Your lives a dyke! stone wall
Nothing is more characteristic of the poet than this attitude toward prudence—this mixture of Intellectual respect with emotional contempt. He admits freely that restraint and calculation pay, but impulse makes life so much more interesting!
The [Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet], deserves to be quoted in full. It contains the final phrasing of the central point of Burns's ethics, the Scottish rustic's version of that philosophy of benevolence with which Shaftesbury sought to warm the chill of eighteenth-century thought:
The heart aye's the part aye
That makes us right or wrang.
The mood of this poem is Burns's middle mood, lying between the black melancholy of his poems of despair and remorse and the exhilaration of his more exalted bacchanalian and love songs—the mood, we may infer, of his normal working life. We may again observe the correspondence between the change of dialect and change of tone in stanzas nine and ten, the increase of artificiality coming with his literary English and culminating in the unspeakable “tenebrific scene.” His humor returns with his Scots in the last verse.
EPISTLE TO DAVIE, A BROTHER POET
While winds frae aff Ben Lomond blaw,
And bar the doors wi' driving snaw,
And hing us owre the ingle, hang, fire