By the valiance of those two thoughts animating, even when only implicitly presented, the whole body of his work—and by the convincing tragic token of a life which, whatever its confusions and faults, was always starkly independent and compassionately kind—Burns has made a contribution distinctly his own to the world’s wealth of ideals, and of the memories that keep them alive. What makes the power of this ideal, and its distinctness as an historical event, is that it was so utterly personal and of the Poet himself: therefore, so inspired and authoritative. The message which he conveys comes to him with the sweep of his genius and the certainty of his imperishable song, and in its delivery he speaks as a chosen son of Nature for and to all mankind. In this sense he speaks as no other poet in the world has spoken. Standing in the new-ploughed earth, or following the occupations of seedtime or harvest, he seems to be at the beginning and at the centre; and has a consciousness of universal man, of the labours and seedtimes and harvests of the ages and the climes, denied to the poets, however great, for whom the world is primarily a scene of cities, and not of earth and sky and man, alone in the fields with the primal curse and solace. In this regard he stands nearer to Millet than any other name in Art or Poetry. Therefore it was fitting that one who was so much and potently and generously a man should have written, near the close of his life and in a time of repression and alarm, that vindication—_A Man’s a Man for a’ That_—which (_pace_ Mr. Henley) has been not inaptly called “the Marseillaise of Humanity.” Fitting also that he should have written, again near the close of his life, that song of human friendship and recollected childhood—_Auld Lang Syne_—which seems destined to become the common possession of the nations, as it is already the one thing in our literature which draws the hearts of all English-speaking people throughout the world, and not seldom their tears.