ONLY a small number of Burns's poems were inspired by the flying visit he paid to Edinburgh, the Borders, and the Highlands. Nearly all his poetry was composed in the two regions of Scotland in which he formed more or less permanent homes at successive periods of his life, namely, the country round Ayr and Mauchline and the valley of the Nith from the farm of Ellisland to Dumfries. It is in those two regions that we must look for the scenery and other external influences that affected his character, and for the originals of the descriptions of Nature that supply the background of his poetry.

So far as his character was moulded by the influence of external Nature on his mind, we shall find the explanation of it in Ayrshire rather than in Nithsdale. It is in childhood and youth that we are most powerfully impressed by the natural scenery that reveals itself to our eyes. When Burns went to Nithsdale in 1791 he was thirty-two years old, and his character was definitely formed, so that it was no longer susceptible

to much alteration from change of environment. He learnt almost all that Nature had to teach him in Ayrshire, especially in the neighbourhood of Alloway Kirk, where he spent the first seven years of his life in the cottage built by his father, and at Mount Oliphant, two or three miles distant, where he lived on his father's farm from his seventh to his eighteenth year.

The scenery on the way from Ayr to Alloway and Mount Oliphant is not in any way remarkable. It has the ordinary characteristics of the landscapes of Lowland Scotland, including a beautiful river with green banks overshadowed by the foliage of many trees. The river that flows past Alloway is the Doon, glorified in one of the sweetest of the poet's love-songs. As he roamed in the impressionable age of boyhood by its banks, he conceived the passionate love of rivers which is such a marked characteristic of his poetry. The future poet, however, could only devote a very limited portion of his time to rambling by the banks of the Doon, and feasting his soul on the beauty that is never absent from streams of running water in the country. The winters in Ayrshire are long and bleak as compared with English winters, and, after the family had removed to Mount Oliphant, Robert Burns and his brother Gilbert, boys as they were, had to do the work of farm-labourers, enduring what the poet afterwards described as "the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave." The life of the Scottish peasantry at

ELLISLAND

Ellisland Farmhouse near Dumfries is situated on the banks of the Nith. From its garden a secluded path descends by the river, a favourite walk of Burns. A more reposeful spot could not be selected, and the ripple of the water and rustle of the leaves add to its quiet charm. It was here that he composed the lines:

Thou ling'ring star, with less'ning ray,
That lov'st to greet the early morn,

Again thou usher'st in the day

My Mary from my soul was torn.