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Show BURNS AND EMERSON. ' Bobbie Burns' anniversary was last week; his j countrymen celebrated it everywhere; this has been going on ever since he died, but only one man so far has given a pen picture of Bobbie Burns ( that has the perfectness of a photograph. That was not a Scotchman, but our own Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was the speaker in Boston at the 'j Burns centennial, Jan. 25, 1859, and the closing , words of his simple but lofty address were as follows: ' ' "He was the poet of the poor, anxious, cheer- ' ful, working humanity, so had he the language j of low life. He grew up in a rural district, speak- ing a patois unintelligible to all but natives, and he has made the Lowland Scotch a Doric dialect dia-lect of fame. It is the only example in history of a language made classic by the genius of a single man. But more than this. He had that secret of genius to draw from the bottom of society so-ciety the strength of his speech, and astonish the ears of the polite with these artless words, better than art, and filtered of all of prose through its beauty. It seemed odious to Luther that the -i devil should have all the best times; he would bring them into the churches ; and Burns knew how to take them from fairs and gypsies, blacksmiths black-smiths ?,hd drovers, the speech of the market and street .nd clothe it with melody. The memory of Burns I am afraid heaven and earth have taken too good care of it to leave us anything to say. The west winds are mur- , mering it. Open the windows behind you and hearken for the incoming tide, what the waves , say of it. The doves perching on the eaves of ' the Stone Chapel opposite, may know something about it. Every home in broad Scotland keeps I his fame bright. The memory of Burns every man's, every boy's and girl's head carries snatches of. his songs, and they say them by heart, and, what is strangest of all, never learned them from a book, but from mouth to mouth. The wind whispers them, the birds whistle them, the corn, barley and bullrushes hoarsely rustle them, nay, ' the mssic boxes at Geneva are framed toothes to play them; the hand organs of the Savoyards in all cities repeat them and the chimes of bells ring them in the spires. They are the property and solace of mankind." ; As a rule one has to keep his thoughts well , ., in hand to read Emerson, but in the above in language as simple as ever Burns used, he picks up his theme and makes music of it from opening open-ing to close. The soul of the transcendentalist and the soul of the lowly past met somewhere in the ether and found they were in exact accord '. and maybe while Emerson was telling here be- j low what Burns was to the world, Burns was telling those in the spheres to just wait, that one was coming from the little dark planet called the earth that would cause the brightest one of all the celestial choir to carefully tune jy his harp before he would dare play before the new i corner'. |