spoiled by two offences of this kind.

She'll steal out to meet her loved Donald again,

and--

The world's false and vanishing scene;

as Allan Cunningham's still more exquisite "Lass of Preston Mill" is
by one subjective figure:

Six hills are woolly with my sheep,
Six vales are lowing with my kye.

Burns doubtless committed the same fault again and again; but in his
time it was the fashion; and the older models (for models they are
and will remain for ever) had not been studied and analysed as they
have been since. Burns, indeed, actually spoiled one or two of his
own songs by altering them from their first cast to suit the
sentimental taste of his time. The first version, for instance, of
the "Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon," is far superior to the second
and more popular one, because it dares to go without epithets.
Compare the second stanza of each:

Thou'lt break my heart, thou bonnie bird,
That sings upon the bough;
Thou minds me o' the happy days
When my fause love was true.

* * * *

Thou'lt break my heart, thou warbling bird,
That wantons through the flowery thorn;
Thou minds me o' departed joys,
Departed never to return.

What is said in the latter stanza which has not been said in the
former, and said more dramatically, more as the images would really
present themselves to the speaker's mind? It would be enough for him
that the bird was bonnie, and singing; and his very sorrow would lead
him to analyse and describe as little as possible a thing which so
painfully contrasted with his own feelings; whether the thorn was
flowery or not, would not have mattered to him, unless he had some
distinct association with the thorn-flowers, in which case he would
have brought out the image full and separate, and not merely thrown
it in as a make-weight to "thorn"--and this is the great reason why
epithets are, nine times out of ten, mistakes in song and ballad
poetry; he never would have thought of "departed" before he thought
of "joys." A very little consideration of the actual processes of
thought in such a case, will show the truth of our observation, and
the instinctive wisdom of the older song-writers, in putting the
epithet as often as possible after the noun, instead of before it,
even at the expense of grammar. They are bad things at all times in
song poetry, these epithets; and, accordingly, we find that the best
German writers, like Uhland and Heine, get ri