Ambition had early made itself heard in him: "I had felt early some stirrings of ambition, but they were the blind groping of Homer's Cyclops around the walls of his cave.... The only two openings by which I could enter the temple of fortune were the gate of niggardly economy, or the path of little chicaning bargain-making. The first is so contracted an aperture, I never could squeeze myself into it; the last I always hated--there was contamination in the very entrance."[66] Low occupations depress the soul even more than the body; man perishes in them--is obliged to perish; of necessity there remains of him nothing but a machine: for in the kind of action in which all is monotonous, in which throughout the very long day the arms lift the same flail and drive the same plough, if thought does not take this uniform movement, the work is ill done. The poet must take care not to be turned aside by his poetry; to do as Burns did, "think only of his work whilst he was at it." He must think of it always, in the evening unyoking his cattle, on Sunday putting on his new coat, counting on his fingers the eggs and poultry, thinking of the kinds of dung, finding a means of using only one pair of shoes, and selling his hay at a penny a truss more. He will not succeed if he has not the patient dulness of a laborer, and the crafty vigilance of a petty shopkeeper. How could poor Burns succeed? He was out of place from his birth, and tried his utmost to raise himself above his condition.[67] At the farm at Lochlea, during mealtimes, the only moments of relaxation, parents, brothers, and sisters, ate with a spoon in one hand and a book in the other. Burns, at the school of Hugh Rodger, a teacher of mensuration, and later at a club of young men at Tarbolton, strove to exercise himself in general questions, and debated _pro_ and _con_ in order to see both sides of every idea. He carried a book in his pocket to study in spare moments in the fields; he wore out thus two copies of Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling. The collection of songs was my _vade mecum._ I pored over them driving my cart, or walking to labor, song by song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true, tender, sublime, or fustian." He maintained a correspondence with several of his companions in the same rank of life in order to form his style, kept a commonplace-book, entered in it ideas on man, religion, the greatest subjects, criticising his first productions. Burns says, "Never did a heart pant more ardently than mine to be distinguished." He thus divined what he did not learn, rose of himself to the level of the most highly cultivated; in a while, at Edinburgh, he was to read through and through respected doctors, Blair himself; he was to see that Blair had attainments, but no depth. At this time he studied minutely and lovingly the old Scotch ballads; and by night in his cold little room, by day whilst whistling at the plough, he invented forms and ideas. We must