“Thou Power Supreme, whose mighty scheme
    These woes of mine fulfil,
  Here firm I rest, they must be best
    Because they are Thy will!"[113]

It is far rather:  Whistle owre the lave o’t! Yet we may say of him as of Chaucer, that of life and the world, as they come before him, his view is large, free, shrewd, benignant,—­truly poetic, therefore; and his manner of rendering what he sees is to match.  But we must note, at the same time, his great difference from Chaucer.  The freedom of Chaucer is heightened, in Burns, by a fiery, reckless energy; the benignity of Chaucer deepens, in Burns, into an overwhelming sense of the pathos of things;—­of the pathos of human nature, the pathos, also, of non-human nature.  Instead of the fluidity of Chaucer’s manner, the manner of Burns has spring, bounding swiftness.  Burns is by far the greater force, though he has perhaps less charm.  The world of Chaucer is fairer, richer, more significant than that of Burns; but when the largeness and freedom of Burns get full sweep, as in Tam o’ Shanter, or still more in that puissant and splendid production, The Jolly Beggars, his world may be what it will, his poetic genius triumphs over it.  In the world of The Jolly Beggars there is more than hideousness and squalor, there is bestiality; yet the piece is a superb poetic success.  It has a breadth, truth, and power which make the famous scene in Auerbach’s Cellar, of Goethe’s Faust, seem artificial and tame beside it, and which are only matched by Shakespeare and Aristophanes.

Here, where his largeness and freedom serve him so admirably, and also in those poems and songs where to shrewdness he adds infinite archness and, wit, and to benignity infinite pathos, where his manner is flawless, and a perfect poetic whole is the result,—­in things like the address to the mouse whose home he had ruined, in things like Duncan Gray, Tarn Glen, Whistle and I’ll come to you my Lad, Auld Lang Syne (this list might be made much longer),—­here we have the genuine Burns, of whom the real estimate must be high indeed.  Not a classic, nor with the excellent[Greek:  spoudaihotaes] of the great classics, nor with a verse rising to a criticism of life and a virtue like theirs; but a poet with thorough truth of substance and an answering truth of style, giving us a poetry sound to the core.  We all of us have a leaning towards the pathetic, and may be inclined perhaps to prize Burns most for his touches of piercing, sometimes almost intolerable, pathos; for verse like—­

  “We twa hae paidl’t i’ the burn
    From mornin’ sun till dine;
  But seas between us braid hae roar’d
    Sin auld lang syne ...”

where he is as lovely as he is sound.  But perhaps it is by the perfection of soundness of his lighter and archer masterpieces that he is poetically most wholesome for us.  For the votary misled by a personal estimate of Shelley, as so many of us have been, are, and will be,—­of that beautiful spirit building his many-colored haze of words and images