heroic times or the heroic climates, who on all hands swarm in our poetry. Peace be with them! But yet, as a great moralist proposed preaching to the men of this century, so would we fain preach to the poets “a sermon on the duty of staying at home." Let them be sure that heroic ages and heroic climates can do little for them. That form of life has attraction for us less because it is better or nobler than our own than simply because it is different, and even this attraction must be of the most transient sort. For will not our own age one day be an ancient one and have as quaint a costume as the rest, not contrasted with the rest, therefore, but ranked along with them in respect of quaintness? Does Homer interest us now because he wrote of what passed out of his native Greece and two centuries before he was born, or because he wrote of what passed in God's world and in the heart of man, which is the same after thirty centuries? Let our poets look to this; is their feeling really finer, truer, and their vision deeper than that of other men, they have nothing to fear, even from the humblest subject; is it not so, they have nothing to hope, but an ephemeral favour, even from the highest.

The poet, we cannot but think, can never have far to seek for a subject; the elements of his art are in him and around him on every hand; for him the ideal world is not remote from the actual, but under it and within it; nay, he is a poet precisely because he can discern it there. Wherever there is a sky above him, and a world around him, the poet is in his place, for here too is man's existence with its infinite longings and small acquirings, its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed endeavours, its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and hopes that wander through eternity, and all the mystery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever made of, in any age or climate, since man first began to live. Is there not the fifth act of a tragedy in every death-bed, though it were a peasant's and a bed of heath? And are wooings and weddings. obsolete that there can be comedy no longer? Or are men suddenly grown wise that Laughter must no longer

shake his sides, but be cheated of his farce? Man's life and nature is as it was, and as it will ever be. But the poet must have an eye to read these things and a heart to understand them, or they come and pass away before him in vain. He is a vates, a seer; a gift of vision has been given him. Has life no meanings for him which another cannot equally decipher? then he is no poet, and Delphi itself will not make him one.

In this respect Burns, though not perhaps absolutely a great poet, better manifests his capability, better proves the truth of his genius, than if he had by his own strength kept the whole Minerva Press going to the end of his literary course. He shows himself at least a poet of Nature's own making, and Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets. We often hear of this and the other external condition being requisite for the existence of a poet. Sometimes it is a certain sort of training he must have studied certain things-studied, for instance," the elder dramatists," and so learned a poetic language, as if poetry lay in the tongue, not in the heart. At other times we are told he must be bred in a certain rank, and must be on a confidential footing with the higher classes, because, above all other things, he must see the world. As to seeing the world, we apprehend this will cause him little difficulty if he have but an eye to see it with. Without eyes, indeed, the task might be hard. But happily every poet is born in the world and sees it, with or against his will, every day and every hour he lives. The mysterious workmanship of man's heart, the true light and the inscrutable darkness of man's destiny, reveal themselves not only in capital cities and crowded saloons, but in every hut and hamlet where men have their abode. Nay, do not the elements of all human virtues and all human vices, the passions at once of a Borgia and of a Luther, lie written, in stronger or fainter lines, in the consciousness of every individual bosom that has practised honest self-examination? Truly the same world may be seen in Mossgiel and Tarbolton, if we look well, as clearly as it ever came to light in Crockford's, or the Tuileries itself.

But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on the poor aspirant to poetry, for it is hinted that he should have been born two centuries ago, inasmuch as poetry soon after that date vanished from the earth and became no longer attainable by men! Such cobweb speculations have, now and then, overhung the field of literature, but they obstruct not the growth of any plant there; the Shakespeare or the Burns unconsciously, and merely as he walks onward, silently brushes them away. Is not every genius an impossibility till he appear?

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Why do we call him new and original if we saw where his marble was lying, and what fabric he could rear from it? It is not the material but the workman that is wanting. is not the dark place that hinders, but the dim eye. A Scottish peasant's life was the meanest and rudest of all lives till Burns became a poet in it and a poet of it, found it a man's life, and therefore significant to men. A thousand battlefields remain unsung, but the Wounded Hare has not perished without its memorial, a balm of mercy yet breathes on us from its dumb agonies because a poet was there. Our Halloween has passed and repassed in rude awe and laughter since the era of the Druids, but no Theocritus, till Burns, discerned in it the materials of a Scottish idyl; neither was the Holy Fair any Council of Trent or Roman Jubilee; but, nevertheless, Superstition and Hypocrisy, and Fun having been propitious to him, in this man's hand it became a poem, instinct with satire and genuine comic life. Let but the true poet be given us, we repeat it, place him where and how you will, and true poetry will not be wanting.

