Whether his
books treat of love or political economy, theology or geology, it is
there, the history of the man legibly printed, for those who care to
read it. In these poems and letters of Burns, we apprehend, is to be
found a truer history than any anecdote can supply, of the things
which happened to himself, and moreover of the most notable things
which went on in Scotland between 1759 and 1796.

This latter assertion may seem startling, when we consider that we
find in these poems no mention whatsoever of the discoveries of
steamboats and spinning-jennies, the rise of the great manufacturing
cities, the revolution in Scottish agriculture, or even in Scottish
metaphysics. But after all, the history of a nation is the history
of the men, and not of the things thereof; and the history of those
men is the history of their hearts, and not of their purses, or even
of their heads; and the history of one man who has felt in himself
the heart experiences of his generation, and anticipated many
belonging to the next generation, is so far the collective history of
that generation, and of much--no man can say how much--of the next
generation; and such a man, bearing within his single soul two
generations of working-men, we take Robert Burns to have been; and
his poems, as such, a contemporaneous history of Scotland, the equal
to which we are not likely to see written for this generation, or
several to come.

Such a man sent out into such an age, would naturally have a hard and
a confused battle to fight, would probably, unless he fell under the
guidance of some master-mind, end se ipso minor, stunted and sadly
deformed, as Burns did. His works are after all only the disjecta
membra poetae; full of hints of a great might-have-been. Hints of
the keenest and most dramatic appreciation of human action and
thought. Hints of an unbounded fancy, playing gracefully in the
excess of its strength, with the vastest images, as in that robe of
the Scottish Muse, in which

Deep lights and shades, bold mingling, threw
A lustre grand,
And seem'd to my astonished view
A well-known land.

The image, and the next few stanzas which dilate it, might be a
translation from Dante's "Paradiso," so broad, terse, vivid, the
painter's touch. Hints, too, of a humour, which, like that of
Shakespeare, rises at times by sheer depth of insight into the
sublime; as when

Hornie did the Laigh Kirk watch
Just like a winking baud