Burns’ chief use of Nature, however, is in connection with man. External Nature is illustration, background, frame, for human emotions. “The Lass of Cressnock Banks” was written at twenty-two and is the first one of his poems in which there is any distinct use of Nature. It is merely an assemblage of twelve formally drawn-out similes to represent the beauty of the lassie. Some of these similes are conventional and unmeaning, as when her hair is likened to curling mist on a mountain side,[509] her forehead to a rainbow, her lips to ripe cherries, and her teeth to a flock of sheep. In later poems the similitudes are simpler and sweeter, but they are drawn from a small number of facts and those of the more obvious sort, as the “simmer morn,” “the flower in May,” “the opening rose.” A much more effective use of Nature is as dramatic background either by congruity or contrast. As fine examples of the use of Nature to give the keynote of the human emotion it accompanies we have the opening lines of the “Elegy,” “Farewell Song to the Banks of Ayr,” “Raving Winds around Her Blowing,” and “Farewell to Ballochmyle.” The more usual form is to represent a natural picture in contrast to the human emotion, as in “The Chevalier’s Lament,” “The Lament of Mary, Queen of Scots,” or best of all, “The Banks of Doon.” Ye banks and braes o’ bonny Doon, How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair? How can ye chant ye little birds, And I sae weary, fu’ of care! It is characteristic of Burns that his knowledge was wider and his sympathy keener in the realm of animate than of inanimate Nature. He apparently thought of animals almost as if they had been human. The address to a mouse is as tenderly and genuinely sympathetic as if it had been to a hurt child. On winter nights he listens to the wind and cannot sleep for thinking of the “ourie cattle” and “silly sheep” and helpless birds that “cow’r” with “chittering wing.”[510] He scorned hunting and said there was no warm poetic heart that did not inly bleed at man’s savage cruelty.[511] He found it impossible to reconcile so-called “sport” with his ideas of virtue.[512] He knew animals, especially birds, in an intimate, friendly fashion. In the description of their manners and habits there is the most minute realism. The following phrases are illustrative: “Ye grouse that crap the heather bud;” “Ye curlews calling thro’ a clud;” “Ye whirring paitrick brood;” “Ye fisher herons watching eels;” “sooty coots;” “speckled teals;” “whistling plover;” Clam’ring craiks at close o’ day ’Mang fields o’ flow’ring clover gay; and Ye duck and drake, wi’ airy wheels Circling the lake.[513] In accurate first-hand observation, in abundant knowledge, in the use of felicitous descriptive epithets, in great personal joy in Nature, in delight in winter, in love for animals, and in a critical estimate of the value of truthful portrayal, Burns represents the new spirit.