"The Cotter's Saturday Night" filled my whole soul--my heart throbbed and my eyes moistened; and never before did I feel half so proud of my country, or know half so well on what score it was I did best in feeling proud. I had perused the entire volume from beginning to end, ere I remembered I had not taken supper, and that it was more than time to go to bed. But it is no part of my plan to furnish a critique on the poems of my friend. I merely strive to recall the thoughts and feelings which my first perusal of them awakened, and thus only as a piece of mental history. Several months elapsed from this evening ere I could hold them out from me sufficiently at arms' length, as it were, to judge of their more striking characteristics. At times the amazing amount of thought, feeling, and imagery which they contained--their wonderful continuity of idea, without gap or interstice--seemed to me most to distinguish them. At times they reminded me, compared with the writings of smoother poets, of a collection of medals which, unlike the thin polished coin of the kingdom, retained all the significant and pictorial roughness of the original die. But when, after the lapse of weeks, months, years, I found them rising up in my heart on every occasion, as naturally as if they had been the original language of all my feelings and emotions--when I felt that, instead of remaining outside my mind, as it were, like the writings of other poets, they had so amalgamated themselves with my passions, my sentiments, my ideas, that they seemed to have become portions of my very self--I was led to a final conclusion regarding them. Their grand distinguishing characteristic is their unswerving and perfect truth. The poetry of Shakspeare is the mirror of life--that of Burns the expressive and richly modulated voice of human nature. CHAPTER VIII. "Burns was a poor man from his birth, and an exciseman from necessity; but--I _will say_ it!--the sterling of his honest worth, poverty could not debase; and his independent British spirit oppression might bend, but could not subdue."--_Letter to Mr. Graham_.