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literature. For I know no other case

I do not speak dogmatically upon the point, but I do not recall any other case -in which we can say with the same confidence that a poet has occupied a place, and a great place, in universal literature and that he is also the daily companion of hundreds of thousands of men and women who cannot be described as belonging to a class who make an occupation of literary study. I imagine that this unique fact, if unique fact it be, is in part due to the circumstance that Burns dealt so largely with those great elementary feelings, passions, and experiences which are common to every human being, whether he be literary or whether he be not literary, whatever his occupation in life may be, whatever be the labors which engross his time. For his best poems, after all, not all his poems but the bulk of the best, deal with such things as love and friendship, the joys of family life, the sorrows of parting, all things which come within the circle of our daily experience, and he dealt with them simply as they are in a manner which comes home to every man and every woman, which readily echoes their own intimate sense of reality. It speaks to them, therefore, in tones of sympathy and of consolation, and is present with them in all the experiences of their daily life. And, while this is the character of the subjects which Burns made his themes, he treated them at a time and in a manner which gained him an absolutely unique position in the development of British literature, for he was unconscious of his mission, he was unconscious of the great work which he was to initiate and foreshadow. He was the first of those great revolutionary writers-revolutionary, I mean, in the literary sense of the word-who made the early years of the present country so rich in instruction and so rich in genius. He was the precursor of Wordsworth and Scott and of Byron and Shelley and Keats, but while he was their precursor, while he heralded this great change in the literary fashions of his country, he spoke in tones which deeply

sank into the popular mind, and which appealed to the people. The names of Wordsworth and Shelley, of Byron and Keats, are names, but little else.

I suppose in estimating this double quality of Burns's fame-I mean the popular quality and the universal literary quality-I must mention one fact which is obvious enough, but which has doubtless had its influence-namely, that he wrote in our Scotch vernacular. Now, it is necessary in a poet who is to occupy the position which Burns occupies among his countrymen that he should speak the language of his countrymen. It is necessary that every man should feel, not that he is reading a mere literary construction, but that the words the poet uses are familiar words which he immediately understands and which carry with them a wealth of association, without which poetry is but a vague and empty sound. But the misfortune of popular poets has often been that, while they spoke the vernacular of their country, this vernacular was so restricted in its area that the great literary heart, the great literary world, which is confined to no country and to no people, was incapable of appreciating what he said except through the imperfect medium of translation, and, as we all know, translation, however admirable and however excellent and however painstaking, has never, can never, and will never preserve the inmost life and essence of the work of art with which it deals. The fate of Robert Burns was happier than the fate of those of whom I have spoken, for, though he spoke and wrote in our Scotch vernacular, the vernacular is itself but a form of the great language which is now the birth-tongue of more people born into the world than any other literary language whatever. But, while he appealed, therefore, as only one writing the Scotch vernacular could appeal, to the mind and feelings of Scotsmen, that great mass of the English-speaking world do not feel towards him as a foreigner must feel towards a language which he has not spoken from his youth. Rather do they feel, though here and there there may

be words which are strange to them, that the language is, after all, the language of their own childhood, and they can cherish Robert Burns as a poet of their own language, a poet speaking their own tongue. One other cause may perhaps have done something to add to the universal character and world-wide fame which our poet enjoys and seems likely in ever-increasing measure to enjoy in the future. That cause is that in every part of the world you will find Scotsmen, you will find people who are making their presence felt in the communities in which they live, and wherever you find a Scotsman you will, I am glad to think, also find people who are by no means prepared to allow the careless or unthinking world to forget the glories of their native land. Therefore it is that the fame of Burns has spread wherever Scotsmen have spread, and that there is a kind and degree of worship paid to his genius such as, I believe, is paid to the genius of no other kind nor of any other country. Mr. Provost, I fear that in these observations, I may seem, at all events, to have travelled somewhat far from the immediate occasion on which I have the honor of addressing you, but, after all, that is not the case, for as your youngest burgess, as one

