Modern Idols; Studies in Biography and Criticism (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1886 edition. Excerpt: ... IV. ROBERT BURNS. Listen I will sing thee a song of light, Distill'd from burning tears, --A song that shall nevermore take its flight From out the ceaseless years. Robert Burns was a new world's new creation. A poet so distinctively national in his individuality, and yet so absolutely cosmopolitan in his type of thought, never before touched this world. The Christian civilization of the past had come to incarnate world-granite in John Knox and his ScotchEnglish Protestantism, producing Cromwell and his king-slayers in Old England, and our own tea-spillers and witch-burners in New England: an earnest, fanatical race. But the world is not all conscience and justice and severity, any more than it is all mugwump, dandy, dallying, and clown. By natural attrition and reaction there had to come something solid and grand and beautiful in human character, human faith, and human thought, but less straitened and strait-laced. Nature was in her birth-throes for a new type of man, and Robert Burns was the first-born of this agony. Then- Written for the 127th Anniversary of his Birth, Jan. 1886. Goethe, and Carlyle, and Hugo, and Emerson; till at last the heavens and the earth are full ot them. Do you wonder he set the world on fire with his star-clashings and died of his own inward flame? Place your own ear closer to the heart of nature, and learn how, in all ages and nations, it throbs and thumps till it breaks in such momentous hours. No merely professional man, no mere worldling or Bohemian, can understand Robert Burns, or say one just word about him. He was not of these, but above them. He knew more theology than the parsons; he could love like a libertine and rant like a Jacobin, but by instinct he was conservative and a gentleman. Above all, ...