d, and,--

Be ours to-night--who knows what comes to-morrow?

was the language of every eye in the circle that welcomed him. The
highest gentry of the neighbourhood, when bent on special merriment,
did not think the occasion complete unless the wit and eloquence of
Burns were called in to enliven their carousals."

It can readily be imagined how distracting such a life must have been,
how fatal to all mental concentration on high objects, not to speak of
the habits, of which it was too sure to sow the seeds. The frequent
visits to Dumfries, which his Excise work entailed, and the haunting
of the Globe Tavern, already spoken of, led to consequences, which
more than even deep potations, must have been fatal to his peace.

His stay at Ellisland is now hastening to a close. Before passing,
however, from that, on the whole the best period of his life since
manhood, one or two incidents of the spring of 1791 must be mentioned.
In the February of that year Burns received from the Rev. Archibald
Alison, Episcopalian clergyman in Edinburgh, a copy of his once famous,
but now, I believe, forgotten, _Essay on Taste_, which contained (p. 129)
the authorized exposition of that theory, so congenial to Scotch
metaphysics, that objects seem beautiful to us only because our minds
associate them with sensible objects which have previously given us
pleasure. In his letter to the author, acknowledging the receipt of
his book, Burns says, "I own, sir, at first glance, several of your
propositions startle me as paradoxical: that the martial clangour of a
trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime
than the twingle-twangle of a Jew's-harp; that the delicate flexure of
a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the
dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub
of a burdock; and that from something innate and independent of all
association of ideas--these I had set down as irrefragable orthodox
truths until perusing your book shook my faith." These words so pierce
this soap-bubble of the metaphysicians, that we can hardly read them
without fancying that the poet meant them to be ironical. Dugald
Steward expressed surprise that the unschooled Ayrshire ploughman
should have formed "a distinct conception of the general principles of
the doctrine of association;" on which Mr. Carlyle remarks, "We rather
think that far subtler things than the doctrine of associat