Robert Burns

The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Celebrated Scottish poet, born at Alloway, near Ayr, in 1759, son of an honest, intelligent peasant, who tried farming in a small way, but did not prosper; tried farming himself on his father's decease in 1784, but took to rhyming by preference; driven desperate in his circumstances, meditated emigrating to Jamaica, and published a few poems he had composed to raise money for that end; realised a few pounds thereby, and was about to set sail, when friends and admirers rallied round him and persuaded him to stay; he was invited to Edinburgh; his poems were reprinted, and money came in; soon after he married, and took a farm, but failing, accepted the post of exciseman in Dumfries; fell into bad health, and died in 1796, aged 37. "His sun shone as through a tropical tornado, and the pale shadow of death eclipsed it at noon.... To the ill-starred Burns was given the power of making man's life more venerable, but that of wisely guiding his own life was not given.... And that spirit, which might have soared could it but have walked, soon sank to the dust, its glorious faculties trodden under foot in the blossom; and died, we may almost say, without ever having lived." See Carlyle'S "Miscellanies" for by far the justest and wisest estimate of both the man and the poet that has yet by any one been said or sung. He is at his best in his "Songs," he says, which he thinks "by far the best that Britain has yet produced.... In them," he adds, "he has found a tune and words for every mood of man's heart; in hut and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in many-coloured joy and woe of existence, the name , the voice of that joy and that woe, is the name and voice which Burns has given them."

Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature

a Methodist Episcopal minister was born in South Carolina, April 10, 1794. He spent his youth in Warren County, 0.; acquired a substantial education by diligent personal effort; experienced religion in his seventeenth year; immediately began exercising his gifts in singing, praying, and exhorting; received license to preach in his twenty-second year' and soon after was sent to labor on Paint Creek Circuit, where he began his active, useful itinerant life. In 1824 he went into the wilderness of Indiana, and proclaimed salvation in the log cabins to a people hungry for the Gospel. In 1826 he was admitted into the Illinois Conference, wherein he continued to labor with great zeal and fidelity until his strong constitution gave way, and in 1843 he was obliged to become superannuate, which relation he held until his death, Oct. 2,1877. As a preacher, Mr. Burns was' clear, pointed, and successful; as a Christian, thoroughly consecrated. See Minutes of Annual Conferences, 1878, p. 53.