uine passion and poetry, as anything from Sappho to
Tennyson--abrupt, vivid, heedless of syntax. "Simmer's a pleasant time."
Would any of our greatest geniuses, being limited to one word, have done
better than take "pleasant?" and then the fine vagueness of "time!"
"Flowers o' every color;" he gets a glimpse of "herself a fairer
flower," and is off in pursuit. "The water rins ower the heugh" (a steep
precipice); flinging itself wildly, passionately over, and so do I long
for my true lover. Nothing can be simpler and finer than

"When I sleep, I dream;
When I wauk, I'm eerie."

"Lanely nicht;" how much richer and touching than "darksome." "Feather
beds are saft;" "paintit rooms are bonnie;" I would infer from this,
that his "dearie," his "true love," was a lass up at "the big house"--a
dapper Abigail possibly--at Sir William's at the Castle, and then we
have the final paroxysm upon Friday nicht--Friday at the gloamin'! O for
Friday nicht!--Friday's lang o' comin'!--it being very likely Thursday
before daybreak, when this affectionate _ululatus_ ended in repose.

Now, is not this rude ditty, made very likely by some clumsy, big-headed
Galloway herd, full of the real stuff of love? He does not go off upon
her eyebrows, or even her eyes; he does not sit down, and in a genteel
way announce that "love in thine eyes forever sits," &c. &c., or that
her feet look out from under her petticoats like little mice: he is far
past that; he is not making love, he is in it. This is one and a chief
charm of Burns' love-songs, which are certainly of all love-songs except
those wild snatches left to us by her who flung herself from the
Leucadian rock, the most in earnest, the tenderest, the "most moving
delicate and full of life." Burns makes you feel the reality and the
depth, the truth of his passion; it is not her eyelashes or her nose, or
her dimple, or even

"A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I' the bottom of a cowslip,"

that are "winging the fervor of his love;" not even her soul; it is
herself. This concentration and earnestness, this _perfervor_ of our
Scottish love poetry, seems to me to contrast curiously with the light,
trifling philandering of the English; indeed, as far as I remember, we
have almost no love-songs in English, of the same class as this one, or
those of Burns. They are mostly either of the genteel, or of the
nautical (some of these capital), or of the comic school. Do you know
the m