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.

"Thus, poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially
impressive, partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech
and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances
of excitement. While the matter embodied is idealized emotion, the
vehicle is the idealized language of emotion. As the musical composer
catches the cadences in which our feelings of joy and sympathy, grief
and despair, vent themselves, and out of these germs evolves melodies
suggesting higher phases of these feelings; so the poet develops from
the typical expressions in which men utter passion and sentiments