"Robert Burns" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... appealing, consciously or unconsciously caught, and sincerely felt or insincerely imitated, so Goldsmith possessed a teaching charm and a guiding grace that can be traced in many later poets and amongst the works of greatest minds, in the poetry of Robert Burns. Poets, like priests, teach the hearts and lives of men, the means and power of their expression. One may cull from ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... Robert Burns. All his life long he was the singer of a parish—the last of a long line of "forbears" who had used the Scottish lowland vernacular to rhyme in about their neighbours and their scandals, their loves ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Ingersoll to Beecher, "but possibly I'll be able to yet, for tomorrow I am going to hear you preach." Then it was that Beecher offered to write Ingersoll's epitaph, which he proceeded to do by scribbling two words on the back of an envelope, thus: "Robert Burns." ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... was the Rev. Robert Burns who met him at the door and took him through the factory, bent on seeing some parishioner on an errand of love. And there was that strange sense of the Presence having been there before them, walking about among the machinery, looking at the tired face of one, sorrowing over ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759, in a clay cottage at Alloway, two miles south of Ayr, and near the "auld brig o' Doon." His father, William Burnes, or Burness—for so he spelt his name—was from Kincardineshire. When Robert was born he had the lease of a seven-acre croft, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... Robert Burns, also, in his poem, "The Twa Dogs," written in 1786, refers to a Newfoundland as being an aristocrat among dogs. Doubtless, other breeds of dogs have been the subjects of popular pictures and have had their praises sung by poets, but the Newfoundlands have yet ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... Melrose Abbey was transported across the Atlantic, and trained over the porch of "Sunnyside," by the hand of Mrs. Renwick, daughter of Rev. Andrew Jeffrey of Lochmaben, known in girlhood as the "Bonnie Jessie" of Annandale, or the "Blue-eyed Lassie" of Robert Burns:—a graceful tribute, from the shrine of Waverley to ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... side, and his cane dancing a hornpipe before him. He was, moreover, chanting a song to himself, and I have heard people tell what song it was too. There was once a certain, or rather uncertain, bard, ycleped Robert Burns, who made a number of good songs; but this that the Laird sang was an amorous song of great antiquity, which, like all the said bard's best songs, was sung one hundred and fifty years before he was born. ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... rank—no blood—no clime! What court poet of his day, Major Favraud, compared with Robert Burns for feeling, fire, and pathos? Who ever sung such siren strains as Moore, a simple Irishman of low degree? No Cavalier blood there, I fancy! What power, what beauty in the poems of Walter Scott! Byron was a poet in spite of his condition, not because of it. ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... a native of Marbach, a small town of Wuertemberg, situated on the banks of the Neckar. He was born on the 10th of November 1759,—a few months later than our own Robert Burns. Schiller's early culture was favoured by the dispositions, but obstructed by the outward circumstances of his parents. Though removed above the pressure of poverty, their station was dependent and fluctuating; it involved a frequent change of place and plan. ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Describing Robert Burns' conversational gifts, Mr. Carlyle wrote: "They were the theme of all that ever heard him. All kinds of gifts, from the gracefullest allusions of courtesy to the highest fire of passionate speech, loud floods of mirth, soft wailings of affection, laconic ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... Robert Burns. Edited from the best Printed and Manuscript authorities, with Glossarial Index, Notes, and a Biographical Memoir by ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... and popular, the ordinary and "vulgar" note of the language, have attempted to refine and improve it and have more than once threatened to remodel it, that is, to make it odious. This would be to dress up Robert Burns in plumes borrowed from ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... first sentence to the last; the characters are vital and are, also, most entertaining company; the denouement unexpected and picturesque and cleverly led up to from one of the earliest chapters; the story moves swiftly and without a hitch. Robert Burns is neither idealized nor caricatured; Sandy, Jock, Pitcairn, Danvers Carmichael, and the Duke of Borthewicke are admirably relieved against each other, and Nancy herself as irresistible as she is natural. To ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... Negro dialect Mr. Dunbar has in verse chosen to interpret the Negro in his general character, in his philosophy of life, in his rich humor and good nature, and the world knows how well he has succeeded. Robert Burns has shown how the immortal life of all beautiful things can be handed down for all time in dialect, but it can scarcely be believed by any one that great poetry can ever be clothed in the garb known as Negro dialect. But for some pathos and to put the Negro forward ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Robert Burns, the great lyric poet of Scotland, was born January 25, 1759, near the sea coast town of Ayr. His father, William Burness, had all he could do to support a family of children, of whom Robert was the eldest. The boy soon became a stalwart ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... tower, Where the wa'flower scents the dewy air, Where the howlet mourns in her ivy bower, And tells the midnight moon her care: The winds were laid, the air was still, The stars they shot along the sky; The Fox was howling on the hill, And the distant echoing glens reply. ROBERT BURNS. