Of the older poets, Burns stands by himself, one of the most popular of all poets who wrote in the English language. Best of all his poems are his simple love songs, such as “My Luve is Like the Red, Red Rose,” “Jean,” “Highland Mary,” and “To Mary in Heaven.” Who can forget “Bannockburn,” “Ye Banks and Braes of Bonnie Doon,” and “John Anderson my Jo?” “The Man’s the Gowd for a’ That,” and that beautiful little poem, “To a Mouse,” are unique, because they show us the simple heart of a man in all its struggling simplicity. Some, too, will like to read and reread “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” In the reading of Burns one can hardly go wrong; yet after all there is much even in Burns that we might well spare, and many and many a line of his poetry has no such charm as the poems we have mentioned; yet the reader who has learned to like these will, on reading any other poem, know and discover the difference almost at the first line. If one wishes to find in poetry comfort for a weary mood, one will not look for it in such poets as Pope and Dryden, with their clever lines. Pope has more quotable lines than almost any other poet except Shakspere; and his “Essay on Man” is interesting, and perhaps we may even find some charm in “The Rape of the Lock”; but on the whole one will miss little by reading him in a book of quotations. Milton is different. He is the one noble and lofty poet of the English language. We shall not find any modern philosophy in him; but what is finer in its imagery and rhythm than his “Hymn to the Nativity”! And such lyrical poems as “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” will be found to possess an easy and surprising charm. “Paradise Lost” we should never read more than a page or two at a time, for it is too great, too lofty for the common mind to bear it long; but who would miss the pleasure of reading this single page or two once a month or once a year? There are certain single poems which no student of poetry will fail to read and reread as he does the poems of the great poets whom we study as men as well as the author of certain poems. One of these is Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” another is Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” and his “Christabel”; Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs” and the “Song of the Shirt”; Wolfe’s “Burial of Sir John Moore”; Cowper’s “Alexander Selkirk”; Campbell’s “Hohenlinden”; and such bits as Ben Jonson’s “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes,” and Goldsmith’s “When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly.”