The flaunting flowers our gardens yield, High sheltering woods and wa's maun shield, But thou beneath the random bield O' clod or stane, Adorns the histie stibble-field Unseen, alane. There in thy scanty mantle clad But now the share uptears thy bed, Such is the fate of simple bard, On life's rough ocean luckless starr'd! Of prudent lore, Till billows rage, and gales blow hard, Such fate to suffering worth is given, To mis'ry's brink, Till wrench'd of every stay but Heav'n, Even thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate, Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives, elate, Full on thy bloom, Till crush'd beneath the furrow's weight, A MAN'S A MAN FOR A' THAT. Is there, for honest poverty, That hangs his head, and a' that? Our toil's obscure, and a' that; What tho' on homely fare we dine, For a' that, and a' that, Their tinsel show, and a' that, Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord, Wha struts, and stares, and a' that; His riband, star, and a' that, A king can make a belted knight, But an honest man's aboon his might, For a' that, and a' that, Their dignities, and a' that, Then let us pray that come it may— That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth, It's coming yet for a' that, That man to man, the warld o’er, DEVOTION. NEW YEAR'S DAY MORNING, 1789. I own. that I approve set times, seasons of more than ordinary acts of devotion, for breaking in on that habituated routine of life and thought which is so apt to reduce our existence to a kind of instinct, or even sometimes, and with some minds, to a state very little superior to mere machinery. This day-the first Sunday of May-a breezy, blueskied noon some time about the beginning, and a hoary morning, and calm sunny day, about the end of autumn-these, time out of mind, have been with me a kind of holiday. I believe I owe this to that glorious paper in the Spectator, The Vision of Mirza,' a piece that struck my young fancy before I was capable of fixing an idea to a word of three syllables: "On the fifth day of the moon, which, according to the custom of my forefathers, I always keep holy, after having washed myself and offered up my morning devotions, I ascended the high hill of Bagdad, in order to pass the rest of the day in meditation and prayer." We know nothing, or next to nothing, of the substance or structure of our souls, so cannot account for those seeming caprices in them that one should be particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which on minds of a different cast makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never heard the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild, mixing cadence of a troop of grey plovers in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the Eolian harp, passive takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us |