and love, he found leisure
occasionally to clothe the various moods of his mind in verse. It was as
early as seventeen that he wrote the stanzas which open beautifully, "I
dream'd I lay where flowers were springing," and also the ballad, "My
father was a farmer upon the Carrick border," which, years afterwards,
he used to con over with delight, because of the faithfulness with which
it recalled to him the circumstances and feelings of his opening
manhood. These are the only two of his very early productions in which
there is nothing expressly about love. The rest were composed to
celebrate the charms of those rustic beauties who followed each other in
the domain of his fancy, or shared the capacious throne between them.
The excursions of the rural lover form the theme of almost all the songs
which Burns is known to have produced about this period; and such of
these juvenile performances as have been preserved are beautiful. They
show how powerfully his boyish fancy had been affected by the old rural
minstrelsy of his own country, and how easily his native taste caught
the secret of its charm.

In 1781, despairing of farming, he went to Irvine to learn flax-dressing
with a relative. He was diligent at first, but misfortune soon overtook
him. The shop where he was engaged caught fire, and he "was left, like a
true poet, not worth a sixpence." Gilbert Burns dates a serious change
in his character and conduct from this six months' residence in the
seaport town. "He contracted," he says, "some acquaintance of a freer
manner of thinking than he had been accustomed to, whose society
prepared him for overleaping the bounds of rigid virtue which had
hitherto restrained him."

He had certainly not come unscathed out of the society of those persons
of "liberal opinions" with whom he consorted in Irvine; and he expressly
attributes to their lessons the scrape into which he fell soon after "he
put his hand to plough again." He was compelled, according to the then
all but universal custom of rural parishes in Scotland, to do penance in
church, before the congregation, in consequence of the birth of an
illegitimate child. But not the amours, or the tavern, or drudging
manual labour could keep him long from his true calling. "Rhyme," he
says, "I had given up [on going to Irvine], but meeting with Fergusson's
'Scottish Poems,' I strung anew my wildly sounding lyre with emulating
vigour." It was probably this accidental meeting with Fer