citement his
passionate nature craved. Herein was his stimulant after the routine of
farm-work--spiritless work that was little better than slavery,
incessant and achieving nothing. We can imagine him in those days
returning from the fields, 'forjesket, sair, with weary legs,' and
becoming buoyant as soon as he has opened the drawer of that small deal
table in the garret.

'Leeze me on rhyme! it's aye a treasure,
My chief, amaist, my only pleasure;
At hame, afield, at wark or leisure,
The Muse, poor hizzie,
Though rough and raploch be her measure,
She's seldom lazy.'

But, lazy or not, she becomes 'ramfeezled' with constant work, when he
vows if 'the thowless jad winna mak it clink,' to prose it,--a terrible
threat. For he must write, though it be but to keep despondency at arm's
length. Yet it had become more than a pleasure and a recreation to him;
and this he was beginning to understand. This, after all, was his real
work, not the drudgery of the fields; in it he must live his life, and
fulfil his mission. The more he wrote the more he accustomed himself
with the idea of being an author. He knew that the critic-folk, deep
read in books, might scoff at the very suggestion of a ploughman turning
poet, but he recognised also that they might be wrong. It was not by
dint of Greek that Parnassus was to be climbed. 'Ae spark o' Nature's
fire' was the one thing needful for poetry that was to touch the heart.

'The star that rules my luckless lot,
Has fated me the russet coat,
And damned my fortune to the groat;
But, in requit,
Has blest me with a random shot
O' countra wit.

This while my notion's ta'en a sklent,
To try my fate in guid, black prent;
But still the mair I'm that way bent,
Something cries, "Hoolie!
I red you, honest man, tak tent!
Ye'll shaw your folly.

"There's ither poets, much your betters,
Far seen in Greek, deep men o' letters,
Hae thought they had ensured their debtors,
A' future ages;
Now moths deform in shapeless tatters
Their unknown pages."'

The works of such scholars enjoyed of the moths! There is gentle satire
here. They themselves had grubbed on Greek, and now is Time avenged.

It is in his epistles that we see Burns most vividly and clearly, the
man in all his moods. They are just such letters as might be w