The North Star (Rochester)/1847/12/03/Robert Burns
ROBERT BURNS.
BY MONTGOMERY.
What bird in beauty, flight, or song,
Can with the bïrd compare,
Who sang as sweet, and soared as strong,
As ever child of air?
His plume, his note, his form, could Burns,
For whim or pleasure change;
He was not one, but all by turns,
With transmigration strange.—
The Blackbird, oracle of spring,
When flowed his moral lay;
The Swallow wheeling on the wing,
Capriciously at play;
The Humming-bird, from bloom to bloom,
Inhaling heavenly balm;
The Raven, in the tempest's gloom;
The Halcyon in the calm;
In "auld kirk Alloway" the Owl,
At witching time of night;
By "bonnie Doon," the earliest fowl
That carolled to the light,
He was the Wren amid the grove,
When in his homely vein;
At Bannockburn the bird of Jove,
With thunder in his train;
The Woodlark, in his mournful hours;
The Goldfinch in his mirth;
The Thrush, a spendthrift of his powers,
Enrapturing heaven and earth,
The Swan, in majesty and grace,
Contemplative and still;
But roused, no Falcon in the chase,
Could, like his satire, kill,
The Linnet in simplicity;
In tenderness, the Dove;
But more than all beside, was he
The Nightingale, in Love.
Oh, had he never stoop'd to shame,
Nor lent a charm to vice,
How had devotion loved to name
That Bird of Paradise!
Peace to the dead! In Scotia's choir
Of minstrels, great and small,
He sprang from his spontaneous fire,
The Phœnix of them all.