HANDSOME NELL. O, once I loved a bonnie lass, Ay, and I love her still, And whilst that virtue warms my breast I'll love my handsome Nell. As bonnie lasses I hae seen, And monie full as braw, A bonnie lass, I will confess, Is pleasant to the e'e, But without some better qualities She's no a lass for me. But Nelly's looks are blithe and sweet, And what is best of a', Her reputation is complete, She dresses aye sae clean and neat, And then there's something in her gait A gaudy dress and gentle air May slightly touch the heart, 'Tis this in Nelly pleases me. "Tis this enchants my soul ! For absolutely in my breast She reigns without controul. It is quite an ordinary production, giving little promise of the floods of verbal melody that were destined to succeed it. But no one could be more conscious of its ordinary character than was Burns himself, and his criticism of it in the first Common-Place Book reveals how he could take himself to pieces with a dexterity not surpassed by any of his more pretentious editors. "The first distic of the first stanza," he writes, "is quite too much in the flimsy strain of our ordinary street ballads; and on the other hand, the second distic is too much in the other extreme. The expression is a little awkward, and the sentiment too serious. Stanza the second I am well pleased with; and I think it conveys a fine idea of an amiable part of the Sex-the agreeables ; or what in our Scotch dialect we call a sweet sonsy lass. The third stanza has a little of the flimsy turn in it; and the third line has rather too serious a cast. The fourth stanza is a very indifferent one; the first line is, indeed, all in the strain of the second stanza, but the rest is mostly an expletive. The thoughts in the fifth stanza come finely up to my favourite idea of a sweet sonsy lass; the last line, however, halts a little. The same sentiments are kept up with equal spirit and tenderness in the sixth stanza, but the second and fourth lines, ending with short syllables, hurt the whole. The seventh stanza has several minute faults; but I remember I composed it in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts and my blood sallies at the remembrance.” Happy first love! Destined to be succeeded by many similar passions in the poet's experience; but none of them all so beautifully simple. It rose in his mind, we may be sure (as we have already seen how it did later), when he was composing that fine apostrophe in "The Cottar's Saturday Night" "O happy love! where love like this is found; O heartfelt rapture! bliss beyond compare! If Heaven a draught of heavenly pleasure spare One cordial in this melancholy vale, "Tis when a youthful, loving, modest pair In other's arms breathe out the tender tale Beneath the milk-white thorn that scents the evening gale." 66 TIBBIE STEIN ISABELLA STEIN, or STEVEN, to whom he addressed the song, “O Tibbie, I hae seen the Day," was, if not the next, an early lass to touch the poet's susceptible heart and to rouse his rhyming fancy. There has been controversy regarding the date. Burns himself says:-"This song I composed about the age of seventeen." Now, he was nineteen before the family removed from Mount Oliphant; and the poet's sister, Mrs. Begg (who, by the way, would be only five years old when her brother was seventeen) insisted that the Tibbie of the song was Isabella Stein. "Tibbie Stein," she said, "lived at Little Hill, a farm marching with that of Lochlie; and that the song was written about her was well known in the neighbourhood, no one doubting it." What is more important to note is that Tibbie evidently aimed at higher game, and resisted the young ploughman's advances. "Fient a hair care I," says he; and for the time being, perhaps, he was only whistling to keep his courage up; but we may be sure that he soon got over it. The song, as such, is a decided improvement on "Handsome Nell," and it embraces, besides, a foretaste of his satiric power. 29 O TIBBIE, I HAE SEEN THE DAY. O Tibbie, I hae seen the day, Ye would na been sae shy; But, trowth, I care na by. It is worth noticing again that the air is a reel tune, "Invercauld's Reel, or Strathspey." "In my seventeenth year" (1775), writes the poet to Dr. Moore, "to give my manners a brush, I went to a country dancing-school. My father had an unaccountable antipathy against these meetings, and my going was-what to this hour I repentin absolute defiance of his commands." The dancing-school experience widened his acquaintance with both sexes of the young people in the district, and rid him, presumably, of much of his natural bashfulness. That, together with the summer at Kirkoswald, where he went to learn mensuration and surveying, loosened his tongue and quickened his step in the world. "His native eloquence gushed forth like a liberated stream; in every society he found himself the light of conversation and the leader of debate; and in his hours of leisure beyond the walls of his home, whether by a dyke-side or in an inn-parlour, he was surrounded by admiring or astonished groups, who confided to him their affairs of the heart, and obtained his assistance in their wooing." He became now constantly himself, too, as Gilbert tells, the victim of some fair enslaver; and the agitation of his mind and body under the spell exceeded anything of the kind his brother ever knew in real life. "My heart was completely tender," he tells Dr. Moore, "and was eternally lighted up by some goddess or other; and, like every warfare in this world, I was sometimes crowned with success, and sometimes mortified with defeat. At the plough, scythe, or reap-hook, I feared no competitor, and set want at defiance; and as I never cared farther for any labours than while I was in actual exercise, I spent the evenings in the way after my own heart. A country lad seldom carries on an amour without an assisting confidant. I possessed a curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity in these |