s his gratitude to his young benefactress without
assuming the tone of a fancied lover. Two songs in this strain he
addressed to Jessie Lewars. Of the second of these it is told, that
one morning the poet said to her that if she would play to him any
favourite tune, for which she desired to have new words, he would do
his best to meet her wish. She sat down at the piano, and played over
several times the air of an old song beginning thus:--

The robin cam to the wren's nest,
And keekit in, and keekit in.

As soon as Burns had taken in the melody, he set to, and in a few
minutes composed these beautiful words, the second of the songs which
he addressed to Jessie:--

Oh! wert thou in the cauld blast,
On yonder lea, on yonder lea,
My plaidie to the angry airt,
I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee.
Or did misfortune's bitter storms
Around thee blaw, around thee blaw,
Thy bield should be my bosom,
To share it a', to share it a.'

Or were I in the wildest waste, (p. 179)
Sae black and bare, sae black and bare,
The desert were a paradise,
If thou wert there, if thou wert there:
Or were I monarch o' the globe,
Wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign,
The brightest jewel in my crown
Wad be my queen, wad be my queen.

Mendelssohn is said to have so much admired this song, that he
composed for it what Chambers pronounces an air of exquisite pathos.

June came, but brought no improvement, rather rapid decline of health.
On the 4th of July (1796) he wrote to Johnson, "Many a merry meeting
this publication (the _Museum_) has given us, and possibly it may give
us more, though, alas, I fear it. This protracting, slow consuming
illness, will, I doubt much, my ever dear friend, arrest my sun before
he has reached his middle career, and will turn over the poet to far
more important concerns than studying the brilliancy of wit or the
pathos of sentiment." On the day on which he wrote these words, he
left Dumfries for a lonely place called Brow on the Solway shore, to
try the effects of sea-bathing. He went alone, for his wife was unable
to accompany him. While he was at Brow, his former friend, Mrs. Walter
Riddel, to whom, after their estrangement, he had been reconciled,
happened to