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Devil would annihilate sin. Robinson Crusoe changed the subject to avoid looking foolish, but Man Friday's question remains in full force. Why does not God convert the Devil? The great Thomas Aquinas is reported to have prayed for the Devil's conversion through a whole long night. Robert Burns concludes his "Address to the Deil" with a wish that he "wad tak a thought an' men'." And Sterne, in one of his wonderful strokes of pathos, makes Corporal Trim say of the Devil, "He is damned already, your honor;" whereupon, ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... Robert Burns was one of them, were wont to carry pistols, and those the poet had were given him by one of our gunmakers, Mr. Blair. They were afterwards bought by Allan Cunningham, who gave them back to Burns' widow.—Birmingham lent its rill to the great river of homage to the ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... 11 parks, comprising 402 acres; the most notable is Washington Park, which contains two well known statues—one of Robert Burns, by Charles Caverley, and the bronze and rock fountain, "Moses at the Rock of Horeb," by J. Massey Rhind. The city's filtration system is of special interest to engineers; it occupies 20 acres, has eight filter beds, and filters 15,000,000 gallons ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... reflect that it might sound rude. An hour passed like five minutes in listening to her story of the Lord Chancellor's wedding at Gretna, and Lord Westmorland's shooting of Banker Child's horse, to save his young bride from capture by her father; the tale of Robert Burns almost inveigled into marriage by a pretty girl he met on the road; and best of all the exciting history of the brave lass of Langholm, who ran through brooks and bushes to snatch her lover at the last ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Wit and Mirth, etc. (1720), vi. 289-91; revised by Robert Burns for The Scots Musical Magazine, and again by Allan Cunningham for The Songs of Scotland; given with many differences, 'long current in Selkirkshire,' in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. The present version is a rifaccimento from Burns ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... Evandale given by Balfour of Burley. Thomas Carlyle, with his natural taste for what is manly and daring in character, has suffered no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from his biographical and historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns has given us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies there is an account of the battle of Lutzen which deserves to be read. And Simon Ockley's History of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of individual valor, with admiration ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... contrast to one another in almost every respect—to bring once more into British song a strong individual feeling, and with it a new warmth and directness of speech. These were William Cowper (1731-1800) and Robert Burns (1759-96). Cowper spoke out of his own life experience, his agony, his love, his worship and despair; and straightway the varnish that had glittered over all our poetry since the time of Dryden melted away. Cowper had scribbled verses when ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... banks' monopoly. His literature was not all, however, of so practical a character; not long before he had edited, jointly with Mr. J. Finlay, a volume containing fifty of the best of the poems written on the centenary of Robert Burns—one of his own, which had been highly commended at the Crystal Palace competition, being among them. The volume is, perhaps, the most fitting tribute to the memory of our national poet that has appeared, and we believe it ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... Next to Robert Burns, the Ettrick Shepherd is unquestionably the most distinguished of Scottish bards, sprung from the ranks of the people: in the region of the imagination he stands supreme. A child of the forest, nursed amidst the wilds and tutored among the solitudes ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... the ownership of one man by another. The ideal of equality has wrecked old aristocracies that seemed to have firm hold on permanence. If one would feel again the thrill which men felt when first the old distinctions lost their power, one should read once more the songs of Robert Burns. They often seem commonplaces to us now, but they were not ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... irrepressible fury against what they believe to be cruelty and oppression. Milton's magnificent Piedmont sonnet is a glorious roar of righteous rage; and since his time the poets have ever been the spokesmen for the insulted and injured. Robert Burns, more than most statesmen, helped to make the world safe for democracy. I do not know what humanity would do without its poets—they are the champions of the individual against the tyranny of power, the cruel selfishness of kings, and the artificial conventions of society. We may or may not agree ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... Robert Burns was a systematic lover of anything in petticoats, and has left such a mass of amatory correspondence that his biographer was sorely perplexed. There could not have been a pretty maid in the British Isles, to whom chance