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Home  »  The Poetical Works In Four Volumes  »  The Memory of Burns

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892). The Poetical Works in Four Volumes. 1892.

Personal Poems

The Memory of Burns

  • Read at the Boston celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, 25th 1st mo., 1859. In my absence these lines were read by Ralph Waldo Emerson.


  • HOW sweetly come the holy psalms

    From saints and martyrs down,

    The waving of triumphal palms

    Above the thorny crown!

    The choral praise, the chanted prayers

    From harps by angels strung,

    The hunted Cameron’s mountain airs,

    The hymns that Luther sung!

    Yet, jarring not the heavenly notes,

    The sounds of earth are heard,

    As through the open minster floats

    The song of breeze and bird!

    Not less the wonder of the sky

    That daisies bloom below;

    The brook sings on, though loud and high

    The cloudy organs blow!

    And, if the tender ear be jarred

    That, haply, hears by turns

    The saintly harp of Olney’s bard,

    The pastoral pipe of Burns,

    No discord mars His perfect plan

    Who gave them both a tongue;

    For he who sings the love of man

    The love of God hath sung!

    To-day be every fault forgiven

    Of him in whom we joy!

    We take, with thanks, the gold of Heaven

    And leave the earth’s alloy.

    Be ours his music as of spring,

    His sweetness as of flowers,

    The songs the bard himself might sing

    In holier ears than ours.

    Sweet airs of love and home, the hum

    Of household melodies,

    Come singing, as the robins come

    To sing in door-yard trees.

    And, heart to heart, two nations lean,

    No rival wreaths to twine,

    But blending in eternal green

    The holly and the pine!