rld around them. This
glimpse is so strongly suggestive of the poet that our delight in it
will largely depend on our sympathy with his temperament; yet now and
again he flashes out a phrase whose imaginative value is absolute,
and which makes its appeal without respect to the author:

The wan moon is setting behind the white wave,
And time is setting with me, oh!

Apart from the respects in which Burns is the inheritor and perfecter
of the vernacular traditions, and apart from his contact, active or
passive, with the English poets of his time, there is much in his
poetry which is thoroughly his own. It does not lie mainly in his
thinking, robust and shrewd though that is. We perceive in his work no
great individual attitude toward life and society such as we are
impelled to perceive in the work of Goethe; we find no message in it
like the message of Browning. What he does is to bring before us
characters, situations, moods, images, that belong to the permanent
and elemental in our nature. These are presented with a sympathy so
living, a tenderness so poignant, a humor so arch and so sly, that
they become a part of our experience in the most delightful and
exhilarating fashion. Part of the function of poetry is to prevent us
from becoming sluggish In our contemplation of life by making us feel
it fresh, vivid, pulsing; and this Burns notably accomplishes.
Coleridge's image of wetting the pebble to bring out its color and
brilliance is peculiarly apt in the case of Burns; for it was the
common if not the commonplace that he dealt with, and his workmanship
made it sparkle like a jewel.

In the long run the value of an author depends on two factors, the
nature of his insight and his power of expression. Burns's insight
into his own nature was deep and on the whole just, and that nature
was itself rich enough to teach him much. He found there the great
struggle between impulse and will--fiery, surging impulse and a
stubborn will. This experience, illuminated by a lively imagination,
gave him a sympathetic understanding of extraordinary range, extending
from the domestic troubles of the royal family and the perplexities of
the prime minister to the precarious adventures of a louse. His
insight into external nature blended the weather wisdom of the
ploughman with the poet's sensitiveness to the harmony or discord of
wind and sky with the moods of humanity.

For the expression of all this he had an instrument