was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that language; but you know the Scottish idiom -she was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys, our dearest blessing here below! How she caught the contagion, I cannot tell you medical people talk much of infection from breathing the same air, the touch, &c.; but I never expressly said I loved her. Indeed, I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from our labours; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an Eolian harp; and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious ratann, when I looked and fingered over her little hand, to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualities, she sang sweetly; and it was her favourite reel, to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin; but my girl sang a song, which was said to be composed by a small country laird's son, on one of his father's maids, with whom he was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he; for, excepting that he could smear sheep, and cast peats, his father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than myself. “Thus with me began love and poetry; which at times have been my only, and till within the last twelve months, have been my highest enjoyment." 1 [The autobiography from which these quotations are made was addressed to Dr. Moore at the end of July, 1787. Exactly one year before The earliest of the poet's productions is the little ballad "O, once I loved a bonie lass, Aye! and I love her still; And whilst that honour warms my breast, Burns himself characterizes it as a very puerile and silly performance; " yet it contains here and there lines of which he need hardly have been ashamed at any period of his life : "She dresses ay sae clean and neat, And then there's something in her gait "Silly and puerile as it is," said the poet, long afterwards, "Amaist as soon as I could spell, I to the crambo-jingle fell, Tho' rude and rough; Yet crooning to a body's sel' Does weel eneugh.' And in some nobler verses, entitled, "On my Early Days," we have the following passage: "I mind it weel in early date, When I was beardless, young and blate, that date, he published his poems in Kilmarnock to raise funds to enable him to go abroad. It is observable here that the poet does not confess to having experienced any love-enjoyment in the interval.] And first could thrash the barn, An' wi' the lave ilk merry morn The tither stookit raw, E'en then a wish, I mind its power, I turn'd the weeder-clips aside, And spared the symbol dear." He is hardly to be envied who can contemplate without emotion this exquisite picture of young nature and young genius. It was amidst such scenes that this extraordinary being felt those first indefinite stirrings of immortal ambition, which he has himself shadowed out under the magnificent image of the "blind gropings of Homer's Cyclops, around the walls of his cave." (Autob., 1787.) [These verses form a portion of the poetic epistle, addressed to Mrs Scott, "Gudewife o' Wauchope House," from Edinburgh, in March, 1787.] Tarbolton, where, for some little space, fortune appeared to smile on his industry and frugality. Robert and Gilbert were employed by their father as regular labourers-he allowing them £7 of wages each per annum; from which sum, however, the value of any home-made clothes received by the youths was exactly deducted. Robert Burns's person, inured to daily toil, and continually exposed to all varieties of weather, presented, before the usual time, every characteristic of robust and vigorous manhood. He says himself, that he never feared a competitor in any species of rural exertion; and Gilbert Burns, a man of uncommon bodily strength, adds, that neither he, nor any labourer he ever saw at work, was equal to the youthful poet, either in the corn-field, or the severer tasks of the thrashing-floor. Gilbert says, that Robert's literary zeal slackened considerably after their removal to Tarbolton. He was separated from his acquaintances of the town of Ayr, and probably missed not only the stimulus of their conversation, but the kindness that had furnished him with his supply, such as it was, of books. But the main source of his change of habits about this period was, it is confessed on all hands, the precocious fervour of one of his own turbulent passions. "In my seventeenth year," says Burns, "to give my manners a brush, I went to a country dancing-school. My father had an unaccountable antipathy against these meetings; and my going was, what to this moment I repent, in opposition to his wishes. My father was subject to strong passions; from that instance of disobedience in me, he took a sort of dislike to me, which I believe was one cause of the dissipation which marked my succeeding years. I say dissipation, comparatively with the strictness, and sobriety, and regularity of Presbyterian country life; for though the Will-o'-wisp meteors of thoughtless whim were almost the sole lights of my path, yet early ingrained piety and virtue kept me for several years afterwards within the line of innocence.2 The great misfortune of my life was to 1 [The bard's own dates in his autobiography are worthy of the reader's attention, because, while they are in all respects correct, they have been disregarded by his biographers and annotators, down to nearly the present day. Dr. Currie, under the direction of Gilbert Burns, set their authority aside, and even in one important instance had the temerity to alter, because it interfered with his own theories. The "seventeenth" year of Burns was the one he was least likely ever to forget. It was then he made his memorable excursion to Kirkoswald, where he first was taught "to look unconcernedly on a large tavern bill, and to mix without fear in a drunken squabble." It was also in that year (1775) that the incident narrated by himself, given in the text, took place, and the truth of which Gilbert's long comment in the next footnote was meant to impugn. It was of this year also that Robert used these words in his narrative of that period:-" My father, worn out by early hardship, was unfit for labour. There was a freedom in his lease in two years more, and to weather these we retrenched expenses. We lived very poorly."] "I wonder," says Gilbert, "how Robert could attribute to our father that lasting resentment of his going to a dancing-school against his will, of which he was incapable. I believe the truth was, that about this time he began to see the dangerous impetuosity of my brother's passions, as |