Long have I loved what I behold,
The night that calms, the day that cheers:
The common growth of mother earth
Suffices me--her tears, her mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears.

The poet of the _Waggoner_--who, himself a habitual water-drinker,
has so glowingly described the glorification which the prospect of
nature receives in a half-intoxicated brain--may justly claim that
he can enter into all genuine pleasures, even of an order which he
declines for himself. With anything that is false or artificial he
cannot sympathize, nor with such faults as baseness, cruelty, rancour;
which seem contrary to human nature itself; but in dealing with
faults of mere _weakness_ he is far less strait-laced than many less
virtuous men.

He had, in fact, a reverence for human beings as such which enabled
him to face even their frailties without alienation; and there was
something in his own happy exemption from such falls which touched
him into regarding men less fortunate rather with pity than disdain.

Because the unstained, the clear, the crystalline,
Have ever in them something of benign.

His comment on Barns's _Tam o' Shanter_ will perhaps surprise some
readers who are accustomed to think of him only in his didactic
attitude.

"It is the privilege of poetic genius, he says, to catch, under
certain restrictions of which perhaps at the time of its being