Who made the heart, ’tis He alone
Decidedly can try us,
He knows each chord—its various tone,
Each spring—its various bias:
Then at the balance let’s be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What’s done we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted.
XL.
TAM SAMSON’S ELEGY.[49]
“An honest man’s the noblest work of God.”
Pope.
[Tam Samson was a west country seedsman and sportsman, who loved a good song, a social glass, and relished a shot so well that he expressed a wish to die and be buried in the moors. On this hint Burns wrote the Elegy: when Tam heard o’ this he waited on the poet, caused him to recite it, and expressed displeasure at being numbered with the dead: the author, whose wit was as ready as his rhymes, added the Per Contra in a moment, much to the delight of his friend. At his death the four lines of Epitaph were cut on his gravestone. “This poem has always,” says Hogg, “been a great country favourite: it abounds with happy expressions.
‘In vain the burns cam’ down like waters,
An acre braid.’
What a picture of a flooded burn! any other poet would have given us a long description: Burns dashes it down at once in a style so graphic no one can mistake it.
‘Perhaps upon his mouldering breast
Some spitefu’ moorfowl bigs her nest.’