had been kind, who had not somewhere the usual packet ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... Scott's women. Constance de Beverley and the minstrel girl in "The Fair Maid of Perth," not the Duchesse de Langeais, were his heroines. But better than anything that ever got from the heart of a man into printer's ink, he loved the poetry of Robert Burns. "Death and Dr. Hornbook" and "The Jolly Beggars," Burns's "Reply to his Tailor," he often read aloud to himself in his office, late at night, after a glass of hot toddy. He used to read "Tam o'Shanter" to Thea Kronborg, and he got her some of the songs, set to the old airs ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... household favorites as "Wilson's Tales of the Borders," "Mansie Waugh," by "Delta," "Scots Worthies," Allan Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd," Scott's "Rob Roy" and "Old Mortality," and the well-thumbed and dog-eared copy of Robert Burns' Poems. ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... and cinema productions, but the fun rages with the most furious intensity round the golf links, where eighteen holes have been compressed into the usual space of one and the winner stands to lose drinks. There are also some parodies of ROBERT BURNS, some jokes about bathing-machines and some digs at the Kirk. One has been, of course, before to seaside places that were a bit too bracing, and I am afraid that the air ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... to be turned back from the very threshold of Robert Burns; and as the women seemed to be merely straggling visitors, and nobody, at all events, had a right to send us away, we went into the back door, and, turning to the right, entered a kitchen. It showed a deplorable lack of housewifely neatness, and in it there ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... trade of a mason, worked on Lincoln's Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket. Joseph Hunter was a carpenter in youth, Robert Burns a plowman, Keats a druggist, Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons. Dante and Descartes were soldiers. Andrew Johnson was a tailor. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday was the son of a blacksmith, and his teacher, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... When Robert Burns was invited by Dr. Blacklock to visit Edinburgh, Gilbert was struggling in the unthrifty farm of Mosgiel, and toiling late and early to keep a house over the heads of his aged mother and unprotected sisters. The poet's success was the first ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... bin where he kept photos and drawings of authors that the publishers' "publicity men" were always showering upon him. After some thought he discarded promising engravings of Harold Bell Wright and Stephen Leacock, and chose pictures of Shelley, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Robert Burns. Then, after further meditation, he decided that neither Shelley nor Burns would quite do for a young girl's room, and set them aside in favour of a portrait of Samuel Butler. To these he added a framed text that he was very fond of and had hung over his own desk. He had once clipped it from a copy ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... pearl—and he has such eyes!—especially when your ladyship spoke to him. I don't think you looked at his eyes—they are quite deep and dark, and full of glow, like what you read to us in the letter from that lady, about Robert Burns." ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... a sweet pastoral lyric, which has been praised both by Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham, Isobel Pagan claims a biographical notice. She was born in the parish of New Cumnock, Ayrshire, about the year 1741. Deserted by her relations in youth, and possessing only an imperfect education, she was led into a course of irregularities which an early moral ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... good prose. Lord Rosebery has a natural dignity and a charm of lucid phrasing that adapts itself admirably to the essay form he has chosen. The subjects he takes up are beloved figures of the past. Robert Burns, as Lord Rosebery talks of him, walks about in Dumfries and holds spellbound by sheer personal charm the guests of the tavern. There are papers on Burke, on Dr. Johnson, on Robert Louis Stevenson, and others ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... Even in this splendid summer-day, the whole vale has a rude and triste appearance, somewhat at issue with the declaration of the old song just quoted, and not likely, one would have thought, to attract the regard of such men as William Nicol and Robert Burns. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... Alan as she sang. Afterward, when Jock and Jean were safely stowed away for the night, the Shepherd went over and brought from the table in the room his well-worn copy of Robert Burns's "Poems," and the last view Jean had of him before she went to sleep, he was reading "The Cotter's Saturday Night" aloud to himself by the ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... well as a born poet. But perhaps the whole cycle of Sartorian extravaganza contains no saying so futile as the complaint, that the British nation in the great war with France entrusted their destinies to a phantasmic Pitt, instead of to "the Thunder-god, Robert Burns." Napoleon would no doubt have welcomed such a change of ministry. It is incoherences of this sort which undo so much of the splendid service that Carlyle ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... having consumed some time in introductory toasts, which the company received with impatience, proceeded to propose 'the Memory of ROBERT BURNS:' he dwelt less on his history than on the wide influence of his