Excerpt from The Cotter's Saturday Night, and Other Poems The poetry of Burns is altogether the most genuine thing that we find in English literature. Unstudied, artless, often rude, it voices the joys and sorrows, the loves, the aspirations of the human heart, and interprets the beauty of the commonplace, - that beauty which lies all about us, if we had but eyes to see. Burns performed the miracle of the old fairy tale, spinning out of the straw upon the cottage floor a thread of finest gold. It is this clear vision of the beautiful in everyday life, this wide humanity, this deep sincerity, that has made him the most loved and - excepting Shakespeare - the most widely read of all the British poets. There was nothing in the circumstances of his life to make a poet; indeed there was everything to discourage the making of one. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.