the lowliest things. He also wrote stirring songs of liberty, reflecting his deep-rooted Scottish patriotism, his sympathy with the struggle of the American colonies for independence, his sympathy for the French Revolution. "Scots Wha Hae wi' Wallace Bled" and "For A' That" illustrate his love of liberty and democracy. The "Lines to a Mouse" and "To a Daisy" show his love for humble aspects of Nature. He also wrote some of the most charming love songs in our literature. "The Cotter's Saturday Night" shows the dignity of labor and of the peasant's life. All these poems reflect the new movement in English poetry spoken of in the Introduction to Part III of this book, pages 443, 444.

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS

1. The quotation from Gray is from the "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" already referred to (Introduction, page 443) as an example of the new spirit of sympathy with humble life that began to appear in England from about 1750. In the "Elegy" Gray remarks that, given the opportunity, many men who lived and died in obscurity might have become famous. What principle of democracy is apparent in this observation?

2. Burns's statement in the first stanza that he was not mercenary refers to the old custom of dedicating poems to noble or wealthy persons who were expected to give money to the poet who so honored them. Robert Aiken was one of the best friends of Burns, who helped him when he was in difficulties and encouraged him to write poetry. Burns never tried to make money from his poetry; his statement about scorning each selfish end is literally true.

3. Discover a difference in' the language of the first and second stanzas. Account for this difference. Is the language of the first stanza simple or bookish? Find other words for bard, meed, lowly train, sequestered scene, ween. Why do you think Burns used such words as these? Which stanzas, later in the poem, are written in the same literary language? Which in Scottish dialect? Account for the changes.

Which

4. How many lines has each stanza? line has more accents, or stresses, than the others? Which lines rime? This stanza is called "Spenserian" because it was first used by Edmund Spenser, a great poet, contemporary with Shakespeare, who wrote a long poem called The Faerie Queene.

5. "Cotter" means "cottager," one who

dwells in a cottage as a tenant of a farm belonging to some landed proprietor. What details make up the picture of evening given in the second stanza? When had Burns seen these things? Is anything mentioned here which could not have been seen by any laborer on the farm? What is the difference between what Burns saw in looking at simple, common things and what his companions saw?

6. What details make up the picture in the third stanza? What shows that the cotter is a kind father? What effect does his welcome home have on him? Point out the details in this stanza and in the fifth that prove the industry, thrift, and happiness of the cotter and his family.

7. Is the family a large one? How do the older children help with the expenses? What little story is told about one of them? Gilbert Burns, brother of the poet, said, "Although the Cotter is an exact copy of my father in his manners, his family devotions, and exhortations, yet the other parts of the description do not apply to our family. None of us ever were 'At service out, amang the farmers roun.' Instead of our depositing our 'sair-won pennyfee' with our parents, my father labored hard and lived with the most rigid economy that he might be able to keep his children at home." With this in mind, point out the details in the poem that give a true picture of the poet's boyhood home.

8. Point out the humor in the eighth stanza. How can you account for the late hour at which supper was served? Of what did the supper consist? Was any extra treat served by the mother?

9. Look up the references to Moses and Amalek, and Job's pathetic plaint. What is meant by the Christian volume? Who was banished to Patmos and there saw wondrous visions?

10. Study the last three stanzas so that you can sum up Burns's ideas on the sources of a nation's greatness. Does it depend on wealth and on the nobility? Explain "Princes and lords are but the breath of kings." Do you remember a song by Burns in which he expresses a similar idea? The next line, printed in quotation marks is from a poem by Alexander Pope, a poet of the early eighteenth century, whom Burns much admired. Why does the poet fear "luxury's contagion"? What lines show his patriotism? His love of liberty? Why does he name the patriot bard along with the patriot as a defender of liberty?

1. The poem was written in November, 1785. To what circumstances in the life of Burns does it refer?

2. In the second stanza, Burns speaks, half seriously and half jestingly, of the way in which man's ambition and cruelty destroy the "social union" that should bind together all God's creatures. On this compare what you learned in "The Ancient Mariner."

3. How does Burns make clear his sympathy with the mouse? What words seem to you especially well-chosen to bring out this sympathy? Is there a touch of humor? Is there anything serious back of this humor?

