With their own vision oft astonished droop
When o'er the wintry strath or quaggy moss
They see the gliding ghosts unbodied troop."

Burns, in the foreword to _Halloween_ (1785), writes in the
"enlightened" spirit of the eighteenth century, but in the poem
itself throws himself whole-heartedly into the hopes and fears
that agitate the lovers. He owed much to an old woman who lived
in his home in infancy:

"She had ... the largest collection in the country
of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies,
brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles,
dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted
towers, dragons and other trumpery. This
cultivated the latent seeds of poetry, but had so strong
an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my
nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in
suspicious places; it often takes an effort of philosophy
to shake off these idle terrors."[7]

_Tam o' Shanter_, written for Captain Grose, was perhaps based on
a Scottish legend, learnt at the inglenook in childhood, from
this old wife, or perhaps

"By some auld houlet-haunted biggin
Or kirk deserted by its riggin,"

from Captain Grose himself, who made to quake:

"Ilk ghaist that haunts auld ha' or chamer,
Ye gipsy-gang that deal in glamor,
And you, deep-read in hell's black grammar,
Warlocks and witches."

In it Burns reveals with lively reality the terrors that assail
the reveller on his homeward way through the storm:

"Past the birks and meikle stane
Where drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane;
And through the whins, and by the cairn
Where hunters fand the murdered bairn
And near the thorn, aboon the well
Where Mungo's mither hanged hersell."

For sheer terror the wild, fantastic witch-dance, seen through a
Gothic window in the ruins of Kirk-Alloway, with the light of
humour strangely glinting through, has hardly been surpassed. The
Ballad-collections, beginning with Percy's _Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry_ (1705), brought poets back to the original
sources of terror in popular tradition, and helped to revive the
latent feelings of awe, wonder and fear. In Coleridge's _Ancient
Manner_ the skeleton-ship with its ghastly crew--the
spectre-woman and her deathmate--the sensations of the mariner,
alone on a wide, wide sea, seize on our imagination with
irresistible power. The very substance of the poem is woven of