my fifteenth autumn my partner was a bewitching
creature who just counted an autumn less. In short, she, unwittingly to
herself, initiated me into a certain delicious passion, which ... I hold
to be the first of human joys.... I did not well know myself why I liked
so much to loiter behind her when returning in the evening from our
labours; why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an
AEolian harp; and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious rantann
when I looked and fingered over her hand to pick out the nettle-stings
and thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualifications she sang
sweetly; and 'twas her favourite Scotch reel that I attempted to give an
embodied vehicle to in rhyme. I was not so presumptive as to imagine 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.'

He had already measured himself with this moorland poet, and admits no
inferiority; and what a laird's son has done he too may do. Writing of
this song afterwards, Burns, who was always a keen critic, admits that
it is 'very puerile and silly.' Still, we think there is something of
beauty, and much of promise, in this early effusion. It has at least one
of the merits, and, in a sense, the peculiar characteristic of all
Burns's songs. It is sincere and natural; and that is the beginning of
all good writing.

'Thus with me,' he says, 'began love and poetry, which at times have
been my only and ... my highest enjoyment.' This was the first-fruit of
his poetic genius, and we doubt not that in the composition, and after
the composition, life at Mount Oliphant was neither so cheerless nor so
hard as it had been. A new life was opened up to him with a thousand
nameless hopes and aspirations, though probably as yet he kept all these
things to himself, and pondered them in his heart.

CHAPTER II

LOCHLEA AND MOSSGIEL

The farm at Mount Oliphant proved a ruinous failure, and after
weathering their last two years on it under the tyranny of the scoundrel
factor, it was with feelings of relief, we may be sure, that the family
removed to Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton. This was a farm of 130
acres of land rising from the right bank of the river Ayr. The farm
appeared to them more promising than t