ers. In
despair over his poverty and personal habits, he resolved to emigrate to
Jamaica, and gathered together a few of his early poems, hoping to sell
them for enough to pay the expenses of his journey. The result was the
famous Kilmarnock edition of Burns, published in 1786, for which he was
offered twenty pounds. It is said that he even bought his ticket, and on
the night before the ship sailed wrote his "Farewell to Scotland,"
beginning, "The gloomy night is gathering fast," which he intended to be
his last song on Scottish soil.

In the morning he changed his mind, led partly by some dim foreshadowing of
the result of his literary adventure; for the little book took all Scotland
by storm. Not only scholars and literary men, but "even plowboys and maid
servants," says a contemporary, eagerly spent their hard-earned shillings
for the new book. Instead of going to Jamaica, the young poet hurried to
Edinburgh to arrange for another edition of his work. His journey was a
constant ovation, and in the capital he was welcomed and feasted by the
best of Scottish society. This inexpected triumph lasted only one winter.
Burns's fondness for taverns and riotous living shocked his cultured
entertainers, and when he returned to Edinburgh next winter, after a
pleasure jaunt through the Highlands, he received scant attention. He left
the city in anger and disappointment, and went back to the soil where he
was more at home.

The last few years of Burns's life are a sad tragedy, and we pass over them
hurriedly. He bought the farm Ellisland, Dumfriesshire, and married the
faithful Jean Armour, in 1788, That he could write of her,

I see her in the dewy flowers,
I see her sweet and fair;
I hear her in the tunefu' birds,
I hear her charm the air:
There's not a bonie flower that springs
By fountain, shaw, or green;
There's not a bonie bird that sings,
But minds me o' my Jean,

is enough for us to remember. The next year he was appointed exciseman,
i.e. collector of liquor revenues, and the small salary, with the return
from his poems, would have been sufficient to keep his family in modest
comfort, had he but kept away from taverns. For a few years his life of
alternate toil and dissipation was occasionally illumined by his splendid
lyric genius, and he produced many songs--"Bonnie Doon," "My Love's like a
Red, Red Rose," "Auld Lang Syne," "Highland Mary," and the soul-stirring
"Scots wha hae," co