Such, in outline, is Burns’s own story of his early life, taken mostly from his letters.  There is another and more pleasing side to the picture, of which we have glimpses in his poems and in his Common-place Book.  Here we see the boy at school; for like most Scotch peasants, the father gave his boys the best education he possibly could.  We see him following the plow, not like a slave, but like a free man, crooning over an old Scotch song and making a better one to match the melody.  We see him stop the plow to listen to what the wind is saying, or turn aside lest he disturb the birds at their singing and nest making.  At supper we see the family about the table, happy notwithstanding their scant fare, each child with a spoon in one hand and a book in the other.  We hear Betty Davidson reciting, from her great store, some heroic ballad that fired the young hearts to enthusiasm and made them forget the day’s toil.  And in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” we have a glimpse of Scotch peasant life that makes us almost reverence these heroic men and women, who kept their faith and their self-respect in the face of poverty, and whose hearts, under their rough exteriors, were tender and true as steel.

A most unfortunate change in Burns’s life began when he left the farm, at seventeen, and went to Kirkoswald to study surveying.  The town was the haunt of smugglers, rough-living, hard-drinking men; and Burns speedily found his way into those scenes of “riot and roaring dissipation” which were his bane ever afterwards.  For a little while he studied diligently, but one day, while taking the altitude of the sun, he saw a pretty girl in the neighboring garden, and love put trigonometry to flight.  Soon he gave up his work and wandered back to the farm and poverty again.

When twenty-seven years of age Burns first attracted literary attention, and in the same moment sprang to the first place in Scottish letters.  In despair over his poverty and personal habits, he resolved to emigrate to Jamaica, and gathered together a few of his early poems, hoping to sell them for enough to pay the expenses of his journey.  The result was the famous Kilmarnock edition of Burns, published in 1786, for which he was offered twenty pounds.  It is said that he even bought his ticket, and on the night before the ship sailed wrote his “Farewell to Scotland,” beginning, “The gloomy night is gathering fast,” which he intended to be his last song on Scottish soil.

In the morning he changed his mind, led partly by some dim foreshadowing of the result of his literary adventure; for the little book took all Scotland by storm.  Not only scholars and literary men, but “even plowboys and maid servants,” says a contemporary, eagerly spent their hard-earned shillings for the new book.  Instead of going to Jamaica, the young poet hurried to Edinburgh to arrange for another edition of his work.  His journey was a constant ovation, and in the capital he was welcomed and feasted by the best of Scottish society.  This inexpected triumph lasted only one winter.  Burns’s fondness for taverns and riotous living shocked his cultured entertainers, and when he returned to Edinburgh next winter, after a pleasure jaunt through the Highlands, he received scant attention.  He left the city in anger and disappointment, and went back to the soil where he was more at home.