4. The best comment on this poem and others that Burns wrote on similar subjects is a passage by Thomas Carlyle: "To every poet, to every writer, we might say: 'Be true, if you would be believed. Let a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, the actual condition of his own heart, and other men, so strangely are we all knit together by the tie of sympathy, must and will give heed to him.'”

life to totter up hill and down `hill, a rope of yarn suspended round his shaking neck and fastened to the shafts, assisting him to bear the yoke and slowly strangling him. By and by there came a time when the barrow and the weaver seemed both palsystricken, and Cree, gasping for breath, would stop in the middle of a brae, 10 unable to push his load over a stone. Then he laid himself down behind it to prevent the barrow's slipping back. On those occasions only the barefooted boys who jeered at the panting weaver could put new strength into his shriveled arms. They did it by telling him that he and Mysy would have to go to the "poorshouse" after all, at which the gray old man would 20 wince, as if "joukin" from a blow, and, shuddering, rise and, with a desperate effort, gain the top of the incline. Small blame perhaps attached to Cree if, as he neared his grave, he grew a little dottle. His loads of yarn frequently took him past the workhouse, and his eyelids quivered as he drew near. Boys used to gather round the gate in anticipation of his coming, and 30 made a feint of driving him inside. Cree, when he observed them, sat down on his barrow-shafts terrified to approach, and I see them now pointing to the workhouse till he left his barrow on the road and hobbled away, his legs cracking as he ran.

It is strange to know that there was once a time when Cree was young and straight, a callant who wore a flower 40 in his buttonhole and tried to be a hero for a maiden's sake.

Before Cree settled down as a weaver, he was knife and scissors grinder for three counties, and Mysy, his mother, accompanied him wherever he went. Mysy trudged alongside him till her eyes grew dim and her limbs failed her, and then Cree was 20. joukin, dodging. 25. dottle, crazy.

told that she must be sent to the pauper's home. After that a pitiable 50 and beautiful sight was to be seen. Grinder Queery, already a feeble man, would wheel his grindstone along the long highroad, leaving Mysy behind. He took the stone on a few hundred yards, and then, hiding it by the roadside in a ditch or behind a paling, returned for his mother. Her he ledsometimes he almost carried her-to the place where the grindstone lay, 60 and thus by double journeys kept her with him. Everyone said that Mysy's death would be a merciful releaseeveryone but Cree.

Cree had been a grinder from his youth, having learned the trade from his father, but he his father, but he gave it up when Mysy became almost blind. For a time he had to leave her in Thrums with Dan'l Wilkie's wife, and find em- 70 ployment himself in Tilliedrum. Mysy got me to write several letters for her to Cree, and she cried while telling me what to say. I never heard either of them use a term of endearment to the other, but all Mysy could tell me to put in writing was: "Oh, my son Cree; oh, my beloved son; oh, I have no one but you; oh, thou God, watch over my Cree!" On one of these occa- 80 sions Mysy put into my hands a paper, which she said would perhaps help me to write the letter. It had been drawn up by Cree many years before when he and his mother had been compelled to part for a time, and I saw from it that he had been trying to teach Mysy to write. The paper consisted of phrases such as, “Dear son Cree," "Loving mother," "I am 90 takin' my food weel," "Yesterday," "Blankets," "The peats is near done," "Mr. Dishart," "Come home, Cree." The grinder had left this paper with his mother, and she had written letters to him from it.

When Dan'l Wilkie objected to

keeping a cranky old body like Mysy in his house, Cree came back to Thrums and took a single room with a hand-loom in it. The flooring was only lumpy earth, with sacks spread over it to protect Mysy's feet. The room contained two dilapidated old coffin-beds, a dresser, a high-backed armchair, several three-legged stools, 10 and two tables, of which one could be packed away beneath the other. In one corner stood the wheel at which Cree had to fill his own pirns. There was a plate-rack on one wall, and near the chimney-piece hung the wag-atthe-wall clock, the timepiece that was commonest in Thrums at that time, and that got this name because its exposed pendulum swung along the 20 wall. The two windows in the room faced each other on opposite walls, and were so small that even a child might have stuck in trying to crawl through them. They opened on hinges, like a door. In the wall of the dark passage leading from the outer door into the room was a recess where a pan and pitcher of water always stood wedded, as it were; and a little hole, 30 known as the "bole," in the wall opposite the fireplace contained Cree's library. It consisted of Baxter's Saints' Rest, Harvey's Meditations, the Pilgrim's Progress, a work on folklore, and several Bibles. The saut-backet, or salt-bucket, stood at the end of the fender, which was half of an old cartwheel. Here Cree worked, whistling "Ower the Watter for Charlie," to 40 make Mysy think that he was as gay

as a mavis. Mysy grew querulous in her old age, and up to the end she thought of poor, done Cree as a handsome gallant. Only by weaving far on into the night could Cree earn as much as six shillings a week. He began at six o'clock in the morning, and worked until midnight by the light of his cruizey. The cruizey was all the

