e expressed better in rhyme at a later day in his
_Epistle to the Gude Wife of Wauchope House_.

E'en then, a wish, I mind its power,
A wish that to my latest hour
Shall strongly heave my breast,
That I for poor Auld Scotland's sake
Some usefu' plan or beuk could make,
Or sing a sang at least.
The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide
Amang the bearded bear,
I turn'd the weeder-clips aside,
An' spar'd the symbol dear.

It was about his twenty-fifth year when he first conceived the hope
that he might become a national poet. The failure of his first two
harvests, 1784 and '85, in Mossgiel may well have strengthened this
desire and changed it into a fixed purpose. If he was not to succeed
as a farmer, might he not find success in another employment that was
much more to his mind?

And this longing so deeply cherished, he had, within less than two
years from the time that the above entry in his diary was written,
amply fulfilled. From the autumn of 1784 till May 1786 the fountains
of poetry were unsealed within, and flowed forth in a continuous
stream. That period so prolific of poetry that none like it ever (p. 023)
afterwards visited him, saw the production not only of the satirical
poems already noticed, and of another more genial satire, _Death and
Dr. Hornbook_, but also of those characteristic epistles in which he
reveals so much of his own character, and of those other descriptive
poems in which he so wonderfully delineates the habits of the Scottish
peasantry.

Within from sixteen to eighteen months were composed, not only seven
or eight long epistles to rhyme-composing brothers in the neighbourhood,
David Sillar, John Lapraik, and others, but also, _Halloween_, _To a
Mouse_, _The Jolly Beggars_, _The Cotter's Saturday Night_, _Address
to the Deil_, _The Auld Farmer's Address to his Auld Mare_, _The
Vision_, _The Twa Dogs_, _The Mountain Daisy_. The descriptive poems
above named followed each other in rapid succession during that
spring-time of his genius, having been all composed, as the latest
edition of his works shows, in a period of about six months, between
November, 1785, and April, 1786. Perhaps there are none of Burns'
compositions which give the real man more naturally and unreservedly
than his epistles. Written in the dialect he had learnt by h