The Letters of Robert Burns | Page 6

Ass."
(b) "'On Earth Discord! A gloomy Heaven above opening its jealous
gates to the nineteen-thousandth part of the tithe of mankind! And
below an inexorable Hell expanding its leviathan jaws for the vast
residue of mortals!' O doctrine comfortable and healing to the weary
wounded soul of man! Ye sons and daughters of affliction, to whom
day brings no pleasure and night yields no rest, be comforted! 'Tis one
to but nineteen hundred thousand that your situation will mend in this
world, and 'tis nineteen hundred thousand to one, by the dogmas of
theology, that you will be damned eternally in the world to come."
(c) "A pillar that bears us up amid the wreck of misfortune and misery
is to be found in those feelings and sentiments which, however the
sceptic may deny or the enthusiast disfigure them, are yet, I am
convinced, original and component parts of the human soul; those

senses of the mind, if I may be allowed the expression, which link us to
the awful obscure realities of an all-powerful and equally beneficent
God and a world-to-come beyond death and the grave."
(d) "Can it be possible that when I resign this frail, feverish being I
shall still find myself in conscious existence?... Shall I yet be warm in
life, seeing and seen, enjoying and enjoyed? Ye venerable Sages and
holy Flamens, is there probability in your conjectures, truth in your
stories, of another world beyond death, or are they all alike baseless
visions and fabricated fables? If there is another life, it must only be for
the just, the benevolent, the amiable, and the humane; what a flattering
idea then is a world to come! Would to God I as firmly believed it as I
ardently wish it!... Jesus Christ, thou amiablest of characters! I trust
thou art no impostor.... I trust that in Thee shall all the families of the
earth be blessed."
(e) "From the seeming nature of the human mind, as well as from the
evident imperfections in the administration of affairs, in both the
natural and moral worlds, there must be a retributive scene of existence
beyond the grave."
(f) "I never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer's
noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of grey plover in an
autumn morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the
enthusiasm of Devotion or Poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can
this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, that, like the Æolian harp,
passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these
workings argue something within us above the trodden clod?"
(g) "Gracious Heaven! why this disparity between our wishes and our
powers? Why is the most generous wish to make others blest, impotent
and ineffectual?... Out upon the world! say I, that its affairs are
administered so ill."
(h) "At first glance, several of your propositions startled me as
paradoxical. That the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in it
vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime than the twingle-twangle of a
jew's-harp; that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown

flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more
beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock; and that, from
something innate and independent of all associations of ideas--these I
had set down as irrefragable orthodox truths."[a]
(i) "O, I could curse circumstances, and the coarse tie of human laws
which keeps fast what common-sense would loose, and which bars that
happiness it cannot give--happiness which otherwise love and honour
would warrant!"
(j) "If there is no man on earth to whom your heart and affections are
justly due, it may savour of imprudence, but never of criminality, to
bestow that heart and those affections where you please. The God of
love meant and made those delicious attachments to be bestowed on
somebody."
The inequalities of fortune, the pleasures of friendship, the miseries of
poverty, the glories of independence, the privileges of wealth allied to
generosity, the sin of ingratitude, and similar topics, are continually
recurring to prove the elevation at which his spirit usually soared and
surveyed mankind. It has been charged against him[b] that these
subjects were not the food of his daily contemplation, but were lugged
into his letters for the sake of effect, and that their clumsy introduction
was frequently apologised for by the complaint that the writer had
nothing else to write about. The frequent apologies here spoken of will
be hard to find, and the critic's only reason for advancing the charge,
for which he would fain find support in the fancied apologies of Burns,
is that many of the letters "relate neither to facts nor feelings peculiarly
connected with the author or