Burns from one pole of feeling to its very opposite. Such a poem
as this last could not possibly have proceeded from any but the (p. 113)
deepest and most genuine feeling. Once again, at the same season, three
years later (1792), his thoughts went back to Highland Mary, and he
poured forth his last sad wail for her in the simpler, not less
touching song, beginning--

Ye banks, and braes, and streams around
The castle o' Montgomery!
Green be your woods, and fair your flowers,
Your waters never drumlie;
There simmer first unfauld her robes,
And there the langest tarry;
For there I took the last Fareweel
O' my sweet Highland Mary.

It would seem as though these retrospects were always accompanied by
special despondency. For, at the very time he composed this latter
song, he wrote thus to his faithful friend, Mrs. Dunlop:--

"Alas! who would wish for many years? What is it but to drag existence
until our joys gradually expire, and leave us in a night of misery,
like the gloom which blots out the stars, one by one from the face of
heaven, and leaves us without a ray of comfort in the howling waste?"

To fits of hypochondria and deep dejection he had, as he himself tells
us, been subject from his earliest manhood, and he attributes to
overtoil in boyhood this tendency which was probably a part of his
natural temperament. To a disposition like his, raptures, exaltations,
agonies came as naturally as a uniform neutral-tinted existence to
more phlegmatic spirits. But we may be sure that every cause of
self-reproach which his past life had stored up in his memory tended
to keep him more and more familiar with the lower pole in that
fluctuating scale.

Besides these several poems which mark the variety of moods which (p. 114)
swept over him during the summer and autumn of 1789, there was also a
continual succession of songs on the anvil in preparation for
Johnson's _Museum_. This work of song-making, begun during his second
winter in Edinburgh, was carried on with little intermission during
all the Ellisland period. The songs were on all kinds of subjects, and
of all degrees of excellence, but hardly one, even the most trivial,
was without some small touch which could have come from no hand but
that of Burns. Sometimes they were old songs with a stanza or two
added. Oftener an old chorus or single line was taken up, a