But deep this truth impressed my mind—
Thro’ all His works abroad,
The heart benevolent and kind
The most resembles God.
In the same poem he paints the characters who lack loving sympathy, and whose lives and attitudes towards their fellow-men separate men, and break the ties that should unite all men, and thus prevent the development of the spirit of brotherhood. After describing the fierceness of the storm and expressing his heartfelt sympathy for the cattle, the sheep, the birds, and even with destructive animals such as prey on hen-roosts or defenceless lambs, his mind was filled with a plaintive strain, as he thought of the bitterness of man to his brother man, and he proceeds:
Blow, blow, ye winds, with heavier gust!
And freeze, thou bitter-biting frost!
Descend, ye chilly, smothering snows!
Not all your rage, as now united, shows
More hard unkindness, unrelenting,
Vengeful malice unrepenting,
Than heaven-illumined man on brother man bestows.
The depth and universality of his sympathy is shown in ‘To a Mouse,’ after he had destroyed its nest while ploughing:
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
In his ‘Epistle to Davie,’ a brother poet, he emphasises the value of true sympathy, that should bind all hearts, must yet bind all hearts in universal brotherhood, when he says:
All hail! ye tender feelings dear!
The smile of love, the friendly tear,
The sympathetic glow!
Long since, this world’s thorny ways
Had numbered out my weary days,
Had it not been for you.
In his ‘Epistle to Robert Graham of Fintry,’ after describing the thrifty but selfishly prudent, ‘who feel by reason and who give by rule,’ and expressing regret that ‘the friendly e’er should want a friend,’ he writes:
But come ye, who the godlike pleasure know,
Heaven’s attribute distinguished—to bestow!
Whose arms of love would grasp the human race.
In the opinion of Burns, they are the ideal men and women who best understood, and most perfectly practised, the teaching of Christ.