But in the midst of his daily durgery and incessant toil through summer heats and winter tempests, traveling through the snow, toiling at the plow, thrashing his grain with the “weary flingin tree,” attending market, he nevertheless found time to chant some of the sweetest lyrics ever penned. The outward conditions of his life were dark and lowering, but these could not quench those movements and ambitions of his inner man which flamed up like the lurid flashes of volcanic fires, and threw over the dark shadows of his destiny, a glory and a radiant heat which no adversity could quench. He works like a slave, it is true, but he must need pour in as occasion offered the pure and holy oil of lofty aspirations gathered from nature’s ample store, and a few well worn books, to feed the deathless flame of song which had begun to burn upon the altar of his heart. “He carried a book to study at spare moments in the field and he wore out thus two copies of MacKenzie’s Man of Feeling.” A suggestive hint, for with all his misfortunes, and his sins, perhaps, no more tender heart ever beat in human breast than that of Robert Burns. None more loyal to friendship or more sensitive to generous love and sympathy.
“There is sacrecely any earthly object” he says, “which gives me more pleasure than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood, or high plantation on a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy wind houling among the trees, and raving over the plain. I listened to the birds and frequently turned out of my path, lest I should disturb their little song or frighten them to another station.”
Doubless his own misfortunes brought him into closer relations of sympathetic feeling even with the poorest and meanest things that were suddenly exposed to loss and pain, as for instance in the inadvertent passage of his ploughshare through a field mouse’s nest. Listen to his tender strain.
“We sleekit Cowerin timerous beastie,
O what a pancis in thy breastie;
Thou need nae start awa sae hasty,
Wi bickerin brattle
I wad de laith to rin and chase thee
Wi murderin pattle.”
He moralizes at once, and does not think it beneath his dignity to put himself on the same plane for a time even with a mouse.