GREAT MEN'S BODIES
so Burns. He was emphatically a strong man; there was, as Carlyle says of him, 'a certain ragged, sterling worth about him' which makes his songs as good as sermons sometimes, and sometimes as good as battles. And it was this notable amount of backbone, and force of arm, sensibly felt in his utterances, which gave to him pathos; and his tenderness such healthy grace, and such rare freedom from anything that savored of sentimentality. In Burns the most delicate sensibility to beauty was harmoniously combined with the firmest grip, and the most manly stout-heartedness.… He was a man of good personal aspect and manly presentment. He had none of the pale cast of countenance that men of action expect to find in the poet and the philosopher; He was healthy and robust, and could handle the plough or the flail as vigorously as the pen. Then again his general vigor of mind was as notable as his vigor of body; he was as strong in thought as intense in emotion. If inferior to Coleridge in ideal speculation, to Wordsworth in harmonious contemplation, and to Southey in book-learning; in all that concerns living men, and human life, and human society, he was extremely sharp-sighted; and not only wise in penetrating to the inmost springs of human thought and sentiment; but, in the judgment of conduct, eminently shrewd and sagacious; gifted, in the highest degree, with that fundamental virtue of all sound Scotsmen—common-sense, without which great genius in a full career is apt to lead a man astray from his surroundings, and make him most a stranger to that with which in common life he ought to be most familiar."—Professor W. G. Blaikie's Burns.
Alexander Smith says of Burns: "The frame of this young farmer was originally powerful."
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