Independently of the essential gift of poetic feeling, as we have now attempted to describe it, a certain rugged sterling worth pervades whatever Burns has written, a virtue, as of green fields and mountain breezes, dwells in his poetry; it is redolent of natural life and hardy, natural men. There is a decisive strength in him, and yet a sweet native gracefulness; he is tender, and he is vehement, yet without constraint or too visible effort; he melts the heart, or inflames it, with a power which

seems habitual and familiar to him. We see in him the gentleness, the trembling pity of a woman, with the deep earnestness, the force, and passionate ardour of a hero. Tears lie in him, and consuming fire, as lightning lurks in the drops of the summer cloud. He has a resonance in his bosom for every note of human feeling— the high and low, the sad, the ludicrous, the joyful, are welcome in their turns to his "lightly-moved and allconceiving spirit." And observe with what a prompt and eager force he grasps his subject, be it what it may! How he fixes, as it were, the full image of the matter in his eye, full and clear in every lineament, and catches the real type and essence of it amid a thousand accidents and superficial circumstances, no one of which misleads him! Is it of reason, some truth to be discovered? No sophistry, no vain surface-logic detains him; quick, resolute, unerring, he pierces through into the marrow of the question and speaks his verdict with an emphasis that cannot be forgotten. Is it of description, some visual object to be represented? No poet of any age or nation is more graphic than Burns-the characteristic features disclose themselves to him at a glance; three lines from his hand and we have a likeness. And in that rough dialect, in that rude, often awkward metre, so clear and definite a likeness! It seems a draughtsman working with a burnt stick, and yet the burin of a Retzsch is not more expressive or exact.

This clearness of sight we may call the foundation of all talent, for in fact, unless we see our object, how shall we know how to place or prize it in our understanding, our imagination, our affections? Yet it is not in itself, perhaps, a very high excellence, but capable of being united indifferently with the strongest or with ordinary powers. Homer surpasses all men in this quality, but, strangely enough, at no great distance below him are Richardson and Defoe. It belongs, in truth, to what is called a lively mind, and gives no sure indication of the higher endowments that may exist along with it. In all the three cases we have mentioned it is combined with

great garrulity, their descriptions are detailed, ample, and lovingly exact; Homer's fire bursts through, from time to time, as if by accident; but Defoe and Richardson have no fire. Burns, again, is not more distinguished by the clearness than by the impetuous force of his concep

Of the strength, the piercing emphasis with which he thought, his emphasis of expression may give a humble but the readiest proof. Who ever uttered sharper sayings than his words more memorable now by their burning vehemence, now by their cool vigour and laconic pith? A single phrase depicts a whole subject, a whole scene. Our Scottish forefathers in the battlefield struggled forward, he says, "red-wat shod," giving in this one word a full vision of horror and carnage, perhaps too frightfully accurate for art!

In fact, one of the leading features in the mind of Burns is this vigour of his strictly intellectual perceptions. A resolute force is ever visible in his judgments, as in his feelings and volitions. Professor Stewart says of him, with some surprise-"All the faculties of Burns's mind were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous, and his predilection for poetry was rather the result of his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper than of a genius exclusively adapted to that species of composition. From his conversation I should have pronounced him to be fitted to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities." But this, if we mistake not, is at all times the very essence of a truly poetical endowment. Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole consists in extreme sensibility and a certain vague pervading tunefulness of nature, is no separate faculty, no organ which can be superadded to the rest or disjoined from them, but rather the result of their general harmony and completion. The feelings, the gifts, that exist in the poet are those that exist, with more or less development, in every human soul-the imagination which shudders at the Hell of Dante is the same faculty, weaker in degree, which called that picture into being. How does the poet speak to all men, with power, but by being

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