great men a' sae weel descrive,
And how to gar the nation thrive,
Ane maist would swear ye dwalt amang them,
And as ye saw them sae ye sang them.'

But his intuitive knowledge of men is apparent in almost all he wrote.
Every character he has drawn stands out a living and breathing
personality. This is greatly due to the fact that he studied those he
met, as _men_, dismissing the circumstance of birth and rank, of costly
apparel, or beggarly rags. For rank and station after all are mere
accidents, and count for nothing in an estimate of character. Indeed,
Burns was too often inclined from his hard experience of life to go
further than this, and to count them disqualifying circumstances. This
aggressive independence was, however, always as far removed from
insolence as it was from servility. He saw clearly that the 'pith o'
sense and pride o' worth' are beyond all the dignities a king can
bestow; and he looked to the time when class distinctions would cease,
and the glory of manhood be the highest earthly dignity.

'Then let us pray that come it may--
As come it will for a' that--
That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth,
May bear the gree and a' that!
For a' that, and a' that,
It's comin' yet, for a' that,
That man to man, the warld o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that!'

Besides this abiding love of his fellow-man, or because of it, Burns had
also a childlike love of nature and all created things. He sings of the
mountain daisy turned up by his plough; his heart goes out to the mouse
rendered homeless after all its provident care. Listening at home while
the storm made the doors and windows rattle, he bethought him on the
cattle and sheep and birds outside--

'I thought me on the ourie cattle
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle
O' wintry war,
And thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle
Beneath a scaur.'

Nor is there in his love of nature any transcendental strain; no mawkish
sentimentality, and consequently in its expression no bathos. Everywhere
in his poetry nature comes in, at times in artistically selected detail,
at times again with a deft suggestive touch that is telling and
effective, yet always in harmony with the feeling of the poem, and
always subordinate to it. His descriptions of scenery are never dragged
in. They are incidental and complementary; human life and human feeling
are t