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ROBERT BURNS
[Illustration:
ROBERT
BURNS
BY
GABRIEL
SETOUN
FAMOUS
.SCOTS.
.SERIES.
PUBLISHED BY
OLIPHANT ANDERSON
& FERRIER . EDINBURGH
AND LONDON
]
* * * * *
The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr. Joseph Brown, and
the printing from the press of Morrison & Gibb Limited, Edinburgh.
_June 1896._
* * * * *
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
BIRTH AND EDUCATION 7
CHAPTER II
LOCHLEA AND MOSSGIEL 25
CHAPTER III
THE SERIES OF SATIRES 40
CHAPTER IV
THE KILMARNOCK EDITION 56
CHAPTER V
THE EDINBURGH EDITION 73
CHAPTER VI
BURNS'S TOURS 92
CHAPTER VII
ELLISLAND 111
CHAPTER VIII
DUMFRIES 128
CHAPTER IX
SUMMARY AND ESTIMATE 148
ROBERT BURNS
CHAPTER I
BIRTH AND EDUCATION
Of the many biographies of Robert Burns that have been written, most of
them laboriously and carefully, perhaps not one gives so luminous and
vivid a portrait, so lifelike and vigorous an impression of the
personality of the poet and the man, as the picture the author has given
of himself in his own writings. Burns's poems from first to last are,
almost without exception, the literary embodiment of his feelings at a
particular moment. He is for ever revealing himself to the reader, even
in poems that might with propriety be said to be purely objective. His
writings in a greater degree than the writings of any other author are
the direct expression of his own experiences; and in his poems and songs
he is so invariably true to himself, so dominated by the mood of the
moment, that every one of them gives us some glimpse into the heart and
soul of the writer. In his letters he is rarely so happy; frequently he
is writing up to certain models, and ceases to be natural. Consequently
we often miss in them the character and spirituality that is never
absent from his poetry. But his poems and songs, chronologically
arranged, might make in themselves, and without the aid of any running
commentary, a tolerably complete biography. Reading them, we note the
development of his character and the growth of his powers as a poet; we
can see at any particular time his attitude towards the world, and the
world's attitude towards him; we have, in fine, a picture of the man in
his relations to his fellow-man and in relation to circumstances, and
may learn if we will what mark he made on the society of his time, and
what effect that society had on him. And that surely is an important
essential of perfect biography.
But otherwise the story of Burns's life has been told with such
minuteness of detail, that the internal evidence of his poetry would
seem only to be called in to verify or correct the verdict of tradition
and the garbled gossip of those wise after the fact of his fame. It is
so easy after a man has compelled the attention of the world to fill up
the empty years of his life when he was all unknown to fame, with
illustrative anecdotes and almost forgotten incidents, revealed and
coloured by the light of after events! This is a penalty of genius, and
it is sometimes called fame, as if fame were a gift given of the world
out of a boundless and unintelligent curiosity, and not the life-record
of work achieved. It is easier to collect ana and to make them into the
patchwork pattern of a life than to read the character of the man in his
writings; and patchwork, of necessity, has more of colour than the
homespun web of a peasant-poet.
Burns has suffered sorely at the hands of the anecdote-monger. One great
feature of his poems is their perfect sincerity. He pours out his soul
in song; tells the tale of his loves, his joys and sorrows, of his
faults and failings, and the awful pangs of remorse. And if a man be
candid and sincere, he will be taken at his word when he makes the world
his confessional, and calls himself a sinner. There is pleasure to small
minds in discovering that the gods are only clay; that they who are
guides and leaders are men of like passions with themselves, subject to
the same temptations, and as liable to fall. This is the consolation of
mediocrity in the presence of genius; and if from the housetops the poet
proclaims his shortcomings, the world will hear him gladly and believe;
his faults will be remembered, and his genius forgiven. What more easy
than to bear out his testimony with the weight of collateral evidence,
and the charitable anecdotage of acquaintances who knew him not?
Information that is vile and valueless may ever be had for the seeking;
and it needs only to be whispered about for a season to find its way
ultimately into print, and to flourish.
