on is a powerful one; made by a man of
vigorous understanding, and (need I say?) a master of language.

But for supreme poetical success more is required than the powerful
application of ideas to life; it must be an application under the
conditions fixed by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. Those
laws fix as an essential condition, in the poet's treatment of such
matters as are here in question, high seriousness;--the high
seriousness which comes from absolute sincerity. The accent of high
seriousness, born of absolute sincerity, is what gives to such verse as

'In la sua volontade e nostra pace . . .'

to such criticism of life as Dante's, its power. Is this accent felt
in the passages which I have been quoting from Burns? Surely not;
surely, if our sense is quick, we must perceive that we have not in
those passages a voice from the very inmost soul of the genuine Burns;
he is not speaking to us from these depths, he is more or less
preaching. And the compensation for admiring such passages less, from
missing the perfect poetic accent in them, will be that we shall admire
more the poetry where that accent is found.

No; Burns, like Chaucer, comes short of the high seriousness of the
great classics, and the virtue of matter and manner which goes with
that high seriousness is wanting to his work. At moments he touches it
in a profound and passionate melancholy, as in those four immortal
lines taken by Byron as a motto for _The Bride of Abydos_, but which
have in them a depth of poetic quality such as resides in no verse of
Byron's own--

'Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met, or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.'

But a whole poem of that quality Burns cannot make; the rest, in the
_Farewell to Nancy_, is verbiage.

We arrive best at the real estimate of Burns, I think, by conceiving
his work as having truth of matter and truth of manner, but not the
accent or the poetic virtue of the highest masters. His genuine
criticism of life, when the sheer poet in him speaks, is ironic; it is
not--

'Thou Power Supreme, whose mighty scheme
These woes of mine fulfil,
Here firm I rest, they must be best
Because they are Thy will!'

It is far rather: _Whistle owre the lave o't_! Yet we may say of him
as of Chaucer, that of life and the world, as they come before him, his
view is large, free, shrewd, benignant,--truly poetic therefo