vision; but it does not kindle
the heat of large and ambitious endeavor. Hence we often find that a man
who has passed the first half of his life in comparative isolation,
cultivating his resources quietly, unmoved by the disturbances and the
broils of civic life, will, on transfer to public scenes, and stirred by
that emulation which comes of contact with the world, feel all his
faculties lighted with a new glow, and accomplish results which are as
much a wonder to himself as to others. The pent river is at length set
loose,--the barriers broken by the wear of mingled waters, and the force
and the roar of it are amazing.

I have alluded to the poet-farmer Burns,--a capital ploughman, a poor
manager, an intemperate lover, a sad reveller, a stilted letter-writer,
a rare good-fellow, and a poet whose poems will live forever. It is no
wonder he did not succeed as farmer; Moss-giel had an ugly, wet subsoil,
and draining-tiles were as yet not in vogue; but from all the accounts I
can gather, there was never a truer furrow laid than was laid by Robert
Burns in his days of vigor, upon that same damp upland of Moss-giel; his
"fearings" were all true, and his headlands as clear of draggled sod as
if he had used the best "Ruggles, Nourse, and Mason" of our time. Alas
for the daisies! he must have turned over perches of them in his day;
and yet only one has caught the glory of his lamentation!

Ellisland, where he went later, and where he hoped to redeem his
farm-promise, was not over-fertile; it had been hardly used by scurvy
tenants before him, and was so stony that a rain-storm made a
fresh-rolled field of sown barley look like a paved street. He tells us
this; and we farmers know what it means. But it lay in Nithsdale; and
the beauty of Nithsdale shed a regal splendor on his home. It was the
poet that had chosen the farm, and not the grain-grower.

Then there were the "callants" coming from Edinburgh, from Dumfries,
from London, from all the world, to have their "crack" with the
peasant-poet, who had sung the "Lass of Ballochmyle." Can this man,
whose tears drip (in verse) for a homeless field-mouse, keep by the
plough, when a half-score of good-fellows are up from Dumfries to see
him, and when John Barleycorn stands frothing in the cupboard?

Consider, again, that his means, notwithstanding the showy and
short-lived generosity of his Edinburgh friends, enabled him only to
avail himself of the old Scotch plough; his harrow