Burns—great in sadness and great in humor; so human in his melancholy, so loving in his laughter. When we hear the pleasant peal of his hearty mirth, our bosoms dilate, until we could embrace our species in affection. When, changing his tone, we feel the breath of his indignation or listen to his cry against oppression, our pulse beats quicker and our blood flows faster. Burns, bard of the brave and fervent soul, destined to move humanity as long as language shall endure; as long as the love of liberty, of independence, of fearless honesty, or patriotic courage, shall have a refuge in our world. Burns is a nobleman of nature;—a man for the toilsmen of earth to look upon and hope. In humble, rustic life, under the thatched roof, which gave the peasant his shelter; in the field where the heir of labor in the sweat of his brow fulfilled the original destiny of man, Burns fed inspired thoughts, and laid the foundation of a deathless fame. True, his life was short in years; but how passing long was it in emotions, in capacious and crowded fancies. His spirit was goaded, no doubt, with the vulgar cares of poverty, and the worse results of passion; but it was glorified also with conscious genius; he could retreat from the vexations of the world to the sanctuary of his enriched imagination, and there, amidst all the evils of his outward condition, he could find in poetry its own exceeding great reward. Through all the sorrows that overspread his short but rapid course; amidst all the clouds that hung heavily over his path, glimpses of joy were ever and anon bursting on his enraptured eye, which it is given only to the favored ones to behold. And who would not, if he could, have a soul so adorned with the beautiful, rather than without it, be overburdened with the load of external fortune? Had Burns been merely a man of title, he had been forgotten as all titled dust since the days of Nimrod; as unknown as the dukes of Edom; a pompous funeral and a lying epitaph would have given him to oblivion. As it is, the recollection of him is garnered in the choicest corners of the heart, and his name is linked forever to the music of sweetest sounds.