to his eyes saw that they might look down the sky as
easily. His muse and teaching was common sense, joyful, aggressive,
irresistible. Not Latimer, nor Luther, struck more telling blows
against false theology than did this brave singer. The "Confession of
Augsburg," the "Declaration of Independence," the French "Rights of
Man," and the "Marseillaise," are not more weighty documents in the
history of freedom than the songs of Burns. His satire has lost none of
its edge. His musical arrows yet sing through the air. He is so
substantially a reformer, that I find his grand, plain sense in close
chain with the greatest masters--Rabelais, Shakespeare in comedy,
Cervantes, Butler, and Burns. If I should add another name, I find it
only in a living countryman of Burns. He is an exceptional genius. The
people who care nothing for literature and poetry care for Burns. It was
indifferent--they thought who saw him--whether he wrote verse or not; he
could have done anything else as well.

Yet how true a poet is he! And the poet, too, of poor men, of
hodden-gray, and the Guernsey-coat, and the blouse. He has given voice
to all the experiences of common life; he has endeared the farmhouse and
cottage, patches and poverty, beans and barley; ale, the poor man's
wine; hardship, the fear of debt, the dear society of weans and wife, of
brothers and sisters, proud of each other, knowing so few, and finding
amends for want and obscurity in books and thought. What a love of
nature! and--shall I say it?--of middle-class nature. Not great, like
Goethe, in the stars, or like Byron, on the ocean, or Moore, in the
luxurious East, but in the homely landscape which the poor see around
them--bleak leagues of pasture and stubble, ice, and sleet, and rain,
and snow-choked brooks; birds, hares, field-mice, thistles, and heather,
which he daily knew. How many "Bonny Doons," and "John Anderson my
Joes," and "Auld Lang Synes," all around the earth, have his verses been
applied to! And his love songs still woo and melt the youths and maids;
the farm work, the country holiday, the fishing cobble, are still his
debtors to-day.

And, as he was thus the poet of the poor, anxious, cheerful, working
humanity, so had he the language of low life. He grew up in a rural
district, speaking a patois unintelligible to all but natives, and he
has made that Lowland Scotch a Doric dialect of fame. It is the only
example in history of a language made classic by the genius