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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
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