works, and recited many verses with taste and feeling. He related how deeply his fame had taken root in the East, and instanced the admiration of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... Robert Peel, says that he had never heard its superior "except indeed in the thrilling tones of O'Connell." The Irish advocate had the advantage, too, of a commanding presence. He was tall and moulded in almost herculean form, and he had eyes which were often compared with those of Robert Burns—the light of genius was in them. There is a full-length picture of him in the Reform Club, London, which enables one to understand how stately and imposing ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... riches and poverty. That man feels for himself and doubly for his children the humiliation. And yet with the ever-turning wheel of fortune such distinctions are transient; yours to-day, mine to-morrow. That glorious Scotch poet, Robert Burns, from the depths of his poverty and despair, might exclaim in an inspired moment on the divine heights where the human soul can ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... cannot resist speculation as to what might have happened to Edison himself and to the development of electricity had he made this proposed plunge into the enervating tropics. It will be remembered that at a somewhat similar crisis in life young Robert Burns entertained seriously the idea of forsaking Scotland for the West Indies. That he did not go was certainly better for Scottish verse, to which he contributed later so many immortal lines; and it was probably better for himself, even if he died ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... the very master of the Victorian era—one would not like to scan his life according to the laws of true poetry. Then there is Coleridge, falling a prey to opium until, as years came, conscience and will seemed to go. Only a very ardent Scot will feel that he can defend Robert Burns at all points, and we would be strange Americans if we felt that Edgar Allen Poe was a model of propriety. That is a large and interesting field, but the Bible seems even to gain power as a book-making book when it lays hold on the book-making proclivities of men who are not prepared ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... stage of secular history, too. At twelve Remenyi was making his violin tremulous with melody, and Caesar delivered an oration at Rome; at thirteen Henry M. Stanley was a teacher; at fourteen Demosthenes was known as an orator; at fifteen Robert Burns was a great poet, Rossini composed an opera, and Liszt was a wizard in music. At the age of sixteen Victor Hugo was known throughout France; at seventeen Mozart had made a name in Germany, and Michael Angelo was a rising star in Italy. At eighteen Marcus Aurelius was ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... braver, truer, or better than the other Teutonic races: they never fought better than the Dutch, Prussians, Swedes, etc., have done. For the rest, modify a little: Frederick the Great was brought up on beer-sops (bread boiled in beer), Robert Burns on oatmeal porridge; and Mahomet and the Caliphs conquered ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... would hae to look a bit further than the sleeve o' the workin'-man's jaicket. There's no muckle in his head, poor soul. Then there'll be Tam Norie, him that edits our weekly paper—Justice for All. Tam's a humorist and great on Robert Burns, but he hasna the balance o' a dwinin' teetotum ... Ye'll understand, Mr Brand, that I keep my mouth shut in such company, and don't express my own views more than is absolutely necessary. I criticize ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... call to mind these words by Robert Burns, singing free and with an untrammelled mind and soul ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... being much affected, he commanded his wise men immediately to take down upon tablets of ivory the lines beginning: "Small and unobtrusive blossom with ruby extremities." But this incident, touching as it is, does not shake my belief in the incident of Robert Burns and the daisy; and I am left with an impression that poets are pretty much the same everywhere in ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... applied to every conceivable occasion, but nothing can happen in all the world that one cannot see or feel or delight in, or suffer in, through Charles Lamb's soul if one has really acquired it. One can be a Charles Lamb almost anywhere toward almost anything that happens along, or a Robert Burns or a Socrates or a Heine, or an Amiel or a Dickens or Hugo or any one, or one can hush one's soul one eternal moment and be the Son of God. To know a few men, to turn them into one's books, to turn them into one another, into one's self, to study history ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... own; they need no picturesque or romantic accessories to give them due relief: looked at by all lights they are the same. Since Adam, there has been none that approached nearer fitness to stand up before God and angels in the naked majesty of manhood than Robert Burns;—but there was a serpent in his field also! Yet but for his fault we could never have seen brought out the brave and patriotic modesty with which he owned it. Shame on him who could bear to think of fault in this rich jewel, unless ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... and Robert Burns The moorland flower and peasant! How, at their mention, memory turns Her ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... lowest and broadest stratum of Society, where the births are by the million, there was born, almost in our own memory, a Robert Burns; son of one who "had not capital for his poor moor-farm of Twenty Pounds a year." Robert Burns never had the smallest