By America and her democracy such a poet, I cannot too often
repeat, must be kept in loving remembrance; but it is best that
discriminations be made. His admirers (as at those anniversary
suppers, over the "hot Scotch") will not accept for their favorite
anything less than the highest rank, alongside of Homer, Shakspere,
etc. Such, in candor, are not the true friends of the Ayrshire bard,
who really needs a different place quite by himself. The Iliad and the
Odyssey express courage, craft, full-grown heroism in situations of
danger, the sense of command and leadership, emulation, the last and
fullest evolution of self-poise as in kings, and god-like even while
animal appetites. The Shaksperean compositions, on vertebers and
frame-work of the primary passions, portray (essentially the same as
Homer's,) the spirit and letter of the feudal world, the Norman lord,
ambitious and arrogant, taller and nobler than common men--with much
underplay and gusts of heat and cold, volcanoes and stormy seas. Burns
(and some will say to his credit) attempts none of these themes. He
poetizes the humor, riotous blood, sulks, amorous torments, fondness
for the tavern and for cheap objective nature, with disgust at the
grim and narrow ecclesiasticism of his time and land, of a young
farmer on a bleak and hired farm in Scotland, through the years and
under the circumstances of the British politics of that time, and
of his short personal career as author, from 1783 to 1796.
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