mountain glory and mountain freedom which was opened up in these strange, weird, Celtic poems. "Whether the poetry was old or the product of last century," says Principal Shairp, "it describes as none other does the desolation of dusky moors; the solemn brooding of the mists on the mountains; the occasional looking through them of sun by day, of moon and stars by night; the gloom of dark cloudy Bens or Cairns with flashing cataracts; the ocean with its storms, as it breaks on the West Highland shores, or on the headlands of the Hebrides. Wordsworth, though an unbeliever in Ossian, felt that the fit dwelling for his spirit was— 'Where rocks are rudely heaped and rent, Where sights are rough and sounds are wild, In some complaining dim retreat, The same writer very happily adds: * Poetic Interpretation of Nature, p. 222. What ever men may now think of them, there cannot be a doubt but these mountain monotones took the heart of Europe with a new emotion, and prepared it for that passion for mountains which has since possessed it." * * Poetic Interpretation of Nature, p. 223. 120 CHAPTER XVI. MODERN PERIOD: ROBERT BURNS. (1759-1796.) IN the poets last mentioned, filling up in the main the gap from Ramsay to Burns (17591796), we have much interesting reference to features of Scottish scenery and a decided consciousness of its power, but by no means a full sense of the wonderful world that lay around them. In this respect, when we come to Burns, who may be said to close the last quarter of the eighteenth century, we find much more intensity, even a certain kind of rapt enthusiasm for nature. Not that Burns was at all a catholic poet of nature, or rose even to its impassioned analogies with man, or its deep symbolism—not even that he had a soul for the full sweep of natural objects in their high est, grandest effect. But there was in him an intense love for certain aspects of nature within his observation and his range; and further, he had a wonderful power of swift, deft picturing in a few vivid lines what some others would have taken stanzas to present. In Burns, the references to the aspects of nature are, as a rule, incidental. But then these are, in many of his poems, permeated with a sympathy for man as man - for his feelings, his hopes, his aspirations, his miserable condition in an artificial state of the world, and a living imaginative hope in the gradual coming of a higher social destiny. They appear also, as every one knows, in his love-songs, making the most exquisite surrounding and the most delicate harmony with the feeling sometimes, it may be, forming that terrible contrast which we know between human hopelessness and nature's joy. Of the varied and intense susceptibility to outward nature which characterised Burns, we have ample evidence even in his letters. Writing to Mrs Dunlop, he says: "This day [New Year's Day], the first Sun day of May, a breezy blue-skied noon some time about the beginning, and a hoary morning and calm sunny day about the end of autumn-these, time out of mind, have been with me a kind of holiday. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild rustling cadence of a troop of grey plovers in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the Æolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities, a God that made all things-man's immaterial and immortal nature, and a world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave." But the soul of Burns was not less open to |