who values the privilege which you have in no unstinted measure just conferred upon me, I feel that not the least of these privileges is, as you yourself have said, that I may feel myself a citizen of this town, so intimately associated with great events in Scottish history in general, and in particular with Robert Burns. One of the greatest possessions of any community is the memory of its great men, and much as I admire the vigor of your community, and great as I feel the privilege of being a citizen of Dumfries, that privilege is enhanced in my eyes, as I believe it to be in the eyes of every one whom I am now addressing, by the memory of the distinguished men who have been admitted before me into these privileges. May the prosperity of your burgh, Mr. Provost, go on ever increasing, like the fame of the greatest of its sons, and may Dumfries be associated in the future, as it has been in the past, with the names of men who have rendered Scotland illustrious; and may there be added in the future to the long and brilliant roll of your purgesses many a name as yet unknown, but which our children and our children's children may revere as ornaments of their country and as pillars of the State.

The European Bison. While the bison of North America is on the point of extinction, the European bison, which is still found in Russia and the Caucasus, is sensibly decreasing in numbers, in spite of the efforts made for its protection by the Imperial government. Herr Buchener (says the Zoologist), in a memoir on the subject recently presented to the Imperial Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg, regards it as likely soon to share the fate of its American relative. In the forest of Bialowicksa, in the province of Lithuania, a herd of these fine animals has long been preserved, and forty years ago, namely in 1856, numbered about nineteen hundred, but of late

years this has dwindled down to less than five hundred, and there is no encouraging sign of any material increase. Our contemporary points out that if the Russian government would only give instructions to have some of the Caucasian bison captured alive and transported to Lithuania for the purpose of resuscitating the herd there, no doubt in a few years a marked improvement might be effected. The enterprise would necessarily be attended with considerable difficulty and great expense, but in view of the scientific importance which would attach to the result of the experiment, it would be well worth undertaking.

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PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

THE LIVING AGE COMPANY, BOSTON.

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Single copies of THE LIVING AGE. 15 cents.

THE EVERLASTING NO.

Thou who hast seen for once and all the vision,

Thon who hast felt high discontent. And known the bitter sweet of great ambition

Not for these short-lived follies thou wast meant.

Yet which to follow of the striving voices, Faith, knowledge, nature, still to meet Surfeit in pleasure, in faith superstition,

In knowledge weariness, in love deceit?

Forth to the wilderness? Ah, I see only Desert winds shaking the desert reeds: Ignorant and thirsting still and lonely

Shall solitude suffice my thousand

needs?

What though the inner eye be filled with seeing,

What though the mountain and the plain be great,

Only to think and brood in dreams of being,

This cannot solve the riddle of our fate.

Sight of the stars and conscious sense of duty,

These are but drops in the still vacant heart,

These have I known and felt and loved their beauty

With half my soul, nor filled the other part.

HERBERT WARREN.

LES ROSES DE SAADI.

This morning I would gather you some

roses,

But lo! too many sweets my lap encloses,
The knotted cincture breaks,
The wind my treasure takes.

The stream bears fast away the gathered

roses,

It runs flame-red; my raiment never loses
The stain of purple bloom,
Nor yet its sweet perfume.

The stream flows crimson; gathered are

the roses,

At morn I said, "I go to gather roses," And now at eve I'll say, while daylight closes,

Take incense! breathe from me

The fragrant memory!

MARCELINE VALMOKE.

A CHILD'S DREAMS.

When bed-time came, and childish prayers were prayed,

She fell asleep, for all dear tales were told

Aladdin's lamp, the dwarf's enchanted

gold,

And simple rhymes that please a littl

maid.

And now her curls-how like the soft, dark braid

Worn next my heart-fall, tangled fold in fold,

Whilst with kissed cheeks deep pillowed

from the cold

She dreams, watched close by love, and unafraid.

