This pathos is neither maudlin nor misanthropic. It does not make the head giddy with paradox; nor whirl the heart upon a wild and chaotic tempest of doubt and selfishness; it does not dissect out the evils of human nature, and gloat over them with a diseased voluptuousness; it does not lead you to sit at the feast of despair, with the spectres and skeletons around you of unsocial horrors. It is no mawkish pretence of sentiment. Burns is true to what he feels; and, right or wrong, he speaks it as it is. He maintains this course in his good and his evil. It saved him from groveling and bombast; it saved him from intellectual cant, and from literary quackery. No language is so eloquent as honest language. Truth goes direct to its purpose, while affectation is crawling around its petty circumlocutions; and, as the straight line is the shortest, the most sincere words are the most resistless. As the poet had honesty in himself, he had faith in others. His appeal was weakened by no skepticism in the capacity of humble men to appreciate the noble and the beautiful. He spoke to them as beings whose hearts were of the same substance as his own; he spoke confident of the result, and he was not disappointed. The first auditors of his verses were the obscure dwellers among Scottish hills and hamlets, and to his words he received as true a response as poetic enthusiasm could have desired. The sons and daughters of toil proved to him, that he had not trusted them in vain. He gave them his faith, and they paid back the trust with a priceless love. I have said that the pathos of Burns is not morbid—and I have said truly. In its lowest depths, it is not dark—in the uttermost sadness, it is not despairing. He grieves, but he never whines; and when he utters forth tones the most plaintive, they are yet so vigorous and so full, that, by the strong sound of them, you feel that they come out from the stalwort struggle of a manly bosom. He has pathos, too, of every variety. He has the pathos of sympathy—and this sympathy is often so intense, as to amount to a passionate indignation. As thus, in the poem—“_Man was made to Mourn_:”— Many and sharp, the numerous ills— Interwoven with our frame! More pointed still we make ourselves, Regret, remorse, and shame. And Man, whose heaven-created face, The smiles of love adorn, Man’s inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn.