And of course the ideal has its other aspect: “I bring not peace, but a sword.” With the judgment which saw those two truths clear, he was empowered to put upon its trial the existing system, in as far as it denied them. Being very sure of the essentials, he could look upon the good and evil in current practice with the nihilistic audacity of the great saints or the great sinners, of those who have nothing further to gain or nothing further to lose. Hence the unsurpassed energy of his satire, an energy only possible to a mind working with consummate detachment, a mind that sat very loose to all the dead-horse ideas on which the creatures of convention get carried safely through life. But of this particular splendour and peril of his powers the less need here be said because few of the poems in the present selection have been taken from among those which illustrate it. Enough to know that the spirit of Burns remains in the world, as both a glory and a defence; and that many usurping polities will crumble, and many moral incrustations dissolve, when required to meet the challenge of those two conceptions of the sovereignty of the man whose soul is free and the supremacy of kindness. Nor can we doubt that as time goes on, and the idea of his life emerges more clearly out of the chaos in which we see it now, he will be recognised as not only an apparitional personality and a great lyric poet, but as a largely symbolic being also, expressing and embodying the powers in the world which for ever save and for ever beneficently destroy: one of whom it will seem but sense to say— A Poet, he was brought to birth By Nature’s self or Mother Earth, And had for his prophetic sire The Force that sets the Sun on fire.