"Saturday Night." It is all a beautiful dream. The real Scottish cotter is
quite another kind of person. The religion of the live cotter is well
seasoned with fear, malevolence and absurd dogmatism. The amount of love,
patience, excellence and priggishness shown in "The Cotter's Saturday
Night" never existed, except in a poet's imagination. In stanza Number Ten
of that particular poem is a bit of unconscious autobiography that might
as well ha' been omitted; but in letting it stand, Burns was loyal to the
thought that surged through his brain.

People who are not scientific in their speech often speak of the birds as
being happy. My opinion is that birds are not any more happy than
men--probably not as much so. Many birds, like the English sparrow and the
blue jay, quarrel all day long. Come to think of it, I believe that man
is happier than the birds. He has a sense of remorse, and this suggests
reformation, and from the idea of reformation comes the picturing of an
ideal. This exercise of the imagination is pleasure, for indeed there is a
certain satisfaction in every form of exercise of the faculties. There is
a certain pleasure in pain: for pain is never all pain. And sin surely is
not wholly bad, if through it we pass into a higher life--the life of the
spirit.

Anything is better than the Dead Sea of neutral nothingness, wherein a man
merely avoids sin by doing nothing and being nothing. The stirring of the
imagination by sorrow for sin, sometimes causes the soul to wing a
far-reaching upward flight.

Asceticism is often only a form of sensuality: the man finds satisfaction
in overcoming the flesh. And wherever you find asceticism you find
potential passion--a smoldering volcano held in check by a devotion to
duty; and a gratification is oft found in fidelity.