lamp Thrums had in those days, 50 though it is only to be seen in use now in a few old-world houses in the glens. It is an ungainly thing in iron, the size of a man's palm, and shaped not unlike the palm when contracted and deepened to hold a liquid. Whale-oil, lying open in the mold, was used, and the wick was a rash with the green skin peeled off. These rashes were sold by herd-boys at a halfpenny the co bundle, but Cree gathered his own wicks. The rashes skin readily when you know how to do it. The iron mold was placed inside another of the same shape, but slightly larger, for in time the oil dripped through the iron, and the whole was then hung by a cleek or hook close to the person using it. Even with three wicks it gave but a stime of light, and never 70 allowed the weaver to see more than the half of his loom at a time. Sometimes Cree used threads for wicks. He was too dull a man to have many visitors, but Mr. Dishart called occasionally and reproved him for telling his mother lies. The lies Cree told Mysy were that he was sharing the meals he won for her, and that he wore the overcoat which he had exchanged 80 years before for a blanket to keep her

warm.

There was a terrible want of spirit about Grinder Queery. Boys used to climb on to his stone roof with clods. of damp earth in their hands, which they dropped down the chimney. Mysy was bedridden by this time, and the smoke threatened to choke her; so Cree, instead of chasing his per- 90 secutors, bargained with them. He gave them flyhooks which he had busked himself, and when he had nothing left to give he tried to flatter them into dealing gently with Mysy by talking to them as men. One night

58. rash, a rush, a marsh plant having a hollow stem. 70. stime, glimmer.

it went through the town that Mysy now lay in bed all day listening for her summons to depart. According to her ideas this would come in the form of a tapping at the window, and their intention was to forestall the spirit. Dite Gow's boy, who is now a grown man, was hoisted up to one of the little windows, and he has always thought 10 of Mysy since as he saw her then for the last time. She lay sleeping, so far as he could see, and Cree sat by the fireside looking at her.

Everyone knew that there was seldom a fire in that house unless Mysy was cold. Cree seemed to think that the fire was getting low. In the little closet, which, with the kitchen, made up his house, was a corner shut off 20 from the rest of the room by a few boards, and behind this he kept his peats. There was a similar receptacle for potatoes in the kitchen. Cree wanted to get another peat for the fire without disturbing Mysy. First he took off his boots, and made for the peats on tiptoe. His shadow was cast on the bed, however, so he next got down on his knees and crawled softly 30 into the closet. With the peat in his hands he returned in the same way, glancing every moment at the bed where Mysy lay. Though Tammy Gow's face was pressed against a broken window, he did not hear Cree putting that peat on the fire. Some say that Mysy heard, but pretended not to do so for her son's sake; that she realized the deception he played on 40 her and had not the heart to undeceive him. But it would be too sad to believe that. The boys left Cree alone that night.

The old weaver lived on alone in that solitary house after Mysy left him, and by and by the story went abroad that he was saving money. At first no one believed this except the man who told it, but there seemed

after all to be something in it. You 50 had only to hit Cree's trousers pocket to hear the money chinking, for he was afraid to let it out of his clutch. Those who sat on dikes with him when his day's labor was over said that the weaver kept his hand all the time in his pocket, and that they saw his lips move as he counted his hoard by letting it slip through his fingers. So there were boys who called "Miser 60 Queery" after him instead of Grinder, and asked him whether he was saving up to keep himself from the workhouse.

But we had all done Cree wrong. It came out on his deathbed what he had been storing up his money for. Grinder, according to the doctor, died of getting a good meal from a friend of his earlier days after being accus- 70 tomed to starve on potatoes and a very little oatmeal indeed. The day before he died this friend sent him half a sovereign, and when Grinder saw it he sat up excitedly in his bed and pulled his corduroys from beneath his pillow. The woman who, out of kindness, attended him in his last illness, looked on curiously while Cree added the sixpences and coppers in so his pocket to the half-sovereign. After all they only made some two pounds, but a look of peace came into Cree's eyes as he told the woman to take it all to a shop in the town. Nearly twelve years previously Jamie Lownie had lent him two pounds, and though the money was never asked for, it preyed on Cree's mind that he was in debt. He paid off all he owed, and so 90 Cree's life was not, I think, a failure.

NOTES AND QUESTIONS

1. Why were Cree and his mother given the names "Queery" and "Drolly"? Do you think that to Barrie they were only queer and droll? What did he see in them that the boys who tormented them failed to see? By what were