They, however, were its prophets. They struck the first note of the new music. They perceived the drift. of thought, and watched the first trailing vapours of the approaching storm. By the time their work was. done new spirits were at work, and Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley were inaugurating the new age which is our heritage to-day.

CHAPTER III.

ROBERT BURNS.

[Born at Alloway, Ayr, 1759. His poems published, 1786. Died at Dumfries, July 21st, 1796.]

WE

E have named Robert Burns as truly the first singer of the new era, and since Burns represents so much, he demands more than the concise brevity of a paragraph. He accepted the ideals of Crabbe and Cowper, and carried on the revolution they had commenced, but it was with large and important differences. It must not be forgotten that these great poets were contemporaries. While Crabbe in 1783 was beginning his series of life-pictures of the poor, and Cowper in 1785 was feeling his way towards. a more simple and unaffected style of poetry, Burns in 1786 was rousing genuine enthusiasm in Scotland by the publication of the first poems of genius in Scottish dialect which had enriched the literature of Scotland for many years. Like Cowper, he described nature with admirable simplicity, but with a terseness and exquisiteness of expression which Cowper never gained. Like Crabbe, he described "the short and simple annals of the poor," but it was with a more moving sympathy, a deeper pathos, and a concentration and brilliance of phrase which Crabbe never acquired.

So far the work of Burns resembles the work of

Crabbe and Cowper, but no further. Burns brought to his task a broad humour and incisive wit which neither of his English rivals could emulate. He was himself a poor man, a man of the soil, a son of labour, and he described what such a life was, not from the calm heights of observation, but from actual experience. Above all, he did what neither Crabbe nor Cowper could accomplish-he sang of love. He sang of it with a full, passionate utterance, a grace and a fire unknown in English poetry for upwards of a century. There was the magic of enchantment in his song. His lyrics have a sweetness and a poignancy all their own. They sing themselves into the universal heart. love-poet he is unsurpassed and unapproachable. Such lines as

Had we never loved so blindly,
Had we never loved so kindly,
Never met, and never parted,

We had ne'er been broken-hearted,

are immortal. Byron said they had the essence of a thousand love stories in them. They utter in the simplest but most pathetic fashion the experience of multitudes. And in all his lyrics, whether of love or nature, there is an abandonment and freshness which are captivating. It is beautiful to remember, when we read these exquisite love-verses, that the women who inspired them were farm-girls, domestic servantsScotch maidens met at a dance or in the harvest-field, all of them used to toil, and born to toil, and living a life far more akin to drudgery than romance. Yet no heroine of ancient or medieval song ever had more beautiful things said of her than this child of the plough addressed to the comrades of his labour. In nothing does the manliness and originality of Burns's

genius show to better advantage. He was so truly a child of the people that he found among the people with whom he lived all the elements needful for the nurture of his genius, all the materials requisite for his immortal songs.

There is not much that is new that can be said about the life of Burns. The story has become an epic, and the epic is known to all the world. It is something of a misconception which describes Burns as a ploughman: he was rather a small yeoman, born of a race of small farmers, hard-headed, industrious, fond of reading, sober, religious; precisely that class which is the strength and pride of Scotland to-day. His father was a man considerably superior to the class in which he moved; and a strong taste, almost amounting to a thirst, for knowledge, was one of the leading characteristics of the home in which Burns was born. But whatever was the precise social position of Burns, there can be no doubt about one thing-viz., his passionate love of the people. In his poetry it is the human element that is supreme. For the mere picturesque side of nature, as such, he had no great love; nature is everywhere in his poetry the background for man. Not that he did not love nature; he loved her as few poets have loved her. His poems are full of those short, crisp phrases, those felicitous touches of description, which bring before us in an instant, with magical clearness and beauty, the aspects of nature in all her seasons, and all her moods. But when Burns looked at a landscape it was not to brood over its beauty, and to invent exquisite phrases with a laborious skill to interpret it. That is Tennyson's method, and living and beautiful as his touches of natural description always are, yet they are seldom

quite spontaneous. We are pretty sure they have been corrected, sublimated, refined to the very last degree before they have passed the muster of publicity. When Burns describes nature, it is always with a rapid and easy touch, as one who thinks less of nature. than of the human toil and passion for which nature is the background. Nothing remains to-day of Burns's brilliant conversation among the notables of Edinburgh, during his first visit to that city in the early days of his fame, but one little story which Dugald Stewart recalls. He and Burns had climbed the Braid Hills in the early morning, and were looking down upon the fair plains, full of the dewy freshness of the morning glory. Stewart expressed his admiration of the beauty of the scene, and beautiful indeed it was. But Burns had his eyes fixed upon the little cluster of cottages at his feet, with the rising clouds of blue smoke trailing in the morning air, eloquent of the labourer's early meal, and said the worthiest object in all that fair scene was this little cluster of labourers' cottages, knowing as he did the wealth of true character, the piety, and happiness, and contentment, which they enshrined. It was a speech that was characteristic of the man. His mission was not to describe nature, but to sing the epic of man. He has himself given excellent expression to this idea in his well-known lines:

To mak a happy fireside clime

To weans and wife,

That's the true pathos and sublime

Of human life.

There are certain passages in Burns's letters which do not exactly tally with this simplicity of nature, but the letters Burns wrote are the only bad things he ever