, very likely, had
wooden teeth; he could venture nothing for the clearing of gorse and
broom; he could enter upon no system of drainage, even of the simple
kind recommended by Lord Kames; he had hardly funds to buy the best
quality of seed, and none at all for "liming," or for "wrack" from the
shore. Even the gift of a pretty heifer he repays with a song.

Besides all this, he was exciseman; and he loved galloping over the
hills in search of recreants, and cozy sittings in the tap of the "Jolly
Beggars" of Mauchline, better than he loved a sight of the stunted
barley of Ellisland.

No wonder that he left his farm; no wonder that he went to
Dumfries,--shabby as the street might be where he was to live; no
wonder, that, with his mad pride and his impulsive generosity, he died
there, leaving wife and children almost beggars. But, in all charity,
let us remember that it is not alone the poor exciseman who is dead, but
the rare poet, who has intoned a prayer for ten thousand lips,--

"That He, who stills the raven's clamorous nest,
And decks the lily fair in flowery pride,
Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best,
For them and for their little ones provide,
But chiefly in their hearts with grace divine preside."

Let no one fancy that Burns was a poor farmer because he was a poet: he
was a poor farmer simply because he gave only his hand to the business,
and none of his brain. He had enough of good sense and of
clear-sightedness to sweep away every agricultural obstacle in his path,
and to make Ellisland "pay well"; but good-fellowship, and the "Jolly
Beggars," and his excise-galloping among the hills by Nithsdale made an
end of the farmer,--and, in due time, made an end of the man.

Robert Bloomfield was another poet-farmer of these times, but of a much
humbler calibre. I could never give any very large portion of a wet day
to his reading. There is truthfulness of description in him, and a
certain grace of rhythm, but nothing to kindle any glow. The story of
Giles, and of the milking, and of the spotted heifers, may be true
enough; but every day, in my barn-yard, I find as true and as lively a
story. The fact is, that the details of farm-life--the muddy boots, the
sweaty workers, the amber-colored pools, the wallowing pigs--are not of
a kind to warrant or to call out any burning imprint of verse. Theme for
this lies in the breezes, the birds, the waving-wooded mountains
([Greek: Neriton eino