the struggle which ended in their removal was rapidly approaching its crisis, has been already described; nor need we dwell again on the untimely burden of sorrow, as well as toil, which fell to the share of the youthful poet, and which would have? broken altogether any mind wherein feelings like his had existed, without strength like his to control them. The removal of the family to Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton, took place when Burns was in his sixteenth year. He had some time before this made his first attempt in verse, and the occasion is thus described by himself in his letter to Moore. "This kind of life-the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave, brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before which period I first committed the sin of Rhyme. You know our country custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labours of harvest. In my fifteenth autumn my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that language; but you know the Scottish idiom-she was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys, our dearest blessing here below! How she caught the contagion, I cannot tell you medical people talk much of infection from breathing the same air, the touch, &c.; but I never expressly said I loved her. Indeed, I did not know myself 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 heart-strings thrill like an Æolian harp; and particularly 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 other 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 had Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song, which was said to be composed by a small 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 smear 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; which at times have been my only, and till within the last twelve months, have been my highest enjoyment." The earliest of the poet's productions is the little ballad, "O once I loved a bonnie lass, Ay, and I love her still, And whilst that honour warms my breast, I'll love my handsome Nell," &c. Burns himself characterises it as "a very puerile and silly performance;" yet it contains here and there lines of which he need hardly have been ashamed at any period of his life :— "She dresses aye sae clean and neat, And then there's something in her gait "Silly and puerile as it is," said the poet, long afterwards, "I am always pleased with this song, as it recalls to my mind those happy days when my heart was yet honest, and my tongue sincere... I composed it in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, my blood sallies, at the remembrance." (MS. Memorandum book, August 1783.) In his first epistle to Lapraik (1785) he says— I to the crambo-jingle fell, Yet crooning to a body's sell And in some nobler verses, entitled "On my Early Days," we have the following passage :— "I mind it weel in early date, When first amang the yellow corn An' wi' the lave ilk merry morn The tither stookit raw, Wearing the day awa E'en then a wish, I mind its power, Shall strongly heave my breast: The rough bur-thistle spreading wide I turn'd the weeder-clips aside, He is hardly to be envied who cancontemplate without emotion, this exquisite picture of young nature and young genius. It was amidst such scenes that this extraordinary being felt those first indefinite stirrings of immortal ambition, which he has himself shadowed out under the magnificent image of "the blind gropings of Homer's Cyclops, around the walls of his cave." * "Letter to Dr Moore. CHAPTER II. "O enviable early days, When dancing thoughtless pleasure's maze, Of others--or my own!" As has been already mentioned, William Burnes now quitted Mount Oliphant for Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton, where, for some little space, fortune appeared to smile on his industry and frugality. Robert and Gilbert were employed by their father as regular labourers-he allowing them 77. of wages each per annum; from which sum, however, the value of any home-made clothes received by the youths was exactly deducted. Robert Burns's person, inured to daily toil, and continually exposed to every variety of weather, presented, before the usual time, every characteristic of robust and vigorous manhood. He says himself, that he never feared a competitor in any species of rural exertion; and Gilbert Burns, a man of uncommon bodily strength, adds, that neither he, nor any labourer he ever saw at work, was equal to the youthful poet, either in the corn field, or the severer tasks of the thrashing-floor. Gilbert says, that Robert's literary zeal slackened considerably after their removal to Tarbolton. He was separated from his acquaintances of the town of Ayr, and probably missed not only |