The first-named were written because he could not help it, and are, for
the most part, rarely excellent. They are joyous, rapturous, sprightly,
dancing, and filled with references to sky, clouds, trees, fruit, grain,
birds and flowers. Birds and flowers, by the way, are peculiarly lovers'
properties. The song and the plumage of birds, and the color and perfume
of flowers are all distinctly sex manifestations. Robert Burns sang his
songs just as the bird wings and sings, and for the same reason. Sex holds
first place in the thought of Nature; and sex in the minds of men and
women holds a much larger place than most of us are willing to admit. All
religious emotion and all art are born of the sex instinct.

Burns' poems of the second variety, written after he had won her, are
touched with religious emotion, or filled with vain regret and deep
remorse, as the case may be, all owing to the quality and kind of success
achieved, and the influence of the Dog-Star.

Burns wrote several deeply religious poems. Now, men are very seldom
really religious and contrite, except after an excess. Following a
debauch a man signs the pledge, vows chastity, writes fervently of
asceticism and the need of living in the spirit and not in the senses.
Good pictures show best on a dark back-ground. Men talk most about things
they do not possess.

"The Cotter's Saturday Night," perhaps the most quoted of any of Burns'
poems, is plainly the result of a terrible tip to t' other side. Bobby had
gone so far in the direction of Venusburg that he resolved on getting
back, and living thereafter a staid and proper life.

In order to reform you must have an ideal, and the ideal of Burns, on the
occasion of having exhausted all capacity for sin, is embodied in the