HAVING spent my youth in reading books about religion—about the "new birth"—the disobedience of our first parents, the atonement, salvation by faith, the wickedness of pleasure, the degrading consequences of love, and the impossibility of getting to heaven by being honest and generous, and having become somewhat weary of the frayed and raveled thoughts, you can imagine my surprise, my delight when I read the poems of Robert Burns.
I was familiar with the writings of the devout and insincere, the pious and petrified, the pure and heartless. Here was a natural honest man. I knew the works of those who regarded all nature as depraved, and looked upon love as the legacy and perpetual witness of original sin. Here was a man who plucked joy from the mire, made goddesses of peasant girls, and enthroned the honest man. One whose sympathy, with loving arms, embraced all forms of suffering life, who hated slavery of every kind, who was as natural as heaven's blue, with humor kindly as an autumn day, with wit as sharp as Ithuriel's spear, and scorn that blasted like the simoon's breath. A man who loved this world, this life, the things of every day, and placed above all else the thrilling ecstasies of human love.
I read and read again with rapture, tears and smiles, feeling that a great heart was throbbing in the lines.
The religious, the lugubrious, the artificial, the spiritual poets were forgotten or remained only as the fragments, the half remembered horrors of monstrous and distorted dreams.
I had found at last a natural man, one who despised his country's cruel creed, and was brave and sensible enough to say: "All religions are auld wives' fables, but an honest man has nothing to fear, either in this world or the world to come."
One who had the genius to write Holy Willie's Prayer—a poem that crucified Calvinism and through its bloodless heart thrust the spear of common sense—a poem that made every orthodox creed the food of scorn—of inextinguishable laughter.
Burns had his faults, his frailties. He was intensely human. Still, I would rather appear at the "Judgment Seat" drunk, and be able to say that I was the author of "A man's a man for 'a that," than to be perfectly sober and admit that I had lived and died a Scotch Presbyterian.
I read Byron—read his Cain, in which, as in Paradise Lost, the Devil seems to be the better god—read his beautiful, sublime and bitter lines—read his Prisoner of Chillon—his best—a poem that filled my heart with tenderness, with pity, and with an eternal hatred of tyranny.
I read Shelley's Queen Mab—a poem filled with beauty, courage, thought, sympathy, tears and scorn, in which a brave soul tears down the prison walls and floods the cells with light. I read his Skylark—a winged flame—passionate as blood—tender as tears—pure as light.
I read Keats, "whose name was writ in water"—read St. Agnes Eve, a story told with such an artless art that this poor common world is changed to fairy land—the Grecian Urn, that fills the soul with ever eager love, with all the rapture of imagined song—the Nightingale—a melody in which there is the memory of morn—a melody that dies away in dusk and tears, paining the senses with its perfectness.