and his sufferings had refined him to a
feminine delicacy. But there is no sickliness in his poetry, and he
retained a charming playful humor--displayed in his excellent comic
ballad, _John Gilpin_; and Mrs. Browning has sung of him,

"How when one by one sweet sounds and wandering lights departed
He bore no less a loving face, because so broken-hearted."

At the close of the year 1786 a young Scotchman, named Samuel Rose,
called upon Cowper at Olney, and left with him a small volume, which
had appeared at Edinburgh during the past summer, entitled _Poems
chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, by Robert Burns_. Cowper read the
book through {216} twice, and, though somewhat bothered by the dialect,
pronounced it a "very extraordinary production." This momentary flash,
as of an electric spark, marks the contact not only of the two chief
British poets of their generation, but of two literatures. Scotch
poets, like Thomson and Beattie, had written in Southern English, and,
as Carlyle said, _in vacuo_, that is, with nothing specially national
in their work. Burns's sweet though rugged Doric first secured the
vernacular poetry of his country a hearing beyond the border. He had,
to be sure, a whole literature of popular songs and ballads behind him,
and his immediate models were Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferguson; but
these remained provincial, while Burns became universal.

He was born in Ayrshire, on the banks of "bonny Doon," in a clay biggin
not far from "Alloway's auld haunted kirk," the scene of the witch
dance in _Tam O'Shanter_. His father was a hard-headed, God-fearing
tenant farmer, whose life and that of his sons was a harsh struggle
with poverty. The crops failed; the landlord pressed for his rent; for
weeks at a time the family tasted no meat; yet this life of toil was
lightened by love and homely pleasures. In the _Cotter's Saturday
Night_, Burns has drawn a beautiful picture of his parents' household,
the rest that came at the week's end, and the family worship about the
"wee bit ingle, blinkin' bonnily." Robert was handsome, wild, and
witty. He was universally susceptible, and his first songs, like his
last, were of "the lasses." His head had been {217} stuffed, in
boyhood, with "tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies,
brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles,
dead-lights," etc., told him by one Jenny Wilson, an old woman who
lived in the family. His ear was full of