ugh the groves I walk with you,
Each object makes me gay.
Since your return--the sun and moon
With brighter beams do shine,
Streams murmur soft notes while they run
As they did lang syne."

Compare the verses in Burns--

"We twa hae run about the braes
And pu'd the gowans fine;
But we've wandered mony a weary foot
Sin auld lang syne.
We twa hae paidl'd in the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine:
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin auld lang syne."

Burns as a poet of the inanimate world doubtless derived hints from Thomson
of _The Seasons_, but in his power of tuning its manifestation to the moods
of the mind he is more properly ranked as a forerunner of Wordsworth. He
never follows the fashions of his century, except in his failures--in his
efforts at set panegyric or fine letter-writing. His highest work knows
nothing of "Damon" or "Musidora." He leaves the atmosphere of drawing-rooms
for the ingle or the ale-house or the mountain breeze.

The affectations of his style are insignificant and rare. His prevailing
characteristic is an absolute sincerity. A love for the lower forms of
social life was his besetting sin; Nature was his healing power. Burns
compares himself to an Aeolian harp, strung to every wind of heaven. His
genius flows over all living and lifeless things with a sympathy that finds
nothing mean or insignificant. An uprooted daisy becomes in his pages an
enduring emblem of the fate of artless maid and simple bard. He disturbs a
mouse's nest and finds in the "tim'rous beastie" a fellow-mortal doomed
like himself to "thole the winter's sleety dribble," and draws his
oft-repeated moral. He walks abroad and, in a verse that glints with the
light of its own rising sun before the fierce sarcasm of "The Holy Fair,"
describes the melodies of a "simmer Sunday morn." He loiters by Afton Water
and "murmurs by the running brook a music sweeter than its own." He stands
by a roofless tower, where "the howlet mourns in her dewy bower," and "sets
the wild echoes flying," and adds to a perfect picture of the scene his
famous vision of "Libertie." In a single stanza he concentrates the
sentiment of many Night Thoughts--

"The pale moon is setting beyond the white wave,
And Time is setting wi' me, O."

For other examples of the same graphic power we may refer to the course of
his stream--

"Whiles ow'r a linn the burnie plays
As through the glen it wimpled," &c.,