Their dignities, and a' that,
The pith o' sense, and pride o' worth,
Are higher rank than a' that."

Here they find his grand, genuine touches; and still more, when this
puissant genius, who so often set morality at defiance, falls
moralizing--

"The sacred lowe o' weel placed love
Luxuriantly indulge it;
But never tempt th' illicit rove,
Tho' naething should divulge it.
I waive the quantum o' the sin,
The hazard o' concealing,
But och! it hardens a' within,
And petrifies the feeling."[110]

Or in a higher strain--

"Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord, its various tone;
Each spring, its various bias.
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What's _done_ we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted."[111]

Or in a better strain yet, a strain, his admirers will say,
unsurpassable--

"To make a happy fire-side clime
To weans and wife,
That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life."[112]

There is criticism of life for you, the admirers of Burns will say to
us; there is the application of ideas to life! There is, undoubtedly.
The doctrine of the last-quoted lines coincides almost exactly with what
was the aim and end, Xenophon tells us, of all the teaching of Socrates.
And the application 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, for missing the
perfect poetic acc