on the name “Robert Burns” at harpers.org turns up several things one of which is this from the February 1947 issue in an article entitled “Western Half-Acre” by Thomas Hornsby Ferril:
The contradictions wash out. I return to the Nature-loving traits in all of us, if we want to use them to our advantage, so magnificently developed in a man like Robert Burns who could write “The Twa’ Dogs,” “To a Mouse,” and “To a Daisy,” and who could be ostracized for his revolutionary devotion to the common man and die as a miserable outcast, yet still set multitudes of us rocking to “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve – bums, barflies, bankers, doctors, economists, arm in arm, everybody loves everybody and where have you been all my life? Sentimentality? Indeed it is! So is war, so is Ku Kluxing; everything wicked about us is sentimental. Robert Burns, who loved all Nature, has done more to make us love each other, in a world where a little goes a long way, than twenty carloads of well meaning international savants. The only thing he hated was the wickedness that hindered loving. Such a mind would forgive, but not approve, tirades like mine against people who rule out love of Nature from their blueprints for a better world. But if we must fight for a better world, let’s love as much of it as we can as we go along, each and every facet of it. The crusader who says there will be time enough to enjoy Nature when we have made the world itself fit to live in is not only an apologist for his own hatreds, but makes the patent error of conceiving of history as a series of static destinations. He reminds me of some single-minded young couple saving up for a glorious honeymoon trip around the world when they are seventy: Unless we love Nature in sickness and in health, in war and peace, in depression and prosperity, we do not love Nature at all-and once we lose interest in her manifestations we block off a vast avenue to our own comradeship.
~ End Article and Begin Conversation ~
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