Perhaps the songs of Burns have exercised a more universal influence than his poems. They seize the heart and hold it as by a spell of enchantment. Who knows not the grand nation melody “Scots wha hae” and the familiar lyrics “Auld Lang Syne,” “John Anderson, My Joe,” “Comin’ through the Rye,” etc. In most of his songs there is a strain of sadness as indeed there is in most of the finest Scottish lyrics other than those written by Burns.
The brightest gems of the Muse show the sparkle of tears or utter the sad sigh which one hears in the moan of the waves, or the wail of the midnight wind through a pine forest. But the songs of Burns have a charm that enlist the sympathy of the whole world. He voices the universal experience. He is the high priest of nature. His words give tone and character to the passion, the sorrows, the pains and the joys of common people. He uses no artifice to engage the interest of others. His genius was a well-spring fresh and pure from the fountains of the heart, in its first unstrained gushings: too soon, alas, to migle with the defiling tributaries which a bitter experience of human life brought to blend with the clearer stream. With his great heart burning with a sense of wrong done him by those who ought to have sheltered and befriended him, mixed also with the bitter reflection that his own indiscretions and sins had entailed suffering and shame upon himself and upon those who were dearer to him than his own life, he sinks into the dark tide of death as the age of 38 years; not, we trust, without a hope that the infinite Father of mercy had heard the piteous appeal which he recorded in these words.
“O thou great governor of all below
If I may dare a litted eye to thee,
For all unfit I feel my powers to be
To rule their torrent in the hollowed line
O aid me with thy help, Omnipotence Divine.”
He wrote his own epitaph, and it is an honest and sincere confession, but if he had lived under more favorable auspices, and had his environment been such as to assure that the flame of his genius would have been nourished from the altars of a purer and fitter companionship, he would probably have penned a far different stanza than this which fitly closes a dark and stormy career, not unrelieved by many bright flashes of hope and gladness.
“The poor inhabitant below
Was quick to learn and wise to know