It might naturally be expected at this time of day that all that is
merely mythical and traditional might have been sifted from what is
accredited and attested fact, that the chaff might have been winnowed
from the grain in the life of Burns. In some of the most
recently-published biographies this has been most carefully and
conscientiously done; but through so many years wild and improbable
stories had been allowed to thrive and to go unchallenged, that fiction
has come to take the colour and character of fact, and to pass into
history. 'The general impression of the place,' that unfortunate phrase
on which the late George Gilfillan based an unpardonable attack on the
character of the poet, has grown by slow degrees, and gained credence by
the lapse of time, till it is accepted as the general impression of the
country. Those who would speak of the poet Robert Burns are expected to
speak apologetically, and to point a moral from the story of a wasted
life. For that has become a convention, and convention is always
respectable. But after all is said and done, the devil's advocate makes
a wretched biographer. It seems strange and unaccountable that men
should dare to become apologists for one who has sung himself into the
heart and conscience of his country, and taken the ear of the world. Yet
there have been apologists even for the poetry of Burns. We are told,
wofully, that he wrote only short poems and songs; was content with
occasional pieces; did not achieve any long and sustained effort--to be
preserved, it is to be expected, in a folio edition, and assigned a
fitting place among other musty and hide-bound immortals on the shelves
of libraries under lock and key. As well might we seek to apologise for
the fields and meadows, in so far as they bring forth neither corn nor
potatoes, but only grasses and flowers, to dance to the piping of the
wind, and nod in the sunshine of summer.
It is a healthier sign, however, that the more recent biographers of
Burns snap their fingers in the face of convention, and, looking to the
legacy he has left the world, refuse to sit in sackcloth and ashes round
his grave, either in the character of moralising mourners or charitable
mutes. Whatever has to be said against them nowadays, the 'cant of
concealment'--to adopt another of Gilfillan's phrases--is not to be laid
to their charge. Rather have they rushed to the other extreme, and in
their eagerness to do justice to the memory of the poet, led the reader
astray in a wilderness of unnecessary detail. So much is now known of
Burns, so many minute and unimportant details of his life and the lives
of others have been unearthed, that the poet is, so to speak, buried in
biography; the character and the personality of the man lost in the
voluminous testimony of many witnesses. Reading, we note the care and
conscientiousness of the writer; we have but a confused and blurred
impression of the poet. Although a century has passed since his death,
we do not yet see the events of Burns's life in proper perspective.
Things trifling in themselves, and of little bearing on his character,
have been preserved, and are still recorded with painful elaboration;
while the sidelights from friends, companions, and acquaintances, male
and female, are many and bewildering.
Would it not be possible out of this mass of material to tell the story
of Robert Burns's life simply and clearly, neither wandering away into
the family histories and genealogies of a crowd of uninteresting
contemporaries, nor wasting time in elaborating inconsequential trifles?
What is wanted is a picture of the man as he was, and an understanding
of all that tended to make him the name and the power he is in the world
to-day.
William Burness, the father of the poet, was a native of
Kincardineshire, and 'was thrown by early misfortunes on the world at
large.' After many years' wanderings, he at last settled in Ayrshire,
where he worked at first as a gardener before taking a lease of some
seven acres of land near the Bridge of Doon, and beginning business as
a nurseryman. It was to a clay cottage which he built on this land that
he brought his wife, Agnes Broun, in December 1757; and here the poet
was born in 1759. The date of his birth is not likely to be forgotten.
'Our monarch's hindmost year but ane
Was five-and-twenty days begun,
'Twas then a blast o' Jan'war' win'
Blew hansel in on Robin.'
To his father Burns owed much; and if there be anything in heredity in
the matter of genius, it was from him that he inherited his marvellous
mental powers. His mother is spoken of as a shrewd and sagacious woman,
with education enough to enable her to read her Bible, but unable to
write her own name. She had a great love for old ballads, and Robert as
a boy must often have listened to her chanting the quaint old songs with
which her retentive memory was stored. The poet resembled his mother in
feature, although he had the swarthy complexion of his father. Attempts
have been made now and again to trace his ancestry on the father's side,
and to give to the world a kind of genealogy of genius. Writers have
demonstrated to their own satisfaction that it was perfectly natural
that Burns should have been the man he was. But the other children of
William Burness were not great poets. It has even been discovered that
his genius was Celtic, whatever that may mean! Excursions and
speculations of this kind are vain and unprofitable, hardly more
reputable than the profanities of the Dumfries craniologists who, in
1834, in the early hours of April 1st,--a day well chosen,--desecrated
the poet's dust. They fingered his skull, 'applied their compasses to
it, and satisfied themselves that Burns had capacity enough to write
_Tam o' Shanter_, _The Cotter's Saturday Night_, and _To Mary in
Heaven_.' Let us take the poet as he comes to us, a gift of the gods,
and be thankful. As La Bruyere puts it, 'Ces hommes n'ont ni ancetres ni
posterites; ils forment eux seuls toute une descendance.'
