of first-rate power, groping,
and that surely, its way to distinction, in spite of humility of
birth, obscurity of condition, and the coldness of the wealthy or the
titled. The epistles of other poets owe some of their fame to the rank
or the reputation of those to whom they are addressed; those of Burns
are written, one and all, to nameless and undistinguished men. Sillar
was a country schoolmaster, Lapraik a moorland laird, Smith a small
shop-keeper, and Rankine a farmer, who loved a gill and a joke. Yet
these men were the chief friends, the only literary associates of the
poet, during those early years, in which, with some exceptions, his
finest works were written.

Burns, while he was writing the poems, the chief of which we have
named, was a labouring husbandman on the little farm of Mossgiel, a
pursuit which affords but few leisure hours for either reading or
pondering; but to him the stubble-field was musing-ground, and the
walk behind the plough, a twilight saunter on Parnassus. As, with a
careful hand and a steady eye, he guided his horses, and saw an evenly
furrow turned up by the share, his thoughts were on other themes; he
was straying in haunted glens, when spirits have power--looking in
fancy on the lasses "skelping barefoot," in silks and in scarlets, to
a field-preaching--walking in imagination with the rosy widow, who on
Halloween ventured to dip her left sleeve in the burn, where three
lairds' lands met--making the "bottle clunk," with joyous smugglers,
on a lucky run of gin or brandy--or if his thoughts at all approached
his acts--he was moralizing on the daisy oppressed by the furrow which
his own ploughshare had turned. That his thoughts were thus wandering
we have his own testimony, with that of his brother Gilbert; and were
both wanting, the certainty that he composed the greater part of his
immortal poems in two years, from the summer of 1784 to the summer of
1786, would be evidence sufficient. The muse must have been strong
within him, when, in spite of the rains and sleets of the
"ever-dropping west"--when in defiance of the hot and sweaty brows
occasioned by reaping and thrashing--declining markets, and showery
harvests--the clamour of his laird for his rent, and the tradesman for
his account, he persevered in song, and sought solace in verse, when
all other solace was denied him.

The circumstances under which his principal poems were composed, have
been related: the "Lament of Mailie" foun