How, when one by one sweet sounds and wandering lights departed,
  He bore no less a loving face, because so broken-hearted.

At the close of the year 1786 a young Scotchman, named Samuel Rose, called upon Cowper at Olney, and left with him a small volume, which had appeared at Edinburgh during the past summer, entitled Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns.  Cowper read the book through twice, and, though somewhat bothered by the dialect, pronounced it a “very extraordinary production.”  This momentary flash, as of an electric spark, marks the contact not only of the two chief British poets of their generation, but of two literatures.  Scotch poets, like Thomson and Beattie, had written in southern English, and, as Carlyle said, in vacuo, that is, with nothing specially national in their work.  Burns’s sweet though rugged Doric first secured the vernacular poetry of his country a hearing beyond the border.  He had, to be sure, a whole literature of popular songs and ballads behind him, and his immediate models were Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferguson; but these remained provincial, while Burns became universal.

He was born in Ayrshire, on the banks of “bonny Doon,” in a clay biggin not far from “Alloway’s auld haunted kirk,” the scene of the witch dance in Tam O’Shanter.  His father was a hard-headed, God-fearing tenant farmer, whose life and that of his sons was a harsh struggle with poverty.  The crops failed; the landlord pressed for his rent; for weeks at a time the family tasted no meat; yet this life of toil was lightened by love and homely pleasures.  In the Cotter’s Saturday Night Burns has drawn a beautiful picture of his parents’ household, the rest that came at the week’s end, and the family worship about the “wee bit ingle, blinkin’ bonnily.”  Robert was handsome, wild, and witty.  He was universally susceptible, and his first songs, like his last, were of “the lasses.”  His head had been stuffed, in boyhood, with “tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights,” etc., told him by one Jenny Wilson, an old woman who lived in the family.  His ear was full of ancient Scottish tunes, and as soon as he fell in love he began to make poetry as naturally as a bird sings.  He composed his verses while following the plow or working in the stack-yard; or, at evening, balancing on two legs of his chair and watching the light of a peat fire play over the reeky walls of the cottage.  Burns’s love songs are in many keys, ranging from strains of the most pure and exalted passion, like Ae Fond Kiss and To Mary in Heaven, to such loose ditties as When Januar Winds, and Green Grow the Rashes O.

Burns liked a glass almost as well as a lass, and at Mauchline, where he carried on a farm with his brother Gilbert, after their father’s death, he began to seek a questionable relief from the pressure of daily toil and unkind fates, in the convivialities of the tavern.  There, among the wits of the Mauchline Club, farmers’ sons, shepherds from the uplands, and the smugglers who swarmed over the west coast, he would discuss politics and farming, recite his verses, and join in the singing and ranting, while