“Of Burns, the man and poet, what is there left to be said?” Thus, some forty years ago, the author of _Dreamthorp_. It was a question unworthy of so acute a mind. Of Burns, the man and poet, there is everything still to be said, for a double reason. First, because a great poet, as he stands for ever in the view of mankind, becomes in effect a part of nature as it exists for each succeeding generation: unremoved as the sun from the heavens, and, like the sun, an eternal subject for remark. What was said of the world or the weather yesterday was good; but to-day must speak for itself out of its own fullness, its own sense of being and receiving. Energy, beneficence, and beauty, in the natural and moral world alike, are a challenge essentially unprecedented wherever their presence is immediately felt; and there can be no lack of novelty—or, better still, no need for it—in the answer of the heart, if sincerely phrased, to whatever touches it with life. But, beyond the fact that explicit appraisement is the indefeasible ritual of response to certain kinds of experience, there is another reason why there can be no finality in our estimate of the works or life of a great genius. In the subject of discourse itself there is no finality; and no fixity save a permanence of changing power. Here is a difference, advising us that we are in the presence of another order of reality than that to which the term “natural” can be usefully applied. For there is a sense in which we may say that the sun and moon are very old. The first day and night sufficed to reveal them, and they showed the same face to Adam that has been looked on by all his posterity. But great poets, those heavenly lights of the mental world, endure without this sameness, and emit to later generations rays and influences that were unsuspected by the earlier. A genius may be discovered—may be descried and acclaimed—in a day; but is hardly to be found out or estimated in a thousand years. The bequeathment of great poets is a text only to be elucidated by the whole experience of the race. Therefore the history of criticism in regard to them is the record not so much of a continuous approximation as of many diverse approaches to what is never quite reached and never can be. As the race goes on evolving through new conditions of consciousness or states of mind—approaching experience in each epoch with a new kind of make-up or adjustment of its faculties, a new system of prepossessions, sensations, tendencies, and therefore aptitudes for perception—the former outlines of things dissolve, and new values, gradually or suddenly, become apparent in the classics long since ranged and estimated.