men in Edinburgh who as to national feeling were entirely colorless, -Scotchmen in nothing except their dwelling-place. The thing they most dreaded was to be convicted of a Scotticism. Among these learned cosmopolitans in walked Burns, who, with the instinct of genius, chose for his subject that Scottish life which they ignored, and for his vehicle that vernacular which they despised, and who, touching the springs of long-forgotten emotions, brought back on the hearts of his countrymen a tide of patriotic feeling to which they had long been strangers."

Lockhart says:

"Burns revived Scottish nationality which was falling asleep on the graves of the Stuarts."

By thus placing the Lowland vernacular upon a national basis, by making it, and the sentiments it revealed, classic, Burns secured his title to Universality. Through him Scotland's hills and vales, her woods and streams, her men and women, became the friends of the race; and a new world of sights and sounds, of joys and sorrows, was brought to every reader of his work.

"We love him, praise him, just for this:

In every form and feature,

Through wealth and want, through woe and bliss,
He saw his fellow-creature."

When we find that the poets more than any other teachers reveal us to ourselves by revealing the unity of the race in the brotherhood of admiration, hope, and love, we take them to our hearts, and they become the most potent forces in our education, all the more potent because silent and unobtrusive. Emerson says:

Every man's, every boy's and girl's head carries snatches of Burns's songs, and they say them by heart, and, what is strangest of all, never learned them from a book, but from mouth to mouth. The wind whispers them, the birds whistle them, the corn, barley, and bulrushes

hoarsely rustle them, nay, the music-boxes of Geneva are framed and toothed to play them, the hand-organs of the Savoyards in all cities repeat them, and the chimes of bells ring them in spires. They are the property and solace of mankind.”

The years 1785 and 1786 are memorable in the history of English poetry; for they mark the first culmination of that movement toward Nature, Man, and God which began in England with Gray and Goldsmith, and in Scotland with Ramsay and : Thomson.

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In 1785 Cowper published The Task, and in 1786 Burns gave to the world the first edition of his poems. Each poet wrought at his task unconscious of the existence of the other. The one in the dewy meadows of Buckinghamshire, and the other on the Ayrshire hills, saw Nature as she had not been seen since the time of Chaucer — in all her freshness and beauty — and by so revealing it made poetry simple and natural, strong and healthful, with the health and the strength of youth. Cowper

"Loved the rural walk through lanes

Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep,

And skirted thick with intertexture firm

O'er hills, through valleys, and by river's brink."

He loved to tend the hare which he had saved from the

Has never heard the sanguinary yell

Of cruel man exulting in her woes.

Yes thou may'st eat thy bread, and lick the hand

That feeds thee; thou may'st frolic on the floor

At evening, and at night retire secure

To thy straw couch, and slumber unalarmed."

Burns loved to wander,

"Whyles owre the linn the burnie plays,
As thro' the glen it wimpl't;

Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays,
Whyles in a wiel it dimpl't;

Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays,
Wi' bickering, dancing dazzle;
Whyles cookit underneath the braes,
Below the spreading hazel,

Unseen that night."

In the winter night when "doors and whinnock rattle" he thought

"On the ourie cattle

Or silly sheep, wha bide the brattle

O' winter war,

And thro' the drift, deep-laiving, sprattle

Beneath a scaur."

Again by revealing that the hearts as tender and true beat under hodden gray as under royal robes, these singers made poetry democratic :

"He is the freeman whom the truth makes free.
He looks abroad into the varied field

Of nature, and though poor, perhaps, compared
With those whose mansions glitter in his sight,
Calls the delightful scenery all his own."

"Princes and lords are but the breath of kings,
'An honest man's the noblest work of God;'
And certes, in fair virtue's heavenly road,
The cottage leaves the palace far behind."

Cowper.

BURNS.

And lastly, by teaching that God's love was revealed in nature, in animal life, and in man, that,

"God made all the creatures, and gave them our love and our fear, To give sign we and they are his children, one family here."

They made poetry reflect, as never before, the religion of Christ.

The one indignantly protests:

"My ear is pain'd,

My soul is sick with every day's report

Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled;
Man devotes his brother and destroys.

And what man seeing this,

And having human feelings, does not blush

And hang his head to think himself a man?"

The other with his sweet sympathy for his erring brother

says:

"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."

I have said that these poets never met, and that each lived and loved and sang almost unconscious of the existence of the other. It seems that Cowper read Burns's poems in July, 1787, for he then wrote:

"I have read Burns's poems twice, and I think them on the whole a very extraordinary production. He is, I believe, the only poet these kingdoms have produced in the lower rank of life since Shakespeare who need not be indebted for any part of his praise to a charitable consideration of his origin, and the disadvantages under which he has labored."

How soon it was after the publication of Cowper's Task that it found Burns we cannot tell; but in 1795 he wrote his friend, Mrs. Dunlop, as follows: :

"How do you like Cowper? Is not The Task a glorious poem? The religion of The Task, bating a few scraps of Calvinistic divinity, is the religion of God and nature; the religion that exalts, that ennobles man."

In this centenary year, when lovers of Burns are vying with each other in manifestations of loyalty to his memory, I have wished to reveal my appreciation of him as a teacher of men by reproducing something of the old and true rather than by introducing anything strange and new. My experience of twenty years in teaching Burns has convinced me that he is one of the poets whose best work, by its inimitable magic of style and melody of verse, together with that absolute frankness and honesty of purpose which delights in being simple and natural, is admirably fitted to kindle in young people a love of simple pleasures and of home-bred sense which is the characteristic of the truly great of all time.

Because of the difficulty of selecting poems for class use, and because of the time lost in looking up the individual poems, which in various editions appear under different titles, I have at last decided to bring together such poems as I have found suitable for the class-room and the home. Burns more than any other English poet needs to be read in selections, for his work is exceedingly uneven both in form and content. I have endeavored to select such poems as by truth and seriousness of subject, beauty and felicity of form," belong to the literature of power. I cannot hope to have included all that the special student of Burns would like, yet I trust that even he will not miss many of his favorites.

My end will be accomplished if the reader is led to make friends with this “lightly moved and all-conceiving spirit,” and thus to become a lover of the matchless melody of a master of song.

In his verse and prose Burns is his own portrait-painter; the notes give to each poem its setting of natural, personal, and historical associations, out of which its pathos and power were created, and thus they are largely biographical. At the same time there is gathered a body of opinion in regard to the mission and message of Burns which may prove of value in con