life remains:
No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains
To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield.

Seek, mangled wretch, some place of wonted rest,
No more of rest, but now thy dying bed!
The sheltering rushes whistling o'er thy head,
The cold earth with thy bloody bosom prest.

Perhaps a mother's anguish adds its woe;
The playful pair crowd fondly by thy side;
Ah! helpless nurslings, who will now provide
That life a mother only can bestow!

Oft as by winding Nith, I, musing, wait
The sober eve, or hail the cheerful dawn,
I'll miss thee sporting o'er the dewy lawn,
And curse the ruffian's aim, and mourn thy hapless fate.

This, which is one of the best of the very few good poems which Burns
composed in classical English, is no mere sentimental effusion, but
expresses what in him was a real part of his nature--his tender feeling
towards his lower fellow-creatures. The same feeling finds (p. 108)
expression in the lines on _The Mouse_, _The Auld Farmer's Address to
his Mare_, and _The Winter Night_, when, as he sits by his fireside,
and hears the storm roaring without, he says,--

I thought me on the ourie cattle,
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle
O' wintry war.
Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle,
Beneath a scaur.
Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing,
That in the merry months o' spring,
Delighted me to hear thee sing,
What comes o' thee?
Whare wilt then cow'r thy chittering wing,
And close thy e'e?

Though for a time, influenced by the advice of critics, Burns had
tried to compose some poems according to the approved models of
book-English, we find him presently reverting to his own Doric, which
he had lately too much abandoned, and writing in good broad Scotch his
admirably humorous description of Captain Grose, an Antiquary, whom he
had met at Friars Carse:--

Hear, Land o' Cakes, and brither Scots,
Frae Maidenkirk to Johnnie Groats--
If there's a hole in a' your coats,
I rede you tent it:
A chield's amang you, takin' notes,