general better, not chiefly because they are in Scots but because they
are concerned with matters of natural feeling; the English poems are
in general poetically poorer, not because they are in English but
because they are so frequently the outcome of moods not dominated by
spontaneous emotion, but intellectual, conscious, or theatrical. He
wrote English sometimes as he wore his Sunday blacks, with dignity but
not with ease; sometimes as he wore the buff and blue, with buckskins
and top-boots, which he donned in Edinburgh--"like a farmer dressed in
his best to dine with the laird." In both cases he was capable of
vigorous, common-sense expression; in neither was he likely to exhibit
the imagination, the tenderness, or the humor which characterized the
plowman clad in home-spun.

_The Cotter's Saturday Night_ is an interesting illustration of these
distinctions. The opening stanza is a dedicatory address on English
models to a lawyer friend and patron; it is pure English in language,
stiff and imitatively "literary" in style. The stanzas which follow
describing the homecoming of the cotter, the family circle, the
supper, and the daughter's suitor, are in broad Scots, the language
harmonizing perfectly with the theme, and they form poetically the
sound core of the poem. In the description of family worship, Burns
did what his father would do in conducting that worship, adopted
English as more reverent and respectful, but inevitably as more
restrained emotionally; and in the moralizing passage which follows,
as in the apostrophes to Scotia and to the Almighty at the close, he
naturally sticks to English, and in spite of a genuine enough
exaltation of spirit achieves a result rather rhetorical than
poetical.

Contrast again songs like _Corn Rigs_ or _Whistle and I'll Come To
Thee, My Lad_, with most of the songs to Clarinda. The former, in
Scots, are genial, whole-hearted, full of the power of kindling
imaginative sympathy, thoroughly contagious in their lusty emotion or
sly humor. The latter, in English, are stiff, coldly contrived,
consciously elegant or marked by the sentimental factitiousness of the
affair that occasioned them. But their inferiority is due less to the
difference in language than to the difference in the mood. When,
especially at a distance, his relation to Clarinda really touched his
imagination, we have the genuinely poetical _My Nannie's Awa_ and _Ae
Fond Kiss_. The latter poem can be, with few cha