.."
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
"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.
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