His pathos is profound but kindly. No writer is less gloomy than Burns, and yet none for the extent of his compositions has more pathos. No writer within the same compass has grander thoughts or deeper beauty; and, by some magic of the heart, grand thoughts and deep beauty are always allied to melancholy. The canopy of the blue heavens, when not a cloud swims in its brightness, makes our rapture sad: so it does when the stars stud it with ten thousand lights: the mountain’s majesty and the ocean’s vastness subdue our souls to thought, and in this world of ours thought has ever something of the hue of grief. It would seem as if a mysterious connection existed between great objects and pensive feelings, between lofty sentiments and deep regrets, a kind of struggle in our higher nature against the limits of its condition: a disappointment at the long interval that separates our aspirations from the ideal, tinges with sorrow all our sensations of the beautiful. Pathos such as this imbues all the graver poetry of Burns. Scarcely is there a wo which wrings the bosom between the cradle and the grave which has not an expression in the solemn music of his verse, from the gentlest whisper of feeling to the frenzies of every pain and the agonies of every passion. But though deep, his melancholy is not morbid. It is the melancholy of great capacities and of real suffering; of error reacting on itself a just infliction; or glorious desires yearning for their congenial objects. The muse of Burns was a rustic maiden; a maiden healthful and hardy. Fits of vapors she might occasionally have, but the heather of her native mountains soon restored the elasticity of her step, and the breeze of her pleasant valleys quickly recalled the bloom to her cheek and the lustre to her eye. At times she sought the solitudes; but she returned ere long to human homes, and sang her wild and simple songs to the friendly circle. She loved, it is true, to meditate under the green shadow of the forest, and to look up in raptured spirit to the lurid and darkened heavens; but she loved no less the blessed sunshine on the harvest hill, and the cottage smoke that floated in the evening sky. If occasionally she wept amidst the graves of her heroes, she came from the places of the dead, more boldly to proclaim liberty in the places of the living.