elf why I liked
so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from
our labours; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill
like an AEolian harp; and especially why my pulse beat such a furious
ratan when I looked and fingered over her little hand, to pick out the
cruel nettle-stings and thistles. Among her love-inspiring qualities,
she sung sweetly; and it was her favourite reel to which I attempted
giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to
imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men
who read Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be
composed by a country laird's son, on one of his father's maids with
whom he was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well
as he; for, excepting that he could shear sheep, and cast peats, his
father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than
myself. Thus with me began love and poetry."

The song he then composed is entitled "Handsome Nell," and is the (p. 009)
first he ever wrote. He himself speaks of it as very puerile and
silly--a verdict which Chambers endorses, but in which I cannot agree.
Simple and artless it no doubt is, but with a touch of that grace
which bespeaks the true poet. Here is one verse which, for directness
of feeling and felicity of language, he hardly ever surpassed:--

She dresses aye sae clean and neat,
Baith decent and genteel,
And then there's something in her gait
Gars ony dress look weel.

"I composed it," says Burns, "in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to
this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, my blood sallies at
the remembrance."

LOCHLEA.--Escaped from the fangs of the factor, with some remnant of
means, William Burness removed from Mount Oliphant to Lochlea in the
parish of Tarbolton (1777), an upland undulating farm, on the north
bank of the River Ayr, with a wide outlook, southward over the hills
of Carrick, westward toward the Isle of Arran, Ailsa Craig, and down
the Firth of Clyde, toward the Western Sea. This was the home of Burns
and his family from his eighteenth till his twenty-fifth year. For a
time the family life here was more comfortable than before, probably
because several of the children were now able to assist their parents
in farm labour. "These seven years," says Gilbert Burns, "brought
small literary improvement to Robert