Explore "Burns and His School" by Charles Kingsley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
{127} North British Review, No. XXXI. -- 1. -- "Elliott's Poems. " London, 1833. -- 2. "Poems of Robert Nicoll. " Third Edition. Edinburgh, 1843. -- 3. "Life and Poems of John Bethune. " London, 1841. -- 4. "Memoirs of Alexander Bethune. " By W. M'Combie. Aberdeen, 1845. -- 5. "Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver. " By William Thorn, of Inverury. Second Edition, London, 1845. -- 6. "The Purgatory of Suicides. " By Thomas Cooper. London, 1845. -- 7. "The Book of Scottish Song. " By Alexander Whitelaw. Edinburgh, 1848.
Four faces among the portraits of modern men, great or small, strike us as supremely beautiful; not merely in expression, but in the form and proportion and harmony of features: Shakespeare, Raffaelle, Goethe, Burns. One would expect it to be so; for the mind makes the body, not the body the mind; and the inward beauty seldom fails to express itself in the outward, as a visible sign of the invisible grace or disgrace of the wearer. Not that it is so always. A Paul, Apostle of the Gentiles, may be ordained to be "in presence weak, in speech contemptible," hampered by some thorn in the flesh -- to interfere apparently with the success of his mission, perhaps for the same wise purpose of Providence which sent Socrates to the Athenians, the worshippers of physical beauty, in the ugliest of human bodies, that they, or rather those of them to whom eyes to see had been given, might learn, that soul is after all independent of matter, and not its creature and its slave.