assumes, if one cares to put it so, that "Auld Hornie" was simply fulfilling his nature, as Robert Burns was fulfilling his, and that the ultimate issue lay not with them to decide, but must be shaped by a power who would redress and judge with insight. There is certainly a serious thought, and not merely a pose, behind the laughing tone and the rapid "crambo clink" of the rhymes, and the conclusion puts it plainly :

An' now, auld Cloots, I ken ye're thinkin,
A certain Bardie's rantin, drinkin,
Some luckless hour will send him linkin,
To your black pit;

But, faith! he'll turn a corner jinkin,
An' cheat you yet.

But, fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben!
O wad ye tak a thought an' men'!
Ye aiblins might — I dinna ken
Still hae a stake.

I'm wae to think upo' yon den,

E'en for your sake!

If we are to set ourselves the question why it is that a man who was drunken and dissolute (and Burns was more than commonly to blame in his dealings with women), and whose verses may be fairly said to incite to drunkenness and loose living at least as often as they deprecate either, is yet a chief glory of his country, a spiritual influence strong for good; the answer must be that his mind, so swift and trenchant, able to communicate itself like lightning or like sunshine, was inspired chiefly by a broad benevolence. And if we set out of sight his poems that breathe the very soul of cordial welcome and friendship between one man and another, on the ground that there lurks in them. invariably some hint of the punch-bowl; or his loveverses, because we can never be sure that on the evening before he wrote Of a' the airts the wind

can blaw (or any other of his most touching lyrics) he had not kissed another woman than the one he was celebrating; still there are always poems left that Auld Cloots himself cannot disparage, full of a loving fellowship and tenderness not for man or woman only, but for the dumb things. To this tenderness he sometimes gave expression in English, as in the lines on a wounded hare:

Inhuman man! curse on thy barb'rous art,
And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye,

and the result was tawdry enough. But when he used his own tongue to write of the beasts he loved- of Poor Mailie, his old ewe, of his mare (worn out now, but honoured in her descendants), of the field mouse whose nest the coulter shatters, or generally of the helpless and appealing - then, he was a poet. The opening stanzas of A Winter Night may be cited for an example of his mastery in description as well as for the expression of this perfectly sincere emotion:

When biting Boreas, fell and doure,
Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r;
When Phoebus gies a short-liv'd glow'r,

Far south the lift,

Ae night the storm the steeples rocked,
Poor Labour sweet in sleep was locked,
While burns, wi' snawy wreeths up-choked,
Wild-eddying swirl,

Or thro' the mining outlet bocked,

Down headlong hurl.

List'ning, the doors an' winnocks rattle,
I thought me on the ourie cattle,

Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle

O' winter war,

And thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle,

Beneath a scar.

Ilk happing bird, wee, helpless thing
That, in the merry months o' spring,
Delighted me to hear thee sing,

What comes o' thee?

Whare wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing,
An' close thy e'e?

Not less admirable, though lying nearer to prose, is the poem of The Twa Dogs, where Burns not only makes us feel his love and understanding of the friendly brutes, but, as it were, uses them to reflect back on to men his sense of an all-pervading fellowship. The life of the poor, in its pleasures and its hardships, has never been so well set out as by "honest Luath"; and whoever wishes to understand what Burns, not as the lyric poet, but as the shrewd and humorous moralist, has meant to his countryfolk, gentle and simple, cannot find a poem that will better suggest it. He preaches a gospel of content, resting not on a contempt of pleasure, but on a keen sense of the value and dignity, the beauty and richness, of human existence and human fellowship; a content which is only heightened by the need of effort. There was no poet less moral in his life than Burns; there is none more explicitly a moralist in his writings. One may prefer the songs where he utters emotion simply to the less lyrical poems where he propounds a philosophy - whether it be that of The Twa Dogs or that of The Jolly Beggars—but one cannot deny that the whole man is to be found only in the latter class. And if one must justify him by a comparison, let him be compared with Byron, his only modern rival in full masculine vigour and easy breadth of style. Even those who praise Byron most will admit that his nature upon any test shows warped and cankered; but no one can ignore the spring of unspoilt humanity in Burns.

CHAPTER XV

THE TRANSITION FROM THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

A TRUE landmark in English literature is William Blake, who was born in 1757, and before he was fourteen, had written such verse as this:

How sweet I roamed from field to field,
And tasted all the summer's pride;

Till I the Prince of Love beheld,

Who in the sunny beams did glide.

He showed me lilies for my hair,
And blushing roses for my brow:
He led me through his gardens fair,
Where all his golden pleasures grow.

With sweet May-dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fired my vocal rage;

He caught me in his silken net,

And shut me in his golden cage.

He loves to sit and hear me sing,

Then laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,

And mocks my loss of liberty.

Except for the single line, "Phoebus fired my Vocal rage," which is purely of the eighteenth century, this is verse which might have been

written in the day of Marlowe or of Herrick. Again, in the Songs of Innocence, when we read the opening numbers, it seems to be the very voice of Wordsworth — or rather of Wordsworth's gentler sister, had she ever written verse:

Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,

And he laughing said to me:
“ Pipe a song about a lamb":
So I piped with merry cheer.
"Piper, pipe that song again";

So I piped; he wept to hear.

"Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe,

Sing thy songs of happy cheer":
So I sung the same again,

While he wept with joy to hear.

"Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read
So he vanished from my sight;
And I plucked a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,

And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs,
Every child may joy to hear.

The Song of the Chimney Sweeper is a sort of forerunner of Wordsworth's At the Corner of Wood Street in manner and in feeling; but probably Wordsworth knew nothing of Blake. The same principle, however, was at work in both. To Blake, the working engraver, draughtsman as well as poet, and mystic before all, it was as though the whole laboriously-built tradition of English literature, from Dryden, to Goldsmith and Johnson down had no existence. He went straight back to the springs of English poetry-but he carried no one in his company. He was no propagandist;