“I had an old grand-uncle,” says Burns, “with whom my mother lived awhile in her girlish years. The good man was long blind ere he died, during which time his highest enjoyment was to sit down and cry, while my mother would sing the simple old song of the Life and Age of Man.”
It is certain that this old song was in Burns's mind when he composed to the same cadence those well-known stanzas of which the burthen is that “man was made to mourn.” But the old blind man's tears were tears of piety, not of regret; it was his greatest enjoyment thus to listen and to weep; and his heart the while was not so much in the past, as his hopes were in the future. They were patient hopes; he knew in Whom he believed, and was awaiting his deliverance in God's good time. Sunt homines qui cum patientiâ moriuntur; sunt autem quidam perfecti qui cum patientiâ vivunt.2 Burns may perhaps have been conscious in his better hours (and he had many such,) that he had inherited the feeling (if not the sober piety,) which is so touchingly exemplified in this family anecdote;—that it was the main ingredient in the athanasia of his own incomparable effusions; and that without it he never could have been the moral, and therefore never the truly great poet that he eminently is.
2 ST. AUGUSTIN.
INTERCHAPTER IX.
AN ILLUSTRATION FOR THE ASSISTANCE OF THE COMMENTATORS DRAWN FROM THE HISTORY OF THE KORAN. REMARKS WHICH ARE NOT INTENDED FOR MUSSELMEN, AND WHICH THE MISSIONARIES IN THE MEDITERRANEAN ARE ADVISED NOT TO TRANSLATE.
You will excuse me if I do not strictly confine myself to narration, hut now and then intersperse such reflections as may offer while I am writing.
JOHN NEWTON.