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Oliver Wendell Holmes - For The Burns Centennial Celebration
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JANUARY 25, 1859

His birthday.--Nay, we need not speak
The name each heart is beating,--
Each glistening eye and flushing cheek
In light and flame repeating!

We come in one tumultuous tide,--
One surge of wild emotion,--
As crowding through the Frith of Clyde
Rolls in the Western Ocean;

As when yon cloudless, quartered moon
Hangs o`er each storied river,
The swelling breasts of Ayr and Doon
With sea green wavelets quiver.

The century shrivels like a scroll,--
The past becomes the present,--
And face to face, and soul to soul,
We greet the monarch-peasant.

While Shenstone strained in feeble flights
With Corydon and Phillis,--
While Wolfe was climbing Abraham`s heights
To snatch the Bourbon lilies,--

Who heard the wailing infant`s cry,
The babe beneath the sheeliug,
Whose song to-night in every sky
Will shake earth`s starry ceiling,--

Whose passion-breathing voice ascends
And floats like incense o`er us,
Whose ringing lay of friendship blends
With labor`s anvil chorus?

We love him, not for sweetest song,
Though never tone so tender;
We love him, even in his wrong,--
His wasteful self-surrender.

We praise him, not for gifts divine,--
His Muse was born of woman,--
His manhood breathes in every line,--
Was ever heart more human?

We love him, praise him, just for this
In every form and feature,
Through wealth and want, through woe and bliss,
He saw his fellow-creature!

No soul could sink beneath his love,--
Not even angel blasted;
No mortal power could soar above
The pride that all outlasted!

Ay! Heaven had set one living man
Beyond the pedant`s tether,--
His virtues, frailties, HE may scan,
Who weighs them all together!

I fling my pebble on the cairn
Of him, though dead, undying;
Sweet Nature`s nursling, bonniest bairn
Beneath her daisies lying.

The waning suns, the wasting globe,
Shall spare the minstrel`s story,--
The centuries weave his purple robe,
The mountain-mist of glory!
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