What silver shapes and shining fantasies Make night dreams strange as day

dreams, and more fair!

The red-cloaked witch who climbed Rapunzel's hair

Haunts she this slumber? or may now arise

Her mother's presence stooping softly there,

With shadowy hair, and misty love-lit eyes?

EUGENE MASON.

BROKEN LIGHTS.

If some old doctrine of thy youth
Thou may'st no more repeat,
Gaze not as though God's very truth
Lay shattered at thy feet.

What though the broken moonbeam spill Its silver o'er the tide,

Not one bud more, nor red, nor white See through the clouds how sure and still

uncloses

Its petals wide for love—

I keep the scent thereof.

The fair round moon doth ride! FREDERICK LANGBRIDGE.

From The Contemporary Review. ETHICS AND SCIENCE.

Those who can look back, through the mists and storms of nearly half a century, to the comparative lull between the political agitation of the Crimean war and the intellectual agitation stirred by "The Origin of Species," will recall the publication of a book the immediate effect of which was much stronger than its permanent position in literature would appear to justify. Buckle's "Introduction to the History of Civilization" remains, indeed, a volume of much interest, and has its warm partisans, whose claim for it would Ichime in with all that was felt by its earliest readers; but a remark made on it by one who was among its most enthusiastic admirers on its first appearance-Charles Darwin-recurs now almost as a verdict. "How curiously the fortune of books changes!" he said, on re-perusing that one shortly before his death; "what a stir that book made among us when it first came out, and now it is dead!" Its significance for the student of to-day is that of some ancient mark of high tide where the land has gained upon the sea-it records a limit that has long vanished. Its argument may be summed up in a few sentences. There is in the world such a thing as progress; civilization is a growing thing. Morality, on the other hand (he assumed), is evidently a stationary thing. A good man at one age is much the same as a good man at another. Therefore civilization (he inferred) must depend on something which is capable of increase, and this is evidently knowledge. The momentum and the direction of progress are given exclusively by science. As one gives this bald summary of a book which took the world by storm, one wonders that its wealth of illustration and vigor of expression could blind its readers to assumptions so baseless. But Buckle, daring heretic as he thought himself and was thought by others, when he assumed that moral development was only individual, merely echoed a view then common to the thoughtless and the thoughtful. John Mill, in his essay on "Utilitarianism," urges that on the issue whether morality is intuitive or what he

called utilitarian-decided, that is, by considerations referring to general enjoyment-depends the further issue, whether it is an advancing or a stationary thing. "How so?" asked a reviewer (in words here necessarily remembered and not copied). "Why must we take this for granted? Why should not the general conscience be a growing thing, as well as the general knowledge?" The review, which is traceable to the pen of Dr. Martineau, was the earliest protest I can recall from contemporary literature against a view which ignores or defies the lessons of all history.

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surely, than that the character and actions which men admired and approved, for instance, in the thirteenth century are different from those which we admire and approve now. Many people think that the good man of the nineteenth century is better than the good man of the thirteenth; a few think that he is not so good; the wise and thoughtful, who are also few, consider that he is both better and worse; but all would agree that he is different. The best of men were ready then for actions from which the worst would shrink in our day. Who, in our time, would burn a fellow-creature alive? Six hundred years ago it would have been the most ardent philanthropists who were ready for that action. We cannot say that philanthropy was unreal then and is real now. We may be very thankful that it is purged of noxious and hateful superstition; but if we suppose that it was in no spirit of love for mankind that a St. Dominic desired to burn a heretic, then we are equally blinded by superstition of our own. We cannot measure our approximation to the moral feeling of the past by our actual nearness to it. If we look back a little way we shall find ourselves among men who felt very differently from the way their representatives feel to-day; if we go back much farther we may find ourselves among people much more sympathetic with our own standard. Cicero and Horace would be more likely to agree with nineteenth-century men of the world than Dominic and Francis of Assisi would. Mr. Huxley or Mr. John

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