who speaks
straight from the heart to the primitive emotions of the race; the second
is the mystic Blake, who only half understands his own thoughts, and whose
words stir a sensitive nature as music does, or the moon in midheaven,
rousing in the soul those vague desires and aspirations which ordinarily
sleep, and which can never be expressed because they have no names. Blake
lived his shy, mystic, spiritual life in the crowded city, and his message
is to the few who can understand. Burns lived his sad, toilsome, erring
life in the open air, with the sun and the rain, and his songs touch all
the world. The latter's poetry, so far as it has a philosophy, rests upon
two principles which the classic school never understood,--that common
people are at heart romantic and lovers of the ideal, and that simple human
emotions furnish the elements of true poetry. Largely because he follows
these two principles, Burns is probably the greatest song writer of the
world. His poetic creed may be summed up in one of his own stanzas:

Give me ae spark o' Nature's fire,
That's a' the learning I desire;
Then, though I trudge thro' dub an' mire
At pleugh or cart,
My Muse, though hamely in attire,
May touch the heart.

LIFE.[205] Burns's life is "a life of fragments," as Carlyle called it; and
the different fragments are as unlike as the noble "Cotter's Saturday
Night" and the rant and riot of "The Jolly Beggars." The details of this
sad and disjointed life were better, perhaps, forgotten. We call attention
only to the facts which help us to understand the man and his poetry.

Burns was born in a clay cottage at Alloway, Scotland, in the bleak winter
of 1759. His father was an excellent type of the Scotch peasant of those
days,--a poor, honest, God-fearing man, who toiled from dawn till dark to
wrest a living for his family from the stubborn soil. His tall figure was
bent with unceasing labor; his hair was thin and gray, and in his eyes was
the careworn, hunted look of a peasant driven by poverty and unpaid rents
from one poor farm to another. The family often fasted of necessity, and
lived in solitude to avoid the temptation of spending their hard-earned
money. The children went barefoot and bareheaded in all weathers, and
shared the parents' toil and their anxiety over the rents. At thirteen
Bobby, the eldest, was doing a peasant's full day's labor; at sixteen he
was chief laborer on his father's fa