Millet looked at the French peasants standing in their wooden shoes, digging potatoes from the earth and pausing to bow reverently at the sounding of the Angelus, and saw in this simple life, so close to Nature’s heart, more beauty and pathos and poetry than all the glittering courts of Europe could produce. And Robert Burns, whose broad mind and sympathetic soul made him kin to all living things, had no need to see the splendor and gaiety of wealth and power, to visit foreign shores and unknown lands; but the flowers, the heather, the daisies, the bleak fields, the pelting rains, the singing birds, the lowing cattle, and above all, the simple country folk seen through his eyes, and felt by his soul, and held in his all-embracing heart, were covered with a beauty and a glory that all the artificial world could not create, and that his genius has endowed with immortal life. Robert Burns did not borrow his philosophy from the books, his humanity from the church, or his poetry from the schools. Luckily for us he escaped all these, and unfettered and untaught, went straight to the soul of Nature to learn from the great source, the harmony and beauty and unity that pervades the whole; and he painted these with colors drawn from his great human heart. His universal sympathy gave him an insight into life that students of science and philosophy can never reach. Contemplating Nature, and seeing her generous bounties lavished alike on all her children, he could not but contrast this with the selfishness and inhumanity of man, which crushes out the weak and helpless and builds up the great and strong. Burns was a natural leveler, and while men still believed in the “divine right of kings,” he preached that “man was the divine King of rights.” None knew better than he the injustice of the social life in which he lived, and in which we live to-day. Burns knew, as all men of intelligence understand, that worldly goods are not, and never have been given as a reward of either brains or merit. It’s hardly in a body’s power To keep at times, frae being sour, To see how things are shared; How best o’chiels are whiles in want While coofs on countless thousands rant And ken na how to wair’t. The immortal singer of songs, and all his descendants, received infinitely less for all the works of his genius than an ordinary gambler often gets for one sale of something that he never owned, or one purchase of something that he never bought; and it is doubtful if all the masterpieces of the world in art, in literature, and in science, ever brought as much cash to those whose great, patient brains have carefully and honestly wrought that the earth might be richer and better and brighter, as has been often “made” by one inferior speculator upon a single issue of watered stock.