till Burns might have been a great song-writer without becoming the
name and power he is in the world to-day. The lyrical gift implies a
quick emotional sense, which in some cases may be little more than a
beautiful defect in a weak nature. But Burns was essentially a strong
man. His very vices are the vices of a robust and healthy humanity.
Besides being possessed of all the qualities of a great singer, he was
at the same time vigorously human and throbbing with the love and joy of
life. It is this sterling quality of manhood that has made Burns the
poet and the power he is. He looked out on the world with the eyes of a
man, and saw things in their true colours and in their natural
relations. He regarded the world into which he had been born, and saw it
not as some other poet or an artist or a painter might have beheld
it,--for the purposes of art,--but in all its uncompromising realism;
and what his eye saw clearly, his lips as clearly uttered. His first and
greatest gift, therefore, as a poet was his manifest sincerity. His men
and women are living human beings; his flowers are real flowers; his
dogs, real dogs, and nothing more. All his pictures are presented in
the simplest and fewest possible words. There is no suspicion of
trickery; no attempt to force words to carry a weight of meaning they
are incapable of expressing. He knew nothing of the deification of
style, and on absolute truthfulness and unidealised reality rested his
poetical structure. Wordsworth speaks of him--

'Whose light I hailed when first it shone,
And showed my youth
How verse may build a princely throne
On humble truth.'

It is this quality that made Burns the interpreter of the lives of his
fellow-men, not only to an outside world that knew them not, but to
themselves. And he has glorified those lives in the interpretation, not
by the introduction of false elements or the elimination of unlovely
features, but simply by his insistence, in spite of the sordidness of
poverty, on the naked dignity of man.

Everything he touched became interesting because it was interesting to
him, and he spoke forth what he felt. For Burns did not go outside of
his own life, either in time or place, for subject. There are poetry and
romance, tragedy and comedy ever waiting for the man who has eyes to see
them; and Burns's stage was the parish of Tarbolton, and he found his
poetry in (or rendered poetical) the ordinary humdrum life r