“how, framing hideous spells,
  In Sky’s lone isle, the gifted wizard-seer
  Lodged in the wintry cave with Fate’s fell spear
  Or in the depths of Uist’s dark forests dwells,
  How they whose sight such dreary dreams engross
  With their own vision oft astonished droop
  When o’er the wintry strath or quaggy moss
  They see the gliding ghosts unbodied troop.”

Burns, in the foreword to Halloween (1785), writes in the “enlightened” spirit of the eighteenth century, but in the poem itself throws himself whole-heartedly into the hopes and fears that agitate the lovers.  He owed much to an old woman who lived in his home in infancy: 

“She had ... the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery.  This cultivated the latent seeds of poetry, but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors."[7]

Tam o’ Shanter, written for Captain Grose, was perhaps based on a Scottish legend, learnt at the inglenook in childhood, from this old wife, or perhaps

“By some auld houlet-haunted biggin
Or kirk deserted by its riggin,”

from Captain Grose himself, who made to quake: 

“Ilk ghaist that haunts auld ha’ or chamer,
Ye gipsy-gang that deal in glamor,
And you, deep-read in hell’s black grammar,

              Warlocks and witches.”

In it Burns reveals with lively reality the terrors that assail the reveller on his homeward way through the storm: 

“Past the birks and meikle stane
Where drunken Charlie brak’s neck-bane;
And through the whins, and by the cairn
Where hunters fand the murdered bairn
And near the thorn, aboon the well
Where Mungo’s mither hanged hersell.”

For sheer terror the wild, fantastic witch-dance, seen through a Gothic window in the ruins of Kirk-Alloway, with the light of humour strangely glinting through, has hardly been surpassed.  The Ballad-collections, beginning with Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1705), brought poets back to the original sources of terror in popular tradition, and helped to revive the latent feelings of awe, wonder and fear.  In Coleridge’s Ancient Manner the skeleton-ship with its ghastly crew—­the spectre-woman and her deathmate—­the sensations of the mariner, alone on a wide, wide sea, seize on our imagination with irresistible power.  The very substance of the poem is woven of the supernatural.  The dream imagery is thrown into relief by occasional touches of reality—­the lighthouse, the church on the cliff, the glimpses of the wedding, the quiet song of the hidden brook in the leafy month of June.  We, like the mariner, after loneliness so awful that