What Burns owed particularly to his father he has told us himself both
in prose and verse. The exquisite and beautiful picture of the father
and his family at their evening devotions is taken from life; and
William Burness is the sire who
'turns o'er with patriarchal grace
The big ha'-bible ance his father's pride';
and in his fragment of autobiography the poet remarks: 'My father picked
up a pretty large quantity of observation and experience, to which I am
indebted for most of my pretensions to wisdom. I have met with few men
who understood men, their manners and their ways, equal to him; but
stubborn, ungainly integrity and headlong, ungovernable irascibility are
disqualifying circumstances; consequently I was born a very poor man's
son.... It was his dearest wish and prayer to have it in his power to
keep his children under his own eye till they could discern between good
and evil; so with the assistance of his generous master, he ventured on
a small farm in that gentleman's estate.'
This estimate of William Burness is endorsed and amplified by Mr.
Murdoch, who had been engaged by him to teach his children, and knew him
intimately.
'I myself,' he says, 'have always considered William Burness as by far
the best of the human race that ever I had the pleasure of being
acquainted with. He was an excellent husband; a tender and affectionate
father. He had the art of gaining the esteem and goodwill of those that
were labourers under him. He carefully practised every known duty, and
avoided everything that was criminal; or, in the apostle's words,
_Herein did he exercise himself in living a life void of offence towards
God and man_.'
Even in his manner of speech he was different from men in his own walk
in life. 'He spoke the English language with more propriety (both with
respect to diction and pronunciation) than any man I ever knew with no
greater advantages.'
Truly was Burns blessed in his parents, especially in his father.
Naturally such a father wished his children to have the best education
his means could afford. It may be that he saw even in the infancy of his
firstborn the promise of intellectual greatness. Certain it is he
laboured, as few fathers even in Scotland have done, to have his
children grow up intelligent, thoughtful, and virtuous men and women.
Robert Burns's first school was at Alloway Mill, about a mile from home,
whither he was sent when in his sixth year. He had not been long there,
however, when the father combined with a few of his neighbours to
establish a teacher in their own neighbourhood. That teacher was Mr.
Murdoch, a young man at that time in his nineteenth year.
This is an important period in the poet's life, although he himself in
his autobiography only briefly touches on his schooling under Murdoch.
He has more to say of what he owed to an old maid of his mother's,
remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition. 'She had, I
suppose, the largest collection in the country of tales and songs
concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks,
spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions,
cantraips, enchanted towers, giants, dragons, and other trumpery. This
cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy; but had so strong an effect on my
imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes
keep a sharp lookout in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more
sceptical in these matters than I, yet it often takes an effort of
philosophy to shake off these idle terrors.'
It ought not to be forgotten that Burns had a better education than most
lads of his time. Even in the present day many in better positions have
not the advantages that Robert and Gilbert Burns had, the sons of such a
father as William Burness, and under such an earnest and thoughtful
teacher as Mr. Murdoch. It is important to notice this, because Burns is
too often regarded merely as a _lusus naturae_; a being gifted with song,
and endowed by nature with understanding from his birth. We hear too
much of the _ploughman_ poet. His genius and natural abilities are
unquestioned and unquestionable; but there is more than mere natural
genius in his writings. They are the work of a man of no mean education,
and bear the stamp--however spontaneously his songs sing themselves in
our ears--of culture and study. In a letter to Dr. Moore several years
later than now, Burns himself declared against the popular view. 'I have
not a doubt but the knack, the aptitude to learn the Muses' trade is a
gift bestowed by Him who forms the secret bias of the soul; but I as
firmly believe that _excellence_ in the profession is the fruit of
industry, attention, labour, and pains. At least I am resolved to try my
doctrine by the test of experience.' There is a class of people,
however, to whom this will sound heretical, forbidding them, as it were,
the right to babble with grovelling familiarity of Rab, Rob, Robbie,
Scotia's Bard, and the Ploughman Poet; and insisting on his name being
spoken with conscious pride of utterance, Robert Burns, Poet.
