For he found himself
in deepest obscurity, without help, without instructions, without
model; or with models only of the meanest sort. An educated man
stands, as it were, in the midst of a boundless arsenal and magazine,
filled with all the weapons and engines which man's skill has been
able to devise from the earliest time; and he works, accordingly, with
a strength borrowed from all past ages. How different is _his_ state
who stands on the outside of that storehouse, and feels that its gates
must be stormed, or remain forever shut against him! His means are
the commonest and rudest; the mere work done is no measure of his
strength. A dwarf behind his steam-engine may remove mountains; but no
dwarf will hew them down with a pickaxe; and he must be a Titan that
hurls them abroad with his arms.
"It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself.... Impelled
by the expansive movement of his own irrepressible soul, he struggles
forward into the general view; and with haughty modesty lays down
before us, as the fruit of his labor, a gift, which Time has now
pronounced imperishable."
But why should one read poetry, at all, where there is so much good
prose to be read? Herbert Spencer in his essay on "Style" gives some
reasons for the superiority of poetry to prose. He says:
"Poetry, we shall find, habitually adopts those symbols of thought
and those methods of using them which instinct and analysis agree in
choosing, as most effective, and becomes poetry by virtue of doing
this.
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