is steps to Edinburgh. There the
peasant poet was lionized for a winter season by the learned and polite
society of the Scotch capital, with results in the end not altogether
favorable to Burns's best interests. For when society finally turned
the cold shoulder on {219} him, he had to go back to farming again,
carrying with him a bitter sense of injustice and neglect. He leased a
farm in Ellisland, in 1788, and some friends procured his appointment
as exciseman for his district. But poverty, disappointment, irregular
habits, and broken health clouded his last years, and brought him to an
untimely death at the age of thirty-seven. He continued, however, to
pour forth songs of unequaled sweetness and force. "The man sank,"
said Coleridge, "but the poet was bright to the last."

Burns is the best of British song-writers. His songs are singable;
they are not merely lyrical poems. They were meant to be sung, and
they are sung. They were mostly set to old Scottish airs, and
sometimes they were built up from ancient fragments of anonymous,
popular poetry, a chorus, or stanza, or even a single line. Such are,
for example, _Auld Lang Syne_, _My Heart's in the Highlands_, and
_Landlady, Count the Lawin_. Burns had a great, warm heart. His sins
were sins of passion, and sprang from the same generous soil that
nourished his impulsive virtues. His elementary qualities as a poet
were sincerity, a healthy openness to all impressions of the beautiful,
and a sympathy which embraced men, animals, and the dumb objects of
nature. His tenderness toward flowers and the brute creation may be
read in his lines _To a Mountain Daisy_, _To a Mouse_, and _The Auld
Farmer's New Year's Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie_. Next
after love and good {220} fellowship, patriotism is the most frequent
motive of his song. Of his national anthem, _Scots wha hae wi' Wallace
bled_, Carlyle said: "So long as there is warm blood in the heart of
Scotchman, or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war ode."

Burns's politics were a singular mixture of sentimental toryism with
practical democracy. A romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes
of the exiled Stuarts, and to have been "out" in '45 with the Young
Pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland. To this purely
poetic loyalty may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns as
_Over the Water to Charlie_. But his sober convictions were on the
side of liberty and