ns. It has been well said that the
essence of the lyric is to describe the passion of the moment. Burns
is a master in this field.

The spirit of revolution against the bondage and cold formalism of the
past made the poor man feel that his place in the world was as
dignified, his happiness as important, as that of the rich. A feeling
of sympathy for the oppressed and the helpless also reached beyond man
to animals. Burns wrote touching lines about a mouse whose nest was,
one cold November day, destroyed by his plow. When the wild eddying
swirl of the snow beat around his cot, his heart went out to the poor
sheep, cattle, and birds.

Burns can, therefore, claim kinship with the Elizabethans because of
his love songs, which in depth of feeling and beauty of natural
utterance show something of Shakespeare's magic. In addition to this,
the poetry of Burns voices the democratic spirit of the Revolution.

Treatment of Nature.--In his verses, the autumn winds blow over
yellow corn; the fogs melt in limpid air; the birches extend their
fragrant arms dressed in woodbine; the lovers are coming through the
rye; the daisy spreads her snowy bosom to the sun; the "westlin" winds
blow fragrant with dewy flowers and musical with the melody of birds;
the brook flows past the lover's Eden, where summer first unfolds her
robes and tarries longest, because of the rarest bewitching
enchantment of the poet's tale told there.

In his poetry those conventional birds,--the lark and the
nightingale,--do not hold the chief place. His verses show that the
source of his knowledge of birds is not to be sought in books. We
catch glimpses of grouse cropping heather buds, of whirring flocks of
partridges, of the sooty coot and the speckled teal, of the fisher
herons, of the green-crested lapwing, of clamoring craiks among fields
of flowering clover, of robins cheering the pensive autumn, of
lintwhites chanting among the buds, of the mavis singing drowsy day to
rest.

It is true that on the poetic stage of Burns, man always stands in the
foreground. Nature is employed in order to give human emotion a proper
background. Burns chose those aspects of nature which harmonized with
his present mood, but the natural objects in his pages are none the
less enjoyable for that reason. Sometimes his songs complain if nature
seems gay when he is sad, but this contrast is employed to throw a
stronger light on his woes.

General Characteristics.--More people o