They are as sincerely and spontaneously autobiographical of his inner life as the sacred lyrics of David the Hebrew. They were indited with as much free fearless abandonment. The advice he gave to young Andrew to keep something to himsel’, not to be told even to a bosom crony, was a maxim of worldly prudence which he himself did not practice. He did not “reck his own rede.” And, though that habit of unguarded expression brought upon him the wrath and revenge of the Philistines, and kept him in material poverty all his days, yet, prompted as it always was by sincerity, and nearly always by absolute truth, it has made the manhood of to-day richer, stronger, and nobler. The world to-day has all the more the courage of its opinions that Burns exercised as a right the freedom of sincere and enlightened speech — and suffered for his bravery.

The subjects of his letters are numerous, and, to a pretty large extent, of much the same sort as the subjects of his poems. Often, indeed, you have the anticipation of an image or a sentiment which his poetry has made familiar. You have a glimpse of green buds which afterwards unfold into fragrance and colour. This is an interesting connection, of which one or two examples may be given. So early as 1781 he wrote to Alison Begbie— “Once you are convinced I am sincere, I am perfectly certain you have too much goodness and humanity to allow an honest man to languish in suspense only because he loves you too well.” Alison Begbie becomes Mary Morison, and the sentiment, so elegantly turned in prose for her, is thus melodiously transmuted for the lady-loves of all languishing lovers —

“O Mary, canst thou wreck his peace
Wha for thy sake would gladly dee,
Or canst thou break that heart of his
Wha’s only faut is loving thee?

 

If love for love thou wiltna gie,
At least be pity on me shown:
A thocht ungentle canna be
The thocht o’ Mary Morison!”

 

Again, in the first month of 1783 he writes to Murdoch, the schoolmaster— “I am quite indolent about those great concerns that set the bustling busy sons of care agog; and if I have wherewith to answer for the present hour, I am very easy with regard to anything further. Even the last worst shift of the unfortunate and wretched does not greatly terrify me.” Just one year later this sentiment was sent current in the well-known stanza concluding —

“But, Davie lad, ne’er fash your head
Though we hae little gear;
We’re fit to win our daily bread
As lang’s we’re hale an’ fier;
Mair speer na, nor fear na;
Auld age ne’er mind a fig,
The last o’t, the warst o’t,
Is only for to beg!”

 

Again, in the letter last referred to occurs the passage— “I am a strict economist, not indeed for the sake of the money, but one of the principal parts in my composition is a kind of pride, and I scorn to fear the face of any man living. Above everything I abhor as hell the idea of sneaking into a corner to avoid a dun.” This is metrically rendered, in May 1786, in the following lines: —

“To catch dame Fortune’s golden smile,
Assiduous wait upon her,
And gather gear by every wile
That’s justified by honour: —
Not for to hide it in a hedge,
Nor for a train attendant,
But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent.”

 

It would be easy to multiply examples: he is jostled in his letters by market-men before he is “hog-shouthered and jundied” by them in his verse; and the legends of Alloway Kirk are narrated in a letter to Grose before the immortal tale of Tam o’Shanter is woven for The Antiquities of Scotland.

There is nothing morbid or narrow in Burns’s letters. They are frank and healthy. You can spend a day over them, and feel at the end of it as if you had been wandering at large through the freedom of nature. They seem to have been written in the open air. The first condition necessary to an appreciative understanding of them is to concern yourself with the sentiment. And, indeed, the strength and sincerity of the sentiment by-and-by draw you away to oblivion of the style, however much it may at first strike you as redundant and affected. They are not the letters of a literary man. They have nothing suggestive of the studious chamber and the midnight lamp. There is often a narrowness of idea in the merely literary man which limits his auditory to men of his peculiar pattern. To this narrowness Burns, with all his faults of style, was a stranger. His letters are the utterances of a man who refused to be imprisoned in any single department of human thought. He was no specialist, pinned to one standpoint, and making the width of the world commensurate with the narrowness of his own horizon. He moved about, he looked abroad; he had no pet subject, no restricted field of study; nature and human nature in their multitudinous phases and many retreats were his range, and he expressed his views as freely and vigorously as he took them.

The general tone of the letters is high. The subject is not seldom of supreme interest. Questions are discussed which are rarely discussed in ordinary correspondence. The writer rises above creeds and formularies and arbitrarily established rule. He speculates on a theology beyond the bounds of Calvinism, on a philosophy of the soul above the dialectics of the schoolmen, on a morality at variance with conventional law. He interrogates the intuitions of the mind and the intimations of nature in order that, if possible, he may learn something of the soul’s origin, destiny, and supremest duty. But let us hear himself: —

(a) “I have ever looked on mankind in the lump to be nothing better    than a foolish, head-strong, credulous, unthinking mob; and their universal belief has ever had extremely little weight with me.... I am drawn by conviction like a Man, not by a halter like an 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 housand 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?...