ience, was derived from his personal intercourse with his
farm stock and from his inborn conviction of the dignity of the
individual. His relations to these elements in the thought and feeling
of his day were, then, reciprocal: they strengthened certain traits in
his personality, and he passed them on to posterity, strengthened in
turn by his moving expression.

The situation is similar with regard to his connection with the
so-called "return to nature" in English poetry. Historians have
discerned a new era begun in descriptive poetry with Thomson's
_Seasons_; and in Cowper again, to ignore many intermediates, there is
abundance of faithful portraiture of landscape. But Burns was not
given to set description of their kind, and what he has in common with
them lies in the nature of his detail--the frank actuality of the
images of wind and weather, burn and brae, which form the background
of his human comedy and tragedy. He observed for himself, and he
called things by their own names. In so doing he was once more
following a national tradition, so that he was not "returning" to
nature, since the tradition had never left it; but, on the other hand,
it is reasonable to suppose that Wordsworth, arriving at a somewhat
similar method by a totally different route, found corroboration for
his theories of the simplification needed in the matter and diction of
poetry in the success of the Scottish rustic who showed his youth

How Verse may build a princely throne
On humble truth.

Wordsworth, of course, like the most distinguished of his romantic
contemporaries, found much in nature that Burns never dreamed of; and
even the faithfulness in detail which Burns shared with these poets
reached a point of subtlety and sensuousness far beyond the reach of
his simple and direct epithets. Nature was to be given in the next
generation a vast and novel variety of spiritual significance. With
all that Burns had nothing to do. He was realist, not romanticist,
though his example operated beneficently and sanely on some of the
romantic leaders.

Yet in Burns's treatment of nature there is imaginative beauty as well
as humble truth. His language in description, though not mystical or
highly idealized, is often rich in feeling, and his personality was
potent enough to pervade his most objective writing. Thus he ranks
among those who have put lovers of poetry under obligation for a fresh
glimpse of the beauty and meaning of the wo