or to "The Birks of Aberfeldy" or the "spate" in the dialogue of "The Brigs
of Ayr." The poet is as much at home in the presence of this flood as by
his "trottin' burn's meander." Familiar with all the seasons he represents
the phases of a northern winter with a frequency characteristic of his
clime and of his fortunes; her tempests became anthems in his verse, and
the sounding woods "raise his thoughts to Him that walketh on the wings of
the wind"; full of pity for the shelterless poor, the "ourie cattle," the
"silly sheep," and the "helpless birds," he yet reflects that the bitter
blast is not "so unkind as man's ingratitude." This constant tendency to
ascend above the fair or wild features of outward things, or to penetrate
beneath them, to make them symbols, to endow them with a voice to speak for
humanity, distinguishes Burns as a descriptive poet from the rest of his
countrymen. As a painter he is rivalled by Dunbar and James I., more rarely
by Thomson and Ramsay. The "lilt" of Tannahill's finest verse is even more
charming. But these writers rest in their art; their main care is for their
own genius. The same is true in a minor degree of some of his great English
successors. Keats has a palette of richer colours, but he seldom
condescends to "human nature's daily food." Shelley floats in a thin air to
stars and mountain tops, and vanishes from our gaze like his skylark.
Byron, in the midst of his revolutionary fervour, never forgets that he
himself belongs to the "caste of Vere de Vere." Wordsworth's placid
affection and magnanimity stretch beyond mankind, and, as in
"Hart-leap-well" and the "Cuckoo," extend to bird and beast; he moralizes
grandly on the vicissitudes of common life, but he does not enter into,
because by right of superior virtue he places himself above them. "From the
Lyrical Ballads," it has been said, "it does not appear that men eat or
drink, marry or are given in marriage." We revere the monitor who,
consciously good and great, gives us the dry light of truth, but we love
the bard, _nostrae deliciae_, who is all fire--fire from heaven and
Ayrshire earth mingling in the outburst of passion and of power, which is
his poetry and the inheritance of his race. He had certainly neither
culture nor philosophy enough to have written the "Ode on the Recollections
of Childhood," but to appreciate that ode requires an education. The
sympathies of Burns, as broad as Wordsworth's, are more intense; in turn