the songs of Scotland while guiding the plow. On the death of his father in 1784, Robert and his brother and sisters took a farm together, but it proved unprofitable. By this time he had written numerous songs, and had gained by them considerable local reputation. His affairs were so involved that he thought of leaving the country, but changed his mind on receiving an invitation from a Dr. Blacklock, who had heard of his poetical ability, to visit Edinburgh. At Edinburgh, Burns, with his genius and flavor of rusticity, his massive head and glowing eyes, became the reigning sensation. In 1788 he leased a farm in Dumfriesshire, married Jean Armour, and spent one of his few peaceful and happy years. In 1789 he was appointed exciseman, that is, the district inspector of goods liable to a tax. From this time the habit of intemperance gained or him. His health and spirits failed, and spells of reckless drinking were followed by intervals of remorse and attempted recovery. His genius did not desert him, and some of his best songs were composed during this miserable time. He died July 21, 1796, worn out and prematurely old at thirty-seven, one of the great song writers of the world.

In spite of those weaknesses which cut off a life "that might have grown full straight," Burns' poetry is unmistakably the utterance of a sincere, largehearted, and essentially noble nature, pleasure-loving and full of laughter as a child, yet broken by a man's grief; a nature with more than a woman's tenderness and with the poet's soul quivering at the throb of pain.

"Still thou art blest, compared wi' me,

The present only toucheth thee;
But och! I backward cast my e'e
On prospects drear!

An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess and fear.”

Here in the midst of the lingering affectations of the time vibrates the anguish of Burns' lyrical cry, quivering with the unmistakable accent of human suffering. This is the universal language of passion not to be learned in the schools. Hence Burns' love songs, from the impassioned lyric flow of "My Luve is Like a Red, Red Rose," or "O, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast," to the quiet anguish of "Ae Fond Kiss and then We Sever," or the serene beauty of "To Mary in Heaven," are among the truest and best in the language.

In "The Cotter's Saturday Night," as we enter the dwelling and identify ourselves with the daily life of the poor, we feel for ourselves that touch of brotherhood which in other poems it is Burns' mission to directly declare. Never perhaps since Langland's Piers Plowman has the complaint of the poor found such articulate expression.

"See yonder poor, o'erlabored wight,

So abject, mean, and vile,

Who begs a brother of the earth

To give him leave to toil;

And see his lordly fellow-worm

The poor petition spurn,

Unmindful though a weeping wife

And helpless offspring mourn."

When Burns wrote that

"Man's inhumanity to man

Makes countless thousands mourn,"

he expressed what thousands were coming to feel; when he wrote

"A king can make a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, and a' that;
But an honest man's aboon his might,
Guid faith he maunna fa' that,

For a' that, and a' that,

Their dignities and a' that,

The pith o' sense and pride o' worth
Are higher ranks than a' that,"

he gave to the world the greatest declaration in poetry of human equality and the glory of simple manhood. But, like that of Cowper, Burns' comprehensive sympathy reaches beyond the circle of human life. He stands at the furrow to look at the "tim'rous" field-mouse, whose tiny house his plow has laid in ruins, and his soul is broad enough to think of the trembling creature gently and humbly as his

"Poor earth-born companion

An' fellow-mortal."

Like Byron, he was a poet of the revolution, but he distinguished more clearly than Byron between the shams and conventionalities which he attacks, and that which was enduring and worthy of reverence. Merciless and daring in his satire upon the cant and

hypocrisy of those who, as he thought, used religion as a cloak for wickedness, he had himself a deeply reverential and religious nature which never confused the abuse of the thing with the thing abused.* He is the poet of nature as well as of man; he would make the streams and burnies of Scotland shine in verse with the Ilissus and the Tiber, and

Sing Auld Coila's plains and fells ;"

and finally in his stirring songs of Bannockburn he is the poet of patriotic Scotland. "Lowland Scotland," it has been said, "came in with her warriors and went out with her bards. It came in with William Wallace and Robert Bruce, and went out with Robert Burns and Walter Scott. The first two made the history; the last two told the story and sung the song."

II. SYMPATHY WITH NATURE AND ANIMALS, "To a Mountain Daisy;""To a Mouse on Turning up her Nest with a Plough; "On Scaring some Water-fowl in Loch Turit; "On Seeing a Wounded Hare Limp by Me."

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III. "Address to the Deil; ""Address to the Unco' Guid." IV. SONGS.-"O Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast; " "John Anderson, My Jo;" "To Mary in Heaven; "Highland Mary;" "Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon;

*V. Epistle to the Rev. Dr. McMath, verse v, religion in their mouths," and the one following.

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Flow

They tak'

"

Gently, Sweet Afton;" "O, My Luve's like a Red, Red Rose;" Scots Wha Hae wi' Wallace Bled; "Is there for Honest Poverty; Macpherson's Farewell."

99.66

V. BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM.-Carlyle's Essay on Burns; Shairp's Aspects of Poetry, p. 179; Shairp's Life of Burns, English Men of Letters Series; Professor Blackie's Life of Burns, Great Writer Series; v. also poems on Burns by Wordsworth, and by Whittier.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.-1770-1850

Toward the close of the eighteenth century we reach, in the French Revolution, the most stormy and critical period in the history of modern Europe. Toward this consummation Europe had been rapidly moving. Poet and philosopher had gone before it, while to the toiling masses, starved, overtaxed, oppressed, the burden was becoming intolerable. Now, during the early acts of that terrible drama, the cloud-land visions and lofty speculations of poet and philosopher, looking for the coming of a Golden Age of peace and brotherhood, seemed to many to be passing out of the region of speculation into the world of substantial fact. Cowper in The Task had cried out against the Bastile as a shameful "house of bondage";* four years later it fell before the fury of a Parisian mob (1789). Then

"France her giant limbs upreared,

And with that oath which smote earth, air, and sea, Stamped her strong foot and said she would be free." + Europe looked on breathless, as the whole glittering fabric of French feudalism, rotten at the base, sud*The Task, Bk. v. The passage should be read in class. + Coleridge, "France, An Ode."