When a few years ago I visited all the places where Burns had been, from the little house of clay with one room where he was born, to the little house with one room where he now sleeps, I thought of this. Yes, I visited them all, all the places made immortal by his genius, the field where love first touched his heart, the field where he ploughed up the home of the Mouse. I saw the cottage where Robert and Jean first lived as man and wife, and walked on "the banks and braes of Bonnie Doon." And when I stood by his grave, I said: This man was a radical, a real genuine man. This man believed in the dignity of labor, in the nobility of the useful. This man believed in human love, in making a heaven here, in judging men by their deeds instead of creeds and titles. This man believed in the liberty of the soul, of thought and speech. This man believed in the sacred rights of the individual; he sympathized with the suffering and oppressed. This man had the genius to change suffering and toil into song, to enrich poverty, to make a peasant feel like a prince of the blood, to fill the lives of the lowly with love and light. This man had the genius to make robes of glory out of squalid rags. This man had the genius to make Cleopatras, and Sapphos and Helens out of the freckled girls of the villages and fields--and he had the genius to make Auld Ayr, and Bonnie Doon, and Sweet Afton and the Winding Nith murmur the name of Robert Burns forever. This man left a legacy of glory to Scotland and the whole world; he enriched our language, and with a generous hand scattered the gems of thought. This man was the companion of poverty, and wept the tears of grief, and yet he has caused millions to shed the happy tears of joy. His heart blossomed in a thousand songs--songs for all times and all seasons--suited to every experience of the heart--songs for the dawn of love--for the glance and clasp and kiss of courtship--for "favors secret, sweet and precious"--for the glow and flame, the ecstasy and rapture of wedded life--songs of parting and despair--songs of hope and simple joy--songs for the vanished days--songs for birth and burial--songs for wild war's deadly blast, and songs for gentle peace--songs for the dying and the dead--songs for labor and content--songs for the spinning wheel, the sickle and the plow--songs for sunshine and for storm, for laughter and for tears--songs that will be sung as long as language lives and passion sways the heart of man. And when I was at his birth-place, at that little clay house where he was born, standing in that sacred place, I wrote these lines: Though Scotland boasts a thousand names, Of patriot, king and peer, The noblest, grandest of them all, Was loved and cradled here. Here lived the gentle peasant-prince, The loving cotter-king, Compared with whom the greatest lord Is but a titled thing.