What art can wash her guilt away?"

Immediately afterwards comes, with a sudden and thrilling change of
note, the voice of Burns:--

"Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon,
How can ye bloom sae fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I sae fu' of care?

Thou'll break my heart, thou bonny bird,
That sings upon the bough,
Thou minds me of the happy days
When my fause Love was true."

A man might read those two poems a great many times without happening
to realise that they are two poems on exactly the same subject--the
subject of a trusting woman deserted by a man. And the whole
difference--the difference struck by the very first note of the voice
of any one who reads them--is this fundamental difference, that
Goldsmith's words are spoken about a certain situation, and Burns's
words are spoken in that situation.

In the transition from one of these lyrics to the other, we have a
vital change in the conception of the functions of the poet; a change
of which Burns was in many ways the beginning, of which Browning, in a
manner that we shall see presently, was the culmination.

Goldsmith writes fully and accurately in the tradition of the old
historic idea of what a poet was. The poet, the _vates_, was the
supreme and absolute critic of human existence, the chorus in the
human drama; he was, to employ two words, which when analysed are the
same word, either a spectator or a seer. He took a situation, such as
the situation of a woman deserted by a man before-mentioned, and he
gave, as Goldsmith gives, his own personal and definite decision upon
it, entirely based upon general principles, and entirely from the
outside. Then, as in the case of _The Golden Treasury_, he has no
sooner given judgment than there comes a bitter and confounding cry
out of the very heart of the situation itself, which tells us things
which would have been quite left out of account by the poet of the
general rule. No one, for example, but a person who knew something of
the inside of agony would have introduced that touch of the rage of
the mourner against the chattering frivolity of nature, "Thou'll break
my heart, thou bonny bird." We find and could find no such touch in
Goldsmith. We have to arrive at the conclusion therefore, that the
_vates_ or poet in his absolute capacity is defied and overthrown by
this new method of what may be called the songs of experience.

Now Browning, as he appears in _Th