Gilbert Burns, writing to Dr. Currie of the school-days under Mr.
Murdoch, says: 'We learnt to read English tolerably well, and to write a
little. He taught us, too, the English Grammar. I was too young to
profit much by his lessons in grammar, but Robert made some proficiency
in it--a circumstance of considerable weight in the unfolding of his
genius and character, as he soon became remarkable for the fluency and
correctness of his expression, and read the few books that came in his
way with much pleasure and improvement; for even then he was a reader
when he could get a book.'
After the family removed to Mount Oliphant, the brothers attended Mr.
Murdoch's school for two years longer, until Mr. Murdoch was appointed
to a better situation, and the little school was broken up. Thereafter
the father looked after the education of his boys himself, not only
helping them with their reading at home after the labours of the day,
but 'conversing familiarly with them on all subjects, as if they had
been men, and being at great pains, as they accompanied him on the
labours of the farm, to lead conversation to such subjects as might tend
to increase their knowledge or confirm them in virtuous habits.' Among
the books he borrowed or bought for them at that period were Salmon's
_Geographical Grammar_, Derham's _Physico-Theology_, Ray's _Wisdom of
God in the Works of Creation_, and Stackhouse's _History of the Bible_.
It was about this time, too, that Robert became possessed of _The
Complete Letter-Writer_, a book which Gilbert declared was to Robert of
the greatest consequence, since it inspired him with a great desire to
excel in letter-writing, and furnished him with models by some of the
first writers in our language. Perhaps this book was a great gain. It is
questionable. What would Robert Burns's letters have been had he never
seen a Complete Letter-Writer, and never read 'those models by some of
the first writers in our language'? Easier and more natural, we are of
opinion; and he might have written fewer. Those in the Complete
Letter-Writer style we could easily have spared. His teacher, Mr.
Murdoch, furnishes some excellent examples of the stilted epistolary
style that was then fashionable.
'But now the plains of Mount Oliphant began to whiten, and Robert was
summoned to relinquish the pleasing scenes that surrounded the grotto of
Calypso, and, armed with a sickle, to seek glory by signalising himself
in the fields of Ceres.' Though Robert Burns never perpetrated anything
like this, his models were not without their pernicious effect on his
prose compositions.
When Robert was about fourteen years old, he and Gilbert were sent for a
time, week about, to a school at Dalrymple, and the year following
Robert was sent to Ayr to revise his English grammar under Mr. Murdoch.
While there he began the study of French, bringing with him, when he
returned home, a French Dictionary and Grammar and Fenelon's
_Telemaque_. In a little while he could read and understand any French
author in prose. He also gave some time to Latin; but finding it dry and
uninteresting work, he soon gave it up. Still he must have picked up a
little of that language, and we know that he returned to the rudiments
frequently, although 'the Latin seldom predominated, a day or two at a
time, or a week at most.' Under the heading of general reading might be
mentioned _The Life of Hannibal_, _The Life of Wallace_, _The
Spectator_, Pope's _Homer_, Locke's _Essay on the Human Understanding_,
_Allan Ramsay's Works_, and several _Plays of Shakspeare_. All this is
worth noting, even at some length, because it shows how Burns was being
educated, and what books went to form and improve his literary taste.
Yet when we consider the circumstances of the family we see that there
was not much time for study. The work on the farm allowed Burns little
leisure, but every spare moment would seem to have been given to
reading. Father and sons, we are told by one who afterwards knew the
family at Lochlea, used to sit at their meals with books in their hands;
and the poet says that one book in particular, _A Select Collection of
English Songs_, was his _vade mecum_. He pored over them, driving his
cart or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse, carefully
noting the true, tender, or sublime from affectation or fustian. 'I am
convinced,' he adds, 'I owe to this practice much of my critic craft,
such as it is.'
