stept aside
with the bairns among the broom,' says Bonnie Jean; not, we should
imagine, to leave room for aliens and strangers. He has been again
burlesqued for us rending himself in rhyme, and stretched on straw
groaning elegiacs to Mary in heaven. All this is mere sensationalism
provided for illiterate readers. We have the poem, and its excellence
sufficeth.

It is worthy of note that in _Tam o' Shanter_, as well as in _To Mary in
Heaven_, the poet goes back to his earlier years in Ayrshire. They are
posthumous products of the inspiration which gave us the Kilmarnock
Edition. I am not inclined to agree with Carlyle in his estimate of _Tam
o' Shanter_. It is not the composition of a man of great talent, but of
a man of transcendent poetical genius. The story itself is a conception
of genius, and in the narration the genius is unquestionable. It is a
panorama of pictures so vivid and powerful that the characters and
scenes are fixed indelibly on the mind, and abide with us a cherished
literary possession. After reading the poem, the words are recalled
without conscious effort of memory, but as the only possible embodiment
of the mental impressions retained. Short as the poem is, there is in it
character, humour, pathos, satire, indignation, tenderness, fun, frolic,
diablerie, almost every human feeling. I have heard Burns in the writing
of this poem likened to a composer at an organ improvising a piece of
music in which, before he has done, he has used every stop and touched
every note on the keyboard. Even the weakest lines of the piece, which
mark a dramatic pause in the rapid narration, have a distinctive beauty
and are the most frequently quoted lines of the poem. In artistic
word-painting and graphic phrasing Burns is here at his best. His
description of the horrible is worthy of Shakspeare; and it is
questionable if even the imagination of that master ever conceived
anything more awful than the scene and circumstance of the infernal
orgies of those witches and warlocks. What Zolaesque realism there is!
In the line, 'The grey hairs yet stack to the heft,' all the
gruesomeness of murder is compressed into a distich. Yet the horrible
details are controlled and unified in the powerful imagination of the
poet. We believe Dr. Blacklock was right in thinking that this poem,
though Burns had never written another syllable, would have made him a
high reputation. Certainly it was not the work of a man daily dazing his
facu