His tenderness toward flowers
and the brute creation may be read in his lines _To a Mountain Daisy_,
_To a Mouse_, and _The Auld Farmer's New Year's Morning Salutation to
his Auld Mare Maggie_. Next after love and good fellowship, patriotism
is the most frequent motive of his song. Of his national anthem, _Scots
wha hae wi' Wallace bled_, Carlyle said: "So long as there is warm blood
in the heart of Scotchman, or man, it will move in fierce thrills under
this war ode."
Burns's politics were a singular mixture of sentimental Toryism with
practical democracy. A romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes of
the exiled Stuarts, and to have been "out" in '45 with the Young
Pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland. To this purely
poetic loyalty may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns as _Over
the Water to Charlie_. But his sober convictions were on the side of
liberty and human brotherhood, and are expressed in _The Twa Dogs_, the
_First Epistle to Davie_, and _A Man's a Man for a' that_. His sympathy
with the Revolution led him to send four pieces of ordnance, taken from
a captured smuggler, as a present to the French Convention, a piece of
bravado which got him into difficulties with his superiors in the
excise.
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