The years of their stay at Mount Oliphant were years of unending toil
and of poverty bravely borne. The whole period was a long fight against
adverse circumstances. Looking back on his life at this time, Burns
speaks of it as 'the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil
of a galley slave'; and we can well believe that this is no exaggerated
statement. His brother Gilbert is even more emphatic. 'Mount Oliphant,'
he says, 'is almost the poorest soil I know of in a state of
cultivation.... My father, in consequence of this, soon came into
difficulties, which were increased by the loss of several of his cattle
by accident and disease. To the buffetings of misfortune we could only
oppose hard labour and the most rigid economy. We lived very sparingly.
For several years butcher's meat was a stranger in the house, while all
the members of the family exerted themselves to the utmost of their
strength, and rather beyond it, in the labours of the farm. My brother,
at the age of thirteen, assisted in thrashing the crop of corn, and at
fifteen was the principal labourer on the farm; for we had no hired
servant, male or female. The anguish of mind we felt at our tender years
under these straits and difficulties was very great. To think of our
father growing old (for he was now above fifty), broken down with the
long-continued fatigues of his life, with a wife and five other
children, and in a declining state of circumstances, these reflections
produced in my brother's mind and mine sensations of the deepest
distress. I doubt not but the hard labour and sorrow of this period of
his life was in a great measure the cause of that depression of spirits
with which Robert was so often afflicted through his whole life
afterwards. At this time he was almost constantly afflicted in the
evenings with a dull headache, which at a future period of his life was
exchanged for a palpitation of the heart and a threatening of fainting
and suffocation in his bed in the night-time.'
This, we doubt not, is a true picture--melancholy, yet beautiful. But
not only did this increasing toil and worry to make both ends meet,
injure the bodily health of the poet, but it did harm to him in other
ways. It affected, to a certain extent, his moral nature. Those bursts
of bitterness which we find now and again in his poems, and more
frequently in his letters, are assuredly the natural outcome of these
unsocial and laborious years. Burns was a man of sturdy independence;
too often this independence became aggressive. He was a man of
marvellous keenness of perception; too frequently did this manifest
itself in a sulky suspicion, a harshness of judgment, and a bitterness
of speech. We say this in no spirit of fault-finding, but merely point
it out as a natural consequence of a wretched and leisureless existence.
This was the education of circumstances--hard enough in Burns's case;
and if it developed in him certain sterling qualities, gave him an
insight into and a sympathy with the lives of his struggling fellows, it
at the same time warped, to a certain extent, his moral nature.
What was his outlook on the world at this time? He measured himself with
those he met, we may be sure, for Burns certainly (as he says of his
father) 'understood men, their manners and their ways,' as it is given
to very few to be able to do. Of the ploughmen, farmers, lairds, or
factors, he saw round about him there was none to compare with him in
natural ability, few his equal in field-work. 'At the plough, scythe, or
reap-hook,' he remarks, 'I feared no competitor.' Yet, conscious of easy
superiority, he saw himself a drudge, almost a slave, while those whom
nature had not blessed with brains were gifted with a goodly share of
this world's wealth.
It's hardly in a body's power
To keep at times frae being sour,
To see how things are shar'd;
How best o' chiels are whiles in want,
While coofs on countless thousands rant,
An' ken na how to wair 't.'
His father, his brother, and himself--all the members of the family
indeed--toiled unceasingly, yet were unable to better their position.
Matters, indeed, got worse, and worst of all when their landlord died,
and they were left to the tender mercies of a factor. The name of this
man we do not know, nor need we seek to know it. We know the man
himself, and he will live for ever a type of tyrannous, insolent
insignificance.
'I've noticed, on our Laird's court-day,
An' mony a time my heart's been wae,
Poor tenant bodies, scant o' cash,
How they maun thole a factor's snash:
He'll stamp an' threaten, curse an swear,
He'll apprehend them, poind their gear:
While they maun stan', wi' aspect humble,
An' hear it a', an' fear an' tremble.'
