Happy thy name, O BURNS! for burns, in thy native Doric, Meaneth the free bright streams, exhaustless, pellucid, and sparkling, Mountain-born, wild and erratic, kissing the flow'rets in passing, Type of thy verse and thyself--loving and musical ever; And the streams by thy verse made immortal are known by our giant rivers, Where the emigrants sing them to soothe the yearnings for home in their bosoms, And the Coila and gentle Doon, by the song of the Celtic wanderer, Are known to the whispering reeds that border the great Mississippi. Thou wert the lad for the lasses! lasses the same are as misses; And here we have misses had pleased you--Missouri and the Mississippi. And "green grow the rushes" beside them--as thy evergreen chorus would have them. Thou wert the champion of freedom!--Thou didst rejoice in our glory! When we at Bunker's Hill no bunkum display'd, but true courage! Jubilant thou wert in our Declaration of Independence! More a Republican thou than a chain-hugging bow-and-scrape Royalist! Even the Stars and the Stripes seem appointed the flag of thy destiny;-- The stars are the types of thy glory, the stripes thou didst get from Misfortune. _Rival Rhymes, in honour of Burns_. Edited by Ben Trovato (Routledge, Warnes & Routledge. London, 1859.) * * * * * There are several excellent parodies in _Lays of the Saintly_, amongst them the following, which is given here as it is also in the style of Longfellow's _Evangeline:_-- SISTER BEATRICE (A.D. uncertain). This is the metre Columbian. The soft-flowing trochees and dactyls, Blended with fragments spondaic, and here and there an iambus, Syllables often sixteen, or more or less, as it happens, Difficult always to scan, and depending greatly on accent, Being a close imitation, in English, of Latin hexameters-- Fluent in sound, and avoiding the stiffness of commoner blank verse, Having the grandeur and flow of America's mountains and rivers, Such as no bard could achieve in a mean little island like England; Oft, at the end of a line, the sentence dividing abruptly Breaks, and in accents mellifluous follows the thoughts of the author. I.