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WILLIAM THOM, THE WEAVER POET.
One of the most extraordinary and painful lives in literary history was that of William Thorn of In-verury, Scotland. There have been Scottish poets before and since Burns who have been bred in poverty and distress, and in whose lives the flowers of poetry have bloomed amid the most depressing and uncongenial circumstances. There have been crofters, shepherds, farm laborers, tailors, weavers, and shoemakers, servant lassies and old wives, who have given expression to their feelings in verse and song, with more or less skill and success, and testified to the strength of the national genius which has made Scotland so peculiarly the land of song, and filled the lower bed of bracken and furze in which the higher and rarer flowers of Scottish minstrelsy have stood preeminent. And the history of the minor Scottish poets is full of the homely pathos of unrequited toil, of pinching poverty, and of hopeless struggles with life, redeemed by honest virtue, patience, and thrift, or clouded with still deeper misfortune, and absolutely and irredeemably wrecked by dissipation and improvi- |
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