Dunlop, regretting her continued silence; and letters begging a temporary loan to James Burness, Montrose, and to George Thomson, whom he had been supplying with songs without fee or reward. Thomson at once forwarded the amount asked—five pounds! To his wife, who had not been able to accompany him, he wrote: 'My dearest love, I delayed writing until I could tell you what effect sea-bathing was likely to produce. It would be injustice to deny it has eased my pain.... I will see you on Sunday.'
During his stay at Brow he met again Mrs. Riddell, and she has left in a letter her impression of his appearance at that time. 'The stamp of death was imprinted on his features. He seemed already touching the brink of eternity.... He spoke of his death with firmness as well as feeling as an event likely to happen very soon.... He said he was well aware that his death would occasion some noise, and that every scrap of his writing would be revived against him, to the injury of his future reputation.... The conversation was kept up with great evenness and animation on his side. I had seldom seen his mind greater or more collected.'
When he returned from Brow he was worse than when he went away, and those who saw him tottering to his door knew that they had looked their last on the poet. The question in Dumfries for a day or two was, 'How is Burns now?' And the question was not long in being answered. He knew he was dying, but neither his humour nor his wit left him. 'John,' he said to one of his brother volunteers, 'don't let the awkward squad fire over me.'
He lingered on for a day or two, his wife hourly expecting to be confined and unable to attend to him, and Jessie Lewars taking her place, a constant and devoted nurse. On the fourth day after his return, July 21, he sank into delirium, and his children were summoned to the bedside of their dying father, who quietly and gradually sank to rest. His last words showed that his mind was still disturbed by the thought of the small debt that had caused him so much annoyance. 'And thus he passed,' says Carlyle, 'not softly, yet speedily, into that still country where the hailstorms and fire-showers do not reach, and the heaviest laden wayfarer at length lays down his load.'
CHAPTER IX
SUMMARY AND ESTIMATE
In Mrs. Riddell's sketch of Burns, which appeared shortly after his death, she starts with the somewhat startling statement that poetry was not actually his forte. She did not question the excellence of his songs, or seek to depreciate his powers as a poet, but she spoke of the man as she had known him, and was one of the first to assert that Burns was very much more than an uneducated peasant with a happy knack of versification. Even in the present day we hear too much of the inspired ploughman bursting into song as one that could not help himself, and warbling of life and love in a kind of lyrical frenzy. The fact is that Burns was a great intellectual power, and would have been a force in any sphere of life or letters. All who met him and heard him talk have insisted on the greatness of the man, apart from his achievements in poetry. It was not his fame as a poet that made him the lion of a season in Edinburgh, but the force and brilliancy of his conversation; and it needs more than the reputation of a minstrel to explain the hold he has on the affection and intelligence of the world to-day.
On the other hand, it would be a mistake to accept his intellectual greatness as a mere tradition of those who knew him, and to regret that he has not left us some long and ponderous work worthy of the power he possessed. It is an absurd idea to imagine that every great poet ought to write an epic or a play. Burns's powers were concentrative, and he could put into a song what a dramatist might elaborate into a five-act tragedy; but that is not to say that the dramatist is the greater poet. After all, the song is the more likely to live, and the more likely, therefore, to keep the mission of the poet an enduring and living influence in the lives of men.
Still Burns might have been a great song-writer without becoming the name and power he is in the world to-day. The lyrical gift implies a quick emotional sense, which in some cases may be little more than a beautiful defect in a weak nature. But Burns was essentially a strong man. His very vices are the vices of a robust and healthy humanity. Besides being possessed of all the qualities of a great singer, he was at the same time vigorously human and throbbing with the love and joy of life. It is this sterling quality of manhood that has made Burns the poet and the power he is. He looked out on the world with the eyes of a man, and saw things in their true colours and in their natural relations. He regarded the world into which he had been born, and saw it not as some other poet or an artist or a painter might have beheld it,—for the purposes of art,—but in all its uncompromising realism; and what his eye saw clearly, his lips as clearly uttered. His first and greatest gift, therefore, as a poet was his manifest sincerity. His men and women are living human beings; his flowers are real flowers; his dogs, real dogs, and nothing more. All his pictures are presented in the simplest and fewest possible words. There is no suspicion of trickery; no attempt to force words to carry a weight of meaning they are incapable of expressing. He knew nothing of the deification of style, and on absolute truthfulness and unidealised reality rested his poetical structure. Wordsworth speaks of him—