Burns lingered by the fireside of the poor and humble, in the thatched cottage of the peasant, with the imprisoned and despised. He loved men and women in spite of their titles, and without regard to the outward. Through robes and rags he saw and loved the man. Tennyson was touched by place and power, the insignia given by chance or birth. As he grew old he grew narrower, lost interest in the race, and gave his heart to the class to which he had been lowered as a reward for melodious flattery. Burns broadened and ripened with the flight of his few years. His sympathies widened and increased to the last. Tennyson had the art born of intellectual taste, of the sense of mental proportion, knowing the color of adjectives and the gradations of emphasis. His pictures were born in his brain, exquisitely shaded by details, carefully wrought by painful and conscious art. Burns's brain was the servant of his heart. His melody was a rhythm taught by love. He was touched by the miseries, the injustice, the agony of his time. While Tennyson wrote of the past--of kings long dead, of ladies who had been dust for many centuries, Burns melted with his love the walls of caste--the cruel walls that divide the rich and the poor. Tennyson celebrated the birth of royal babes, the death of the titled useless; gave wings to degraded dust, wearing the laurels given by those who lived upon the toil of men whom they despised. Burns poured poems from his heart, filled with tears and sobs for the suffering poor; poems that helped to break the chains of millions; poems that the enfranchised love to repeat; poems that liberty loves to hear. Tennyson was the poet of the past, of the twilight, of the sunset, of decorous regret, of the vanished glories of barbarous times, of the age of chivalry in which great nobles clad in steel smote to death with battle axe and sword the unarmed peasants of the field. Burns was the poet of the dawn, glad that the night was fading from the east. He kept his face toward the sunrise, caring nothing for the midnight of the past, but loved with all the depth and sincerity of his nature the few great souls--the lustrous stars--that darkness cannot quench. Tennyson was surrounded with what gold can give, touched with the selfishness of wealth. He was educated at Oxford, and had what are called the advantages of his time, and in maturer years was somewhat swayed by the spirit of caste, by the descendants of the ancient Pharisees, and at last became a lord. Burns had but little knowledge of the world. What he knew was taught him by his sympathies. Being a genius, he absorbed the good and noble of which he heard or dreamed, and thus he happily outgrew the smaller things with which he came in contact, and journeyed toward the great--the wider world, until he reached the end.