It's up yon heathery mountain
And down yon scraggy glen,
We daurna gang a-milking
For Charlie and his men!
Such in nature and origin are the songs of Burns. Of some three
hundred written or rewritten by him, a large number are negligible in
estimating his poetical capacity. One cause lay in his unfortunate
ambition to write in the style of his eighteenth-century predecessors
in English, with the accompanying mythological allusions,
personifications, and scraps of artificial diction. Another was his
pathetic eagerness to supply Thomson with material in his undertaking
to preserve the old melodies--an eagerness which often led him to send
in verses of which he himself felt that their only defense was that
they were better than none. Thus his collected works are burdened with
a considerable mass of very indifferent stuff. But when this has all
been removed, we have left a body of song such as probably no writer
in any language has bequeathed to his country. It is marked, first of
all, by its peculiar harmony of expression with the utterance of the
common people. Direct and simple, its diction was still capable of
carrying intense feeling, a humor incomparable in its archness and sly
mirth, and a power of idealizing ordinary experience without effort or
affectation. The union of these words with the traditional melodies,
on which we have so strongly insisted, gave them a superb singing
quality, which has had as much to do with their popularity as their
thought or their feeling.
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