All great poetry has a national flavor. It tastes of the soil. No matter how great it is, how wide, how universal, the flavor of locality is never lost. Burns made common life beautiful. He idealized the sun-burnt girls who worked in the fields. He put honest labor above titled idleness. He made a cottage far more poetic than a palace. He painted the simple joys and ecstasies and raptures of sincere love. He put native sense above the polish of schools. We love him because he was independent, sturdy, self-poised, social, generous, susceptible, thrilled by a look, by a touch, full of pity, carrying the sorrows of others in his heart, even those of animals; hating to see anybody suffer, and lamenting the death of everything--even of trees and flowers. We love him because he was a natural democrat, and hated tyranny in every form. We love him because he was always on the side of the people, feeling the throb of progress. Burns read but little, had but few books; had but a little of what is called education; had only an outline of history, a little of philosophy, in its highest sense. His library consisted of the _Life of Hannibal_, the _History of Wallace_, Ray's _Wisdom of God_, Stackhouse's _History of the Bible_; two or three plays of Shakespeare, Ferguson's _Scottish Poems_, Pope's _Homer_, Shenstone, McKenzie's _Man of Feeling_ and Ossian. Burns was a man of genius. He was like a spring--something that suggests no labor. A spring seems to be a perpetual free gift of nature. There is no thought of toil. The water comes whispering to the pebbles without effort. There is no machinery, no pipes, no pumps, no engines, no water-works, nothing that suggests expense or trouble. So a natural poet is, when compared with the educated, with the polished, with the industrious. Burns seems to have done everything without effort. His poems wrote themselves. He was overflowing with sympathies, with suggestions, with ideas, in every possible direction. There is no midnight oil. There is nothing of the student--no suggestion of their having been re-written or re-cast. There is in his heart a poetic April and May, and all the poetic seeds burst into sudden life. In a moment the seed is a plant, and the plant is in blossom, and the fruit is given to the world. He looks at everything from a natural point of view; and he writes of the men and women with whom he was acquainted. He cares nothing for mythology, nothing for the legends of the Greeks and Romans. He draws but little from history. Everything that he uses is within his reach, and he knows it from centre to circumference. All his figures and comparisons are perfectly natural. He does not endeavor to make angels of fine ladies. He takes the servant girls with whom he is acquainted, the dairy maids that he knows. He puts wings upon them and makes the very angels envious.