h Burns was largely wrecked,--the thirst for stimulants and the
revolt against restraint which soon made headway and passed all bars. In
the earlier portions of his career a buoyant humour bore him up; and amid
thick-coming shapes of ill he bated no jot of heart or hope. He was cheered
by vague stirrings of ambition, which he pathetically compares to the
"blind groping of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave." Sent to
school at Kirkoswald, he became, for his scant leisure, a great
reader--eating at meal-times with a spoon in one hand and a book in the
other,--and carrying a few small volumes in his pocket to study in spare
moments in the fields. "The collection of songs" he tells us, "was my _vade
mecum_. I pored over them driving my cart or walking to labour, song by
song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true, tender, sublime or
fustian." He lingered over the ballads in his cold room by night; by day,
whilst whistling at the plough, he invented new forms and was inspired by
fresh ideas, "gathering round him the memories and the traditions of his
country till they became a mantle and a crown." It was among the furrows of
his father's fields that he was inspired with the perpetually quoted wish--

"That I for poor auld Scotland's sake
Some useful plan or book could make,
Or sing a sang at least."

An equally striking illustration of the same feeling is to be found in his
summer Sunday's ramble to the Leglen wood,--the fabled haunt of
Wallace,--which the poet confesses to have visited "with as much devout
enthusiasm as ever pilgrim did the shrine of Loretto." In another reference
to the same period he refers to the intense susceptibility to the homeliest
aspects of Nature which throughout characterized his genius. "Scarcely any
object gave me more--I do not know if I should call it pleasure--but
something which exalts and enraptures me--than to walk in the sheltered
side of a wood or high plantation in a cloudy winter day and hear the
stormy wind howling among the trees and raving over the plain. I listened
to the birds, and frequently turned out of my path lest I should disturb
their little songs or frighten them to another station." Auroral visions
were gilding his horizon as he walked in glory, if not in joy, "behind his
plough upon the mountain sides."; but the swarm of his many-coloured
fancies was again made grey by the _atra cura_ of unsuccessful toils.

Burns had written his first verses of not