Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again!
Wordsworth’s great contemporaries, each in his own way, in terms of his own temperament, were guided by the same principle. The whole nature of Burns’s genius was governed by his will to sing the common speech of Scotland into immortality. The beau monde, the gaming rooms and the prize-ring, the purlieus of scandal and the solitudes of romantic exile filled with the whispers of poetry and heroic history, the world of new loves and lost causes, of literary loyalties and animosities, among which Byron moved indifferently, in or out of temper, all spoke their own language in the motley of his verse. To know the poet and his environment is to see the same essential man in—
Smart uniforms and sparkling coronets
Are spurned in turn, until her turn arrives,
After male loss of time, and hearts, and bets
Upon the sweepstakes for substantial wives;
And when at last the pretty creature gets
Some gentleman, who fights, or writes, or drives,
It soothes the awkward squad of the rejected