e by rule,
Grave, tideless-blooded, calm an' cool,
Compar'd wi' you--O fool! fool! fool!
How much unlike!
Your hearts are just a standing pool,
Your lives a dyke! [stone wall]

Nothing is more characteristic of the poet than this attitude toward
prudence--this mixture of Intellectual respect with emotional
contempt. He admits freely that restraint and calculation pay, but
impulse makes life so much more interesting!

The _Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet_, deserves to be quoted in
full. It contains the final phrasing of the central point of Burns's
ethics, the Scottish rustic's version of that philosophy of
benevolence with which Shaftesbury sought to warm the chill of
eighteenth-century thought:

The heart aye's the part aye
That makes us right or wrang.

The mood of this poem is Burns's middle mood, lying between the black
melancholy of his poems of despair and remorse and the exhilaration of
his more exalted bacchanalian and love songs--the mood, we may infer,
of his normal working life. We may again observe the correspondence
between the change of dialect and change of tone in stanzas nine and
ten, the increase of artificiality coming with his literary English
and culminating in the unspeakable "tenebrific scene." His humor
returns with his Scots in the last verse.

EPISTLE TO DAVIE, A BROTHER POET

While winds frae aff Ben Lomond blaw,
And bar the doors wi' driving snaw,
And hing us owre the ingle, [hang, fire]
I set me down to pass the time,
And spin a verse or twa o' rhyme,
In hamely westlin jingle. [west-country]
While frosty winds blaw in the drift,
Ben to the chimla lug, [In, chimney-corner]
I grudge a wee the great-folk's gift,
That live sae bien an' snug; [comfortable]
I tent less, and want less [value]
Their roomy fire-side;
But hanker and canker
To see their cursed pride.

It's hardly in a body's pow'r,
To keep, at times, frae being sour,
To see how things are shar'd;
How best o' chiels are whyles in want [fellows, sometimes]
While coofs on countless thousands rant [dolts, roister]
And ken na how to wair't: [spend it]
But, Davie, lad, ne'er fas