Is it to be wondered at that Burns's blood boiled at times, or that he
should now and again look at those in easier circumstances with snarling
suspicion, and give vent to his feelings in words of rankling
bitterness? Robert Burns and his father were just such men as an
insolent factor would take a fiendish delight in torturing. 'My
indignation yet boils,' Burns wrote years afterwards, 'at the
recollection of the scoundrel factor's insolent, threatening letters,
which used to set us all in tears.' Had they 'boo'd and becked' at his
bidding, and grovelled at his feet, he might have had some glimmering
sense of justice, and thought it mercy. But the Burnses were men of a
different stamp. 'William Burness always treated superiors with a
becoming respect, but he never gave the smallest encouragement to
aristocratical arrogance'; and his son Robert was not less manly and
independent. He was too sound in judgment; too conscious of his own
worth, to sink into mean and abject servility. But this factor, perhaps
more than anyone else, did much to pervert, if he could not kill, the
poet's spirit of independence.
Curiously enough, the opening sentences of his autobiographical sketch
have a suspicious ring of the pride that apes humility. There is
something harsh and aggressive in his unnecessary confidence. 'I have
not the most distant pretensions to assume the character which the
pye-coated guardians of escutcheons call a gentleman. When at Edinburgh
last winter I got acquainted at the Herald's office; and, looking
through that granary of honours, I there found almost every name in the
kingdom; but for me,
"My ancient but ignoble blood
Had crept through scoundrels ever since the flood."
Gules, Purpure, Argent, etc., quite disowned me.' All this is quite
gratuitous and hardly in good taste.
Yet, in spite of untoward circumstances, ceaseless drudgery, and
insufficient diet, the family of Mount Oliphant was not utterly lost to
happiness. With such a shrewd mother and such a father as William
Burness--a man of whom Scotland may be justly proud--no home could be
altogether unhappy. In Burns's picture of the family circle in _The
Cotter's Saturday Night_ there is nothing of bitterness or gloom or
melancholy.
'With joy unfeign'd brothers and sisters meet,
An' each for other's welfare kindly spiers:
The social hours, swift-wing'd, unnotic'd fleet;
Each tells the uncos that he sees or hears.
The parents, partial, eye their hopeful years;
Anticipation forward points the view:
The mother, wi' her needle an' her shears,
Gars auld claes look amaist as weel's the new;
The father mixes a' wi' admonition due.'
In the work of the farm, too, hard as it was, there was pleasure, and
the poet's first song, with the picture he gives of the partners in the
harvest field, breaks forth from this life of cheerless gloom and
unceasing moil like a blink of sunshine through a lowering sky. Burns's
description of how the song came to be made is worthy of quotation,
because it gives us a very clear and well-defined likeness of himself at
the time, a lad in years, but already counting himself among men. 'You
know our country custom of coupling a man and a woman together in the
labours of harvest. In my fifteenth autumn my partner was a bewitching
creature who just counted an autumn less. In short, she, unwittingly to
herself, initiated me into a certain delicious passion, which ... I hold
to be the first of human joys.... I did not well know myself why I liked
so much to loiter behind her when returning in the evening from our
labours; why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an
AEolian harp; and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious rantann
when I looked and fingered over her hand to pick out the nettle-stings
and thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualifications she sang
sweetly; and 'twas her favourite Scotch reel that I attempted to give an
embodied vehicle to in rhyme. I was not so presumptive as to imagine I
could make verses like printed ones composed by men who had Greek and
Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a small
country laird's son, on one of his father's maids with whom he was in
love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he.'
He had already measured himself with this moorland poet, and admits no
inferiority; and what a laird's son has done he too may do. Writing of
this song afterwards, Burns, who was always a keen critic, admits that
it is 'very puerile and silly.' Still, we think there is something of
beauty, and much of promise, in this early effusion. It has at least one
of the merits, and, in a sense, the peculiar characteristic of all
Burns's songs. It is sincere and natural; and that is the beginning of
all good writing.
'Thus with me,' he says, 'began love and poetry, which at times have
been my only and ... my highest enjoyment.' This was the first-fruit of
his poetic genius, and we doubt not that in the composition, and after
the composition, life at Mount Oliphant was neither so cheerless nor so
hard as it had been. A new life was opened up to him with a thousand
nameless hopes and aspirations, though probably as yet he kept all these
things to himself, and pondered them in his heart.