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She’ll steal out to meet her loved Donald again,

and–

The world’s false and vanishing scene;

as Allan Cunningham’s still more exquisite “Lass of Preston Mill” is by one subjective figure:

Six hills are woolly with my sheep,
Six vales are lowing with my kye.

Burns doubtless committed the same fault again and again; but in his time it was the fashion; and the older models (for models they are and will remain for ever) had not been studied and analysed as they have been since. Burns, indeed, actually spoiled one or two of his own songs by altering them from their first cast to suit the sentimental taste of his time. The first version, for instance, of the “Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon,” is far superior to the second and more popular one, because it dares to go without epithets. Compare the second stanza of each:

Thou’lt break my heart, thou bonnie bird,
That sings upon the bough;
Thou minds me o’ the happy days
When my fause love was true.

* * * *

Thou’lt break my heart, thou warbling bird,
That wantons through the flowery thorn;
Thou minds me o’ departed joys,
Departed never to return.

What is said in the latter stanza which has not been said in the former, and said more dramatically, more as the images would really present themselves to the speaker’s mind? It would be enough for him that the bird was bonnie, and singing; and his very sorrow would lead him to analyse and describe as little as possible a thing which so painfully contrasted with his own feelings; whether the thorn was flowery or not, would not have mattered to him, unless he had some distinct association with the thorn-flowers, in which case he would have brought out the image full and separate, and not merely thrown it in as a make-weight to “thorn”–and this is the great reason why epithets are, nine times out of ten, mistakes in song and ballad poetry; he never would have thought of “departed” before he thought of “joys.” A very little consideration of the actual processes of thought in such a case, will show the truth of our observation, and the instinctive wisdom of the older song-writers, in putting the epithet as often as possible after the noun, instead of before it, even at the expense of grammar. They are bad things at all times in song poetry, these epithets; and, accordingly, we find that the best German writers, like Uhland and Heine, get rid of them as much as possible, and succeed thereby, every word striking and ringing down with full force, no cushion of an epithet intruding between the reader’s brain-anvil and the poet’s hammer to break the blow. In Uhland’s “Three Burschen,” if we recollect right, there are but two epithets, and those of the simplest descriptive kind: “Thy fair daughter” and a “black pall.” Were there more, we question whether the poet would have succeeded, as he has done, in making our flesh creep as he leads us on from line to line and verse to verse. So Tennyson, the greatest of our living poets, eschews as much as possible, in his later writings, these same epithets, except in cases where they are themselves objective and pictorial–in short, the very things which he wants you to look at, as, for instance:

And into silver arrows break
The sailing moon in creek and cove.

This is fair enough; but, indeed, after laying down our rule, we must confess that it is very difficult to keep always true to it, in a language which does not, like the Latin and German, allow us to put our adjectives very much where we choose. Nevertheless, whether we can avoid it or not, every time we place before the noun an epithet which, like “departed joys,” relates to our consciousness concerning the object, and not merely to the object itself; or an epithet which, like “flowery thorn,” gives us, before we get to the object itself, those accidents of the object which we only discern by a second look, by analysis and reflection–(for the thorn, if in the flower, would look to us, at the first glance, not “flowery,” but “white,” “snowy,” or what you will which expresses colour, and not scientific fact)– every time, we repeat, this is done, the poet descends from the objective and dramatic domain of song, into the subjective and reflective one of elegy.