rcumstance rather than of the age, in an unnatural and
false position, compared by himself to the daisy he uprooted with his
ploughshare:

Even thou who mourn'st the daisy's fate,
That fate is thine--no distant date;
Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives elate,
Full on thy bloom,
Till crushed beneath the furrow's weight
Shall be thy doom!

His life was uneventful. He was the son of a very poor man who was
gardener to a gentleman at Ayr. He was born in Alloway on the 25th of
January, 1759. His early education was scanty; but he read with avidity
the few books on which he could lay his hands, among which he particularly
mentions, in his short autobiography, _The Spectator_, the poems of Pope,
and the writings of Sterne and Thomson. But the work which he was to do
needed not even that training: he drew his simple subjects from
surrounding nature, and his ideas came from his heart rather than his
head. Like Moore, he found the old tunes or airs of the country, and set
them to new words--words full of sentiment and sense.

HIS POEMS.--Most of his poems are quite short, and of the kind called
fugitive, except that they will not fly away. _The Cotter's Saturday
Night_ is for men of all creeds, a pastoral full of divine philosophy. His
_Address to the Deil_ is a tender thought even for the Prince of Darkness,
whom, says Carlyle, his kind nature could not hate with right orthodoxy.
His poems on _The Louse, The Field-Mouse's Nest_, and _The Mountain
Daisy_, are homely meditations and moral lessons, and contain counsels for
all hearts. In _The Twa Dogs_ he contrasts, in fable, the relative
happiness of rich and poor. In the beautiful song

Ye banks and braes of bonnie Doun,

he expresses that hearty sympathy with nature which is one of the most
attractive features of his character. His _Bruce's Address_ stirs the
blood, and makes one start up into an attitude of martial advance. But his
most famous poem--drama, comedy, epic, and pastoral--is _Tam o' Shanter_:
it is a universal favorite; and few travellers leave Scotland without
standing at the window of "Alloway's auld haunted kirk," walking over the
road upon which Meg galloped, pausing over "the keystane of the brigg"
where she lost her tail; and then returning, full of the spirit of the
poem, to sit in Tam's chair, and drink ale out of the same silver-bound
wooden bicker, in the very room of the inn where Tam a