DROPPING OFF.
AT the Burns Festival, Professor WILSON remarked—" Of his three sons now sitting here, one only, I believe, can remember his father's face." To a native of the land of BURNS these words suggest a train of melancholy associations. They remind him, that he may almost count his years by the persons associated with the memory of BURNS who have one by one "dropped off." We could easily frame such a register of the years of our pilgrimage. At the head of a long list of passers-away, would be a venerable figure, almost bent double with age, with long snow-white hair and sightless eyeballs, but an indescribable expression of serene benevolence on his lineaments.
"Dalrymple mild, Dalrymple mild, whose heart's like a child, And his life like the new-driven maw."
At some distance would follow Joust SYME of Ryedale, with his rubicund countenance and innumerable anecdotes : his name shall live in the verse of BURNS for " his personal converse and sense," and still more for" his porter, the first in the nation," on which he prided himself till his dying-day. "Wealthy young RICHARD," whose accession to his immense property when he had barely attained the age of manhood was sung by the man BURNS, has left us in a ripe age : the fair vallies of Auchencruive have already passed from his lineal descendants. "Bonnie JEAN" has taken her place in the Indian file of the associates of BURNS who in uninterrupted succession have paced the dark road to the shadowy world. The dead rush upon us in crowds : the living may easily be counted. On the spur of the moment, we can only recall JESSIE LEWARS, who smoothed the poet's dying bed ; GEORGE Tnorasort, to whose prompting we are indebted for the best songs of BURNS; and, if we mistake riot, the egregious "Doctor Hoasnooic." Long may they survive ; for while one is living who has grasped the hand of BURNS, he seems still to belong to the category of warm flesh and blood realities: when they also pass away, he will become thin air—an abstraction like HOMER or SHARSPERE.
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