Robert Burns - How To Know Him by William Allan Neilson
page 156 of 334 (46%)
page 156 of 334 (46%)
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Sae light's he jumped up the stair, And tirl'd at the pin; [rattled] And wha sae ready as hersel' To let the laddie in! He set his Jenny on his knee, All in his Highland dress; And brawlie weel he kend the way To please a bonie lass. It's up yon heathery mountain And down yon scraggy glen, We daurna gang a-milking For Charlie and his men! Such in nature and origin are the songs of Burns. Of some three hundred written or rewritten by him, a large number are negligible in estimating his poetical capacity. One cause lay in his unfortunate ambition to write in the style of his eighteenth-century predecessors in English, with the accompanying mythological allusions, personifications, and scraps of artificial diction. Another was his pathetic eagerness to supply Thomson with material in his undertaking to preserve the old melodies--an eagerness which often led him to send in verses of which he himself felt that their only defense was that they were better than none. Thus his collected works are burdened with a considerable mass of very indifferent stuff. But when this has all been removed, we have left a body of song such as probably no writer in any language has bequeathed to his country. It is marked, first of all, by its peculiar harmony of expression with the utterance of the |
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