“Pinnacled dim in the intense inane”—­[114]

no contact can be wholesomer than the contact with Burns at his archest and soundest.  Side by side with the

  “On the brink of the night and the morning
    My coursers are wont to respire,
  But the Earth has just whispered a warning
    That their flight must be swifter than fire ..."[115]

of Prometheus Unbound, how salutary, how very salutary, to place this from Tam Glen—­

“My minnie does constantly deave me and bids me beware o’ young men; They flatter, she says, to deceive me; But wha can think sae o’ Tam Glen?”

But we enter on burning ground as we approach the poetry of times so near to us—­poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth—­of which the estimates are so often not only personal, but personal with passion.  For my purpose, it is enough to have taken the single case of Burns, the first poet we come to of whose work the estimate formed is evidently apt to be personal, and to have suggested how we may proceed, using the poetry of the great classics as a sort of touchstone, to correct this estimate, as we had previously corrected by the same means the historic estimate where we met with it.  A collection like the present, with its succession of celebrated names and celebrated poems, offers a good opportunity to us for resolutely endeavoring to make our estimates of poetry real.  I have sought to point out a method which will help us in making them so, and to exhibit it in use so far as to put any one who likes in a way of applying it for himself.

At any rate the end to which the method and the estimate are designed to lead, and from leading to which, if they do lead to it, they get their whole value,—­the benefit of being able clearly to feel and deeply to enjoy the best, the truly classic, in poetry,—­is an end, let me say it once more at parting, of supreme importance.  We are often told that an era is opening in which we are to see multitudes of a common sort of readers, and masses of a common sort of literature; that such readers do not want and could not relish anything better than such literature, and that to provide it is becoming a vast and profitable industry.  Even if good literature entirely lost currency with the world, it would still be abundantly worth while to continue to enjoy it by oneself.  But it never will lose currency with the world, in spite of momentary appearances; it never will lose supremacy.  Currency and supremacy are insured to it, not indeed by the world’s deliberate and conscious choice, but by something far deeper,—­by the instinct of self-preservation in humanity.

LITERATURE AND SCIENCE[116]