imaginative sympathy, thoroughly contagious in their lusty emotion or
sly humor. The latter, in English, are stiff, coldly contrived,
consciously elegant or marked by the sentimental factitiousness of the
affair that occasioned them. But their inferiority is due less to the
difference in language than to the difference in the mood. When,
especially at a distance, his relation to Clarinda really touched his
imagination, we have the genuinely poetical _My Nannie's Awa_ and _Ae
Fond Kiss_. The latter poem can be, with few changes, turned into
English without loss of quality; and its most famous lines have almost
no dialect:

Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met--or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

Finally, there are the English poems to Highland Mary. For some
reason not yet fully understood, the affair with Mary Campbell was
treated by him in a spirit of reverence little felt in his other love
poetry, and this spirit was naturally expressed by him in English. But
in the almost English

"Ye banks and braes and streams around
The Castle of Montgomery,"

and in the pure English _To Mary in Heaven_, he is not at all hampered
by the use of the Southern speech, Scots would not have heightened the
poetry here, and for Burns Scots would have been less appropriate,
less natural even, for the expression of an almost sacred theme.