Damon and Alexis discourse in his purely English pastorals. Only in one poem, written in pure English, does Burns attain high excellence, and that one is the “Lines to Mary in Heaven.” Perhaps in nothing, except it may be in humorous or pathetic feeling, is the Scottish dialect more in place than in describing the native scenery. For, in truth, the features of every county, if possible of each district, ought to be rendered in the very words by which they are known to the natives. When instead of this they are transferred into the literary language, they have lost I know not how much of their life and individuality. If in Scottish scenery, for instance, you speak of a brook and a grove, instead of a burn or a shaw or wood, you have really robbed the locality described of all that belongs to it. The same thing holds still more of mountain scenery, in which, unless you adopt the words which the country people apply to their own hills, you had better leave them undescribed. This feeling has at last forced both poets, and all who attempt to render Highland scenery, to use the Celtic words by which the mountain lineaments are described. We must, if we would name these features at all, speak of the “corrie,” the “lochan,” the “balloch,” and the “screetan” or “sclidder,” for the book-English has no words for these things. Hence it is that Scottish Lowland scenery is never so truly and vividly described, as when Burns uses his own vernacular. And yet Burns was no merely descriptive poet. It would be difficult to name one of his poems in which description of Nature is the main object. Everywhere with him, man, his feelings and his fate, stand out in the front of his pictures, and Nature comes in as the delightful background—yet Nature loved with a love, beheld with a rapture, all the more genuine, because his pulses throbbed in such intense sympathy with man. Every one can recall many a wonderful line, sometimes whole verse, in his love-songs, in which the surrounding landscape is flashed on the mind’s eye. In that longer poem, so full of sagacious observation on life and character, “The Twa Dogs,” how graphically rendered is the evening with which the poem closes!— “By this, the sun was out o’ sight, An’ darker gloamin brought the night: The bum-clock humm’d wi’ lazy drone, The kye stood rowtin i’ the loan; When up they gat, an’ shook their lugs, Rejoiced they were na men but dogs; An’ each took aff his several way, Resolved to meet some ither day.” “The kye stood rowting in the loan,” what a picture is that of an old-fashioned Lowland farm, with the loane or lane, between two dikes, leading up to the out-field or moor! All who have known the reality will at once recognize the truth of the picture, in which the kye, as they come home at gloamin’, stop and low, ere they enter the byre: to others it is uncommunicable. Or take that description in “Halloween” of the burn and the adventure there:—