chance to got into Parliament, much as Robert Burns deserved, for all our sakes, to have been found there. For the man—it was not known to men purblind, sunk in their poor dim vulgar ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... he stops to ask for a drink of milk and a bit of oat-cake. He feels that there must be a drop of Scotch somewhere in his mingled blood, or at least that the texture of his thought and feelings has been partly woven on a Scottish loom—perhaps the Shorter Catechism, or Robert Burns's poems, or the romances of Sir Walter Scott. At all events, he is among a kindred and comprehending people. They do not speak English in the same way that he does—through the nose—-but they think very much more in his mental dialect than the English ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... There Room for the Poet Ireland David's Lamentation over Saul and Jonathan A Virtuous Woman The Tempest Stilled Nature's Forces Ours Man Life Ode to Man The Reading Man Man and His Pleasures Lines in Memory of the Late Archdeacon Elwood, A.M. Thomas Moore Robert Burns Byron Goderich Kelvin Niagara Falls Autumn A Sunset Farewell By the Lake The Teacher Grace Darling The Indian Lines on the North-West Rebellion Louis Riel Ye Patriot Sons of Canada A Hero's Decision John and Jane The Truant Boy A Swain to his Sweetheart The ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... the case of Robert Burns. The parallel is very interesting, and does not, I think, turn so much to Mr. Greenwood's advantage as he supposes. The genius of Burns, of course, is far indeed below the level of that of the author of the Shakespearean plays. But that author and ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... of my good fortune! The venerable Robert Burns—now, if I mistake not, in his eighty-seventh year—happens to be making a visit to London, as if on purpose to afford me an opportunity of grasping him by the hand. For upwards of twenty years past he has hardly left his quiet ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... him in whatever occupation, or in whatever stage of spiritual or intellectual development; whenever you get under his jacket, whether it be a blouse or a tuxedo, you'll find this picture hanging on the wall of his heart. Ninety-nine men out of every hundred say, with Robert Burns: ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, one of the Senators of the College of Justice in Scotland, and a friend of Robert Burns. Besides the 'Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Hon. Henry Home of Kames' (1807), he published 'Elements of General History' (1801), 'Essay on the Principles of Translation', etc. He died in 1813. His 'Universal History', in six ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... Good Shepherd. There are a county penitentiary and a State armoury. The city has 95 acres of boulevards and avenues under park supervision and several fine parks (17, with 307 acres in 1907), notably Washington (containing Calverley's bronze statue of Robert Burns, and Rhind's "Moses at the Rock of Horeb''), Beaver and Dudley, in which is the old Dudley Observatory—the present Observatory building is in Lake Avenue, south-west of Washington Park, where is also the Albany Hospital. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... an attempt was made to honour the memory of a greater poet than Thomas Campbell, one whose worldly reward had not been great, whose history ended in a grievous tragedy. The Scotchmen of the day seized the opportunity of the return of two of Robert Burns's sons from military service in India to give them a welcome home which should do something to atone for any neglect and injustice that had befallen their father. The festival was not altogether successful, as such festivals rarely are, but it excited considerable enthusiasm in the poet's native ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... refreshing, to find a Scotchman who had never heard of Robert Burns! It was worth the whole journey to take this honest man by the hand. How far would I not travel to talk with an American who had ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the future especially is sought on Hallowe'en. It is a famous time for divination in love affairs. A typical eighteenth century party in western Scotland is described by Robert Burns. ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... the 25th of January, 1759, about two miles from the town of Ayr, in a clay-built cottage, reared by his father's own hands, that Robert Burns was born. The "auld clay bigging" which saw his birth still stands by the side of the road that leads from Ayr to the river and the bridge of Doon. Between the banks of that romantic stream and the cottage is seen the roofless ruin of "Alloway's auld haunted ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... that higher education gives? Of course; and we should have them. Men fitted by nature for special pursuits in life will make preparation for that work. Water will find its level. Genius cannot be repressed. It will find an audience, even though the singer be Robert Burns at his plow in the remoteness of Ayr, or the philosophic AEsop in the humble garb of a Greek pedant's slave. Genius will take care of itself; it is the mass of mankind that must be led by the hand as we lead a small boy. It is therefore that I plead, that the masses ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... ROBERT BURNS was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1759. His childhood and youth were spent in poverty on his father's farm, where he learned to plough, reap, mow, and thresh in the barn, but where opportunities for education were such only as Scottish peasants know. In 1784 his father died, and he attempted ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... carpenter, Robert Burns a ploughman, Keats a druggist, Thomas Carlyle a mason, Hugh Miller a stone mason. Rubens, the artist, was a page, Swedenborg, a mining engineer. Dante and Descartes were soldiers. Ben Johnson was a brick layer and worked at building Lincoln Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... about him which is enough to make him a humbug. Masculine honesty, whether it be saint-like or sinner-like, does not label itself either saint or sinner. Fancy Saint Augustine labelling himself saint, or Robert Burns sinner; and therefore, though, little boy, you have probably not read the poems of Robert Burns, and have certainly not read the 'Confessions' of Saint Augustine, take my word for it, that both those personages were very good ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... directed your taste? who has praised your poems, and under whose patronage are they published? In short, what qualifications intitle you to instruct or entertain us? To the questions of such a catechism, perhaps honest Robert Burns would make no satisfactory answers. 'My good Sir, he might say, I am a poor country man; I was bred up at the school of Kilmarnock; I understand no languages but my own; I have studied Allan Ramsay and Ferguson. My poems have been praised at many a fireside; and I ask no patronage ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... calculated to enlarge his conception of human nature. Not the least among these he found in the brilliant literary and artistic society of Edinburgh, to which his mother's social position gave him entrance. Here, when only a lad, he met Robert Burns, then the pet and idol of the fashionable coteries of the capital. Here he heard Henry Mackenzie deliver a lecture on German literature which turned his attention to the romantic poetry of Germany and led directly to his first attempts at ballad-writing. But much more vital than ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... idea of what I'm trying to drive at, just take a trip up through Central Park the next time you are in New York and pause a while before those bronzes of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns which stand on the Mall. They are called bronzes, but to me they always looked more like castings. I don't care if you are as Scotch as a haggis, I know in advance what your feelings will be. If you decide that these two men ever looked in life ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... dote on Milton and on Robert Burns; I love old Marryat—his tales of pelf; I live on Byron; but my heart most yearns Towards those sweet things that ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... of her with whom his life Was harmony without a flaw, He took no other for a wife, Nor sighed for any that he saw; And if he doubted his two sons, And heirs, Alexis and Evander, He might have been as doubtful once Of Robert Burns and Alexander. ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... I like Robert Burns and think his "To Mary in Heaven" is his finest poem. But the critics seem to prefer his "Highland Mary." So I suppose these critics will look at me, with something akin to pity in the look, and say: ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... Northumbrian or Northern English of the Middle English Period, which may be roughly dated as extant from 1300 to 1400 or 1450. "Modern Scots" is the dialect (when they employ dialect) illustrated by Allan Ramsay, Alexander Ross, Robert Tannahill, John Galt, James Hogg (the Ettrick Shepherd), Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, and ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... was his peculiar charge. We feel assured that the events of that day, and the sentiments which were then inspired and uttered, will produce a marked effect upon the disposition of the country at large. It seemed as if all classes had spontaneously assembled to join hands above the grave of Robert Burns, and then and there to renew the vow of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... "Robert Burns had twins and a rather bad character, but after he met his bonnie Jean he wrote very beautiful poetry. A poet's life is usually sad anyhow—full of ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... matters. It is the spirit that breaks through the form that is the main interest of criticism. Form, we know, has a permanence of its own: so much so that it has again and again been worshipped by the idolators of art as being in itself more enduring than the thing which it embodies. Robert Burns, by his genius for perfect statement, can give immortality to the joys of being drunk with whiskey as the average hymn-writer cannot give immortality to the joys of being drunk with the love of God. Style, then, does seem actually to be a form of life. The critic may not ignore it any ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Poe, Lord Byron, and Robert Burns," says Dr. Geo. F. Hall, "were men of marvelous strength intellectually. But measured by the true rule of high moral principle, they were very weak. Superior endowment in a single direction—physical, mental, or ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... vapors. Next to her, as dragon over beauty, is a fat dame with "grenadier head-dress." "The Rivals" has yet to be written. London still hears "The Beggar's Opera." Lady Macbeth is played in hoopskirts. The Bastille is a tolerably tight building. Robert Burns is strewn with his first crumbs. It is the age of omber, of sonnets to Chloe's false ringlets, of odes to red heels and epics to lap dogs, of tinseled struttings in gilded drawing-rooms. It was town-and-alley, this age; and though the fields lay daily in their new creation with sun and shadow ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... Third is Defender of something we call 'the Faith' in those years; George the Third is head charioteer of the Destinies of England, to guide them through the gulf of French Revolutions, American Independences; and Robert Burns is Gauger of ale in Dumfries. It is an Iliad in a nutshell. The physiognomy of a world now verging towards dissolution, reduced now to spasms and death-throes, lies pictured in that one fact,—which ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... pantheism is due much of the charm and infinite delight of the Epics. Perhaps with ingenuity one might discover a metaphysic for Shakespeare—and even if we could not discover it, none the less it may have been there. But how about Herrick, Robert Burns, or even Mr. Henry James? Are we to equip them with a metaphysic, or exclude them from the portals of art? Shall we not gain more by requiring from an artist something, definite indeed, but less exacting and ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... Robert Burns is said to have "swept a duchess off her feet." Perhaps it did. But that of Lola Montez had a similar effect on a monarch. Under the magic of her spell, this one became rejuvenated. The years were stripped from him; he was once more a boy. ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... who does not agree with our own delightful Robert Burns, of glorious memory, who "dearly lo'ed the lasses O!" So only "Let the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... is little seen on farms to-day. Threshing and winnowing machines have taken its place. The father of Robert Burns declared threshing with a flail to be the only degrading and stultifying work on a farm; but I never knew another farmer who deemed it so, though it was certainly hard work. Last autumn I visited the "Poor Farm" on Quonsett Point in old Narragansett. In the vast barn ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... 10, 1759, a few months later than Robert Burns, he was a native of Marbach in Wuertemberg. His father had been a surgeon in the army, and was now in the pay of the Duke of Wuertemberg; and the benevolence, integrity and devoutness of his parents were expanded and beautified in the character of their son. His education was ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... overestimate rather than by depreciation: among the qualities of his early work, which afterwards suffered some eclipse in the growth of other powers, is its flexibility. It was natural for Carlyle, his successor in genius in the Scotch lowlands, to give an account of Robert Burns which throws all previous criticism of the poet into the shade. Similarly he has strong affinities to Johnson, Luther, Knox, Cromwell, to all his so-called heroes: but he is fair to the characters, if not always to the work, of Voltaire and Diderot, slurs over or makes humorous the escapades ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... life preceding his appointment as a Bow Street magistrate (an appointment comparable only to the choice of Robert Burns as an exciseman) were marked, as we have seen, by lively passages in the political arena, and a steady output of political journalism. Indeed, by this time, the public must have associated swingeing denunciations of Jacobites, and glowing eulogies of the British Constitution, with Harry Fielding's ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... thought, had some claims as a poet, since he was a lineal descendant of the canine companion who invariably accompanied Robert Burns in all ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... and erected in his memory a paltry monument, which will commemorate their shame as long as it lasts. His name has been rescued from oblivion by the industry and tact of Samuel Smiles, who, in writing his life, has revealed to us a rarer and higher kind of man than Robert Burns. ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... besides {p.039} the privilege of ransacking the stores of old French and Italian books, which were in little demand among the bulk of his subscribers. Here I saw the unfortunate Andrew Macdonald, author of Vimonda; and here, too, I saw at a distance the boast of Scotland, Robert Burns. Of the latter I shall presently have occasion to ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... he read were the Bible, the Pilgrims Progress, and the poems of Robert Burns. One day he walked a long distance to borrow a book of a farmer. This book was Weems's Life of Washington. He read as much as he ...
— Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln - A Book for Young Americans • James Baldwin
... by Robert Burns have never appeared in any collection of his works. They were given to me some time ago at Chatham Barracks by Lieut. Colonel Fergusson, R.M., formerly of Dumfriesshire, by whom they were copied from the tumbler upon which they were ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various
... Africa, to find out this sympathetic spirit, and how powerful is the hold of their hearts which those who have it gain! In poetic feeling, or at least in the power of expressing it, as in many other things, David Livingstone and Robert Burns were a great contrast; but in sympathy with the people they were alike, and in both cases the people felt it. Away and alone, in the heart of Africa, when mourning "the pride and avarice that make man a wolf to man," Livingstone would welcome the "good time coming," humming ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... manu, to the point of perfection; his linen washed and ironed by the indefatigable wife. Of simplest tastes, of most frugal habits, a few books the only luxury which he deemed indispensable; yet a most difficult man to live with, for to him applied precisely the description which Robert Burns gave of his own father; he was 'of stubborn, ungainly ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing |
