Many of Byron’s shorter poems are from Bible stories and characters, and it is wonderful how his brilliant genius caught and reproduced both spirit and story. Burns gives us his thought of a religious life in that sweetest pastoral poem in all literature, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.”
In the last few months of his life he did much to reproduce it in his own life, holding family prayer with such earnestness as to bring his hearers to tears over the penitence for sins and hope in the mercy of God.
In these poets the perceptive faculties roamed at will over a wide field of human activities, and voiced their impressions with a witchery of language which has hardly a parallel. The work of both men was revolutionizing in its effects. Burns found his countrymen in bondage to the fear of wraiths, hobgoblins and kindred spirits, and he was a mighty power in their deliverance. Taine estimates that he was as great a force in Scotland as the Revolution in France.
Byron is believed largely to have influenced the revolutionary movement in Germany. He gave a direct stimulus to the liberators of Italy, and ended his life in a heroic struggle for the liberties of Greece.
If Byron’s literary work is more resplendent and daring, Burns’s seems fresher from the varied living forces about us. If Byron’s is a circlet of sapphires, Burns’s is that same circlet transmuted by the alchemy of human sympathy to a wreath of never-fading violets.
When we remember that these colossal figures passed off the stage of life after thirty-seven short years, when we get a suggestion of the difficult circumstances and terrible temptations that encompassed their stormy young lives, we may well leave their failings to God, who alone is their moral Judge. It may be His compassion for them is commensurate with the powers with which He endowed them.
The Man With White Nails
BY CAPTAIN W. E. P. FRENCH, U.S.A.