Here, where his largeness and freedom serve him so admirably, and also in those poems and songs where to shrewdness he adds infinite archness and wit, and to benignity infinite pathos, where his manner is flawless, and a perfect poetic whole is the result,--in things like the address to the mouse whose home he had ruined, in things like _Duncan Gray, Tam Glen, Whistle and I'll come to you my Lad, Auld Lang Syne_ (this list might be made much longer),--here we have the genuine Burns, of whom the real estimate must be high indeed. Not a classic, nor with the excellent _spoudaiotes_ of the great classics, nor with a verse rising to a criticism of life and a virtue like theirs; but a poet with thorough truth of substance and an answering truth of style, giving us a poetry sound to the core. We all of us have a leaning towards the pathetic, and may be inclined perhaps to prize Burns most for his touches of piercing, sometimes almost intolerable, pathos; for verse like-- 'We twa hae paidl't i' the burn From mornin' sun till dine; But seas between us braid hae roar'd Sin auld lang syne . . .' where he is as lovely as he is sound. But perhaps it is by the perfection of soundness of his lighter and archer masterpieces that he is poetically most wholesome for us. For the votary misled by a personal estimate of Shelley, as so many of us have been, are, and will be,--of that beautiful spirit building his many-coloured haze of words and images 'Pinnacled dim in the intense inane'-- no contact can be wholesomer than the contact with Burns at his archest and soundest. Side by side with the 'On the brink of the night and the morning My coursers are wont to respire, But the Earth has just whispered a warning That their flight must be swifter than fire . . .' of _Prometheus Unbound_, how salutary, how very salutary, to place this from _Tam Glen_-- 'My minnie does constantly deave me And bids me beware o' young men; They flatter, she says, to deceive me; But wha can think sae o' Tam Glen?'