First, he was a more entirely open-air poet than any first-rate singer who had yet lived, and as such he dealt with Nature in a more free, close, intimate way than any English poet since the old ballad-singers. He did more to bring the hearts of men close to the outer world, and the outer world to the heart, than any former poet. His keen eye looked directly, with no intervening medium, on the face alike of Nature and of man, and embraced all creation in one large sympathy. With familiar tenderness he dwelt on the lower creatures, felt for their sufferings, as if they had been his own, and opened men’s hearts to feel how much the groans of creation are needlessly increased by the indifference or cruelty of man. In Burns, as in Cowper, and in him perhaps more than in Cowper, there was a large going forth of tenderness to the lower creatures, and in their poetry this first found utterance, and in no poet since their time, so fully as in these two. Secondly, his feeling in Nature’s presence was not, as in the English poets of his time, a quiet contemplative pleasure. It was nothing short of rapture. Other more modern poets may have been thrilled with the same delight, he alone of all in last century expressed the thrill. In this, as in other things, he is the truest herald of that strain of rejoicing in Nature, even to ecstasy, which has formed one of the finest tones in the poetry of this century. Thirdly, he does not philosophize on Nature or her relation to man; he feels it, alike in his joyful moods and in his sorrowful. It is to him part of what he calls “the universal plan,” but he nowhere reasons about the life of Nature as he often does so trenchantly about that of man. THE BALLADS. But another affluent to the growing sentiment, besides Burns, was the ballad-poetry rediscovered, we may say, towards the end of last century. The most decisive mark of this change in literary taste was the collection by Bishop Percy of the “Reliques of Ancient Poetry” in 1765; and this production did much to deepen and expand the taste out of which itself arose. The impulse which began with Bishop Percy may be said to have culminated when Scott gave to the world his “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,” in the opening years of the present century. The ballads of course are mainly engaged with human incidents, heroic and legendary. Yet they contain many side-glances at Nature, as it interwove itself with the actions or the sufferings of men, which are very affecting. This is the way that the sight of Ettrick Forest struck the king and his men as they marched against the outlaw who “won” there— “The king was cuming thro’ Caddon Ford, And full five thousand men was he; They saw the derke Foreste them before, They thought it awsome for to see.” Or take again the impression made on the traveling knight as he comes on Clyde in full flood:—