"We twa hae run about the braes
And pu'd the gowans fine;
But we've wandered mony a weary foot
Sin auld lang syne.
We twa hae paidl'd in the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine:
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin auld lang syne."
Burns as a poet of the inanimate world doubtless derived hints from Thomson of The Seasons, but in his power of tuning its manifestation to the moods of the mind he is more properly ranked as a forerunner of Wordsworth. He never follows the fashions of his century, except in his failures—in his efforts at set panegyric or fine letter-writing. His highest work knows nothing of "Damon" or "Musidora." He leaves the atmosphere of drawing-rooms for the ingle or the ale-house or the mountain breeze.
The affectations of his style are insignificant and rare. His prevailing characteristic is an absolute sincerity. A love for the lower forms of social life was his besetting sin; Nature was his healing power. Burns compares himself to an Aeolian harp, strung to every wind of heaven. His genius flows over all living and lifeless things with a sympathy that finds nothing mean or insignificant. An uprooted daisy becomes in his pages an enduring emblem of the fate of artless maid and simple bard. He disturbs a mouse's nest and finds in the "tim'rous beastie" a fellow-mortal doomed like himself to "thole the winter's sleety dribble," and draws his oft-repeated moral. He walks abroad and, in a verse that glints with the light of its own rising sun before the fierce sarcasm of "The Holy Fair," describes the melodies of a "simmer Sunday morn." He loiters by Afton Water and "murmurs by the running brook a music sweeter than its own." He stands by a roofless tower, where "the howlet mourns in her dewy bower," and "sets the wild echoes flying," and adds to a perfect picture of the scene his famous vision of "Libertie." In a single stanza he concentrates the sentiment of many Night Thoughts—