ordinarily sleep, and which can never be expressed because they have no names.  Blake lived his shy, mystic, spiritual life in the crowded city, and his message is to the few who can understand.  Burns lived his sad, toilsome, erring life in the open air, with the sun and the rain, and his songs touch all the world.  The latter’s poetry, so far as it has a philosophy, rests upon two principles which the classic school never understood,—­that common people are at heart romantic and lovers of the ideal, and that simple human emotions furnish the elements of true poetry.  Largely because he follows these two principles, Burns is probably the greatest song writer of the world.  His poetic creed may be summed up in one of his own stanzas: 

Give me ae spark o’ Nature’s fire,
That’s a’ the learning I desire;
Then, though I trudge thro’ dub an’ mire
At pleugh or cart,
My Muse, though hamely in attire,
May touch the heart.

LIFE.[205] Burns’s life is “a life of fragments,” as Carlyle called it; and the different fragments are as unlike as the noble “Cotter’s Saturday Night” and the rant and riot of “The Jolly Beggars.”  The details of this sad and disjointed life were better, perhaps, forgotten.  We call attention only to the facts which help us to understand the man and his poetry.

Burns was born in a clay cottage at Alloway, Scotland, in the bleak winter of 1759.  His father was an excellent type of the Scotch peasant of those days,—­a poor, honest, God-fearing man, who toiled from dawn till dark to wrest a living for his family from the stubborn soil.  His tall figure was bent with unceasing labor; his hair was thin and gray, and in his eyes was the careworn, hunted look of a peasant driven by poverty and unpaid rents from one poor farm to another.  The family often fasted of necessity, and lived in solitude to avoid the temptation of spending their hard-earned money.  The children went barefoot and bareheaded in all weathers, and shared the parents’ toil and their anxiety over the rents.  At thirteen Bobby, the eldest, was doing a peasant’s full day’s labor; at sixteen he was chief laborer on his father’s farm; and he describes the life as “the cheerless gloom of a hermit, and the unceasing moil of a galley slave.”  In 1784 the father, after a lifetime of toil, was saved from a debtor’s prison by consumption and death.  To rescue something from the wreck of the home, and to win a poor chance of bread for the family, the two older boys set up a claim for arrears of wages that had never been paid.  With the small sum allowed them, they buried their father, took another farm, Mossgiel, in Mauchline, and began again the long struggle with poverty.