BURNS AND FINE WRITING.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 215, 8 June 1877, Page 9

BURNS AND FINE WRITING.

If ever there was a poet born on purpose to illustrate the difference between the poetry of genius and the poetry of talent, between the poetry of impulse and the poetry of effort, between the poetry - of inspiration and the poetry of gestation ; in short, between the intrinsical and extrinsical gift — surely that poet was Burns. One can hardly open his works at random without finding some proof of what we say. His worship of the true fire, and his almost godlike revelry in the use of it, may be inversely estimated by his corresponding contempt of the borrowed light. His perception of the infinite value of the one, and the pretentious hollowness of the other, were equally clear and strong ; and in making allusion totheir respective claims, he was not in the habit of mincing matters. What's a' your jargon o* your schools. Your Latin names for horns and stools, If honest Nature made you fools, What sairs your grammars ? Ye'd better ta'en up spades aud shools, Or knappin hammers. A set o' dull conceited hashes Confuse their brains in college classes ! They gang in stirks, and come out asses, Plain truth to speak, And soon they think to climb Parnassus By dint o' Greek. Gie me a spark o' Nature's fire ! That's a' the learning I desire, Then, though I trudge through dub and mire, At plough or cart, My muse, though namely in attire, May touch the heart. And yet, not to detract one moment from the infinite credit Burns had in the little culture he so manfully strove to give himself, who can read his letters without perceiving that even that little made him not a little pedantic sometimes ? And in his poems, too, we have now and then a phrase such as " the tenebrific scene," and a few others of that description; not many, but yet just enough to make every lover of true poetry inwardly thank God that the poet's culture went no further in that direction, and that h9 escaped the vice of "fine writing" by a happy ignorance of it. — From " Culture and Modern Poetry" in the Cornhill Magazine.