The problem of livelihood, never long absent from his mind, occupied it during his last weeks almost to the exclusion of other thoughts. The only prescriptions the doctors could offer in