s as distinct from his songs. Almost all
the best of these are, with the one notable exception of _Tam O'
Shanter_, contained in the Kilmarnock edition. A few pieces actually
composed before he went to Edinburgh were included in later editions,
but, after leaving Mossgiel he never seriously addressed himself to
any form of poetry but song-writing. The Kilmarnock volume contains
poems descriptive of peasant life and manners, epistles in verse
generally to rhyming brethren, a few lyrics on personal feelings, or
on incidents like those of the mouse and the daisy, and three songs.
In these, the form, the metre, the style and language, even that which
is known as Burns's peculiar stanza, all belong to the traditional
forms of his country's poetry, and from earlier bards had been handed
down to Burns by his two immediate forerunners, Ramsay and Fergusson.
To these two he felt himself indebted, and for them he always
expresses a somewhat exaggerated admiration. Nothing can more show
Burns's inherent power than to compare his poems with even the best of
those which he accepted as models. The old framework and metres which
his country supplied, he took; asked no other, no better, and into (p. 192)
those old bottles poured new wine of his own, and such wine! What,
then, is the peculiar flavour of this new poetic wine of Burns'
poetry? At the basis of all his power lay absolute truthfulness,
intense reality, truthfulness to the objects which he saw,
truthfulness to himself as the seer of them. This is what Wordsworth
recognized as Burns's leading characteristic. He who acknowledged few
masters, owned Burns as his master in this respect when he speaks of
him--

Whose light I hailed when first it shone,
And showed my youth,
How verse may build a princely throne
On humble truth.

Here was a man, a son of toil, looking out on the world from his
cottage, on society low and high and on nature homely or beautiful,
with the clearest eye, the most piercing insight, and the warmest
heart; touching life at a hundred points, seeing to the core all the
sterling worth, nor less the pretence and hollowness of the men he
met, the humour, the drollery, the pathos, and the sorrow of human
existence; and expressing what he saw, not in the stock phrases of
books, but in his own vernacular, the language of his fireside, with a
directness, a force, a vitality that tingled to the finger tips, an