orld; they could not foresee
that from all this moral strength and poetic beauty would arise.

While meditating something better than a ballad to his mistress's
eyebrow, he did not neglect to lay out the little skill he had in
cultivating the grounds of Mossgiel. The prosperity in which he found
himself in the first and second seasons, induced him to hope that good
fortune had not yet forsaken him: a genial summer and a good market
seldom come together to the farmer, but at first they came to Burns;
and to show that he was worthy of them, he bought books on
agriculture, calculated rotation of crops, attended sales, held the
plough with diligence, used the scythe, the reap-hook, and the flail,
with skill, and the malicious even began to say that there was
something more in him than wild sallies of wit and foolish rhymes. But
the farm lay high, the bottom was wet, and in a third season,
indifferent seed and a wet harvest robbed him at once of half his
crop: he seems to have regarded this as an intimation from above, that
nothing which he undertook would prosper: and consoled himself with
joyous friends and with the society of the muse. The judgment cannot
be praised which selected a farm with a wet cold bottom, and sowed it
with unsound seed; but that man who despairs because a wet season robs
him of the fruits of the field, is unfit for the warfare of life,
where fortitude is as much required as by a general on a field of
battle, when the tide of success threatens to flow against him. The
poet seems to have believed, very early in life, that he was none of
the elect of Mammon; that he was too much of a genius ever to acquire
wealth by steady labour, or by, as he loved to call it, gin-horse
prudence, or grubbing industry.

And yet there were hours and days in which Burns, even when the rain
fell on his unhoused sheaves, did not wholly despair of himself: he
laboured, nay sometimes he slaved on his farm; and at intervals of
toil, sought to embellish his mind with such knowledge as might be
useful, should chance, the goddess who ruled his lot, drop him upon
some of the higher places of the land. He had, while he lived at
Tarbolton, united with some half-dozen young men, all sons of farmers
in that neighbourhood, in forming a club, of which the object was to
charm away a few evening hours in the week with agreeable chit-chat,
and the discussion of topics of economy or love. Of this little
society the poet was president, an