For when society finally turned the
cold shoulder on him he had to go back to farming again, carrying with
him a bitter sense of injustice and neglect. He leased a farm at
Ellisland, in 1788, and some friends procured his appointment as
exciseman for his district. But poverty, disappointment, irregular
habits, and broken health clouded his last years, and brought him to an
untimely death at the age of thirty-seven. He continued, however, to
pour forth songs of unequaled sweetness and force. "The man sank," said
Coleridge, "but the poet was bright to the last."
Burns is the best of British song-writers. His songs are singable; they
are not merely lyrical poems. They were meant to be sung, and they are
sung. They were mostly set to old Scottish airs, and sometimes they were
built up from ancient fragments of anonymous popular poetry, a chorus,
or stanza, or even a single line. Such are, for example, _Auld Lang
Syne_, _My Heart's in the Highlands_, and _Landlady, Count the Lawin_.
Burns had a great, warm heart. His sins were sins of passion, and sprang
from the same generous soil that nourished his impulsive virtues. His
elementary qualities as a poet were sincerity, a healthy openness to all
impressions of the beautiful, and a sympathy which embraced men,
animals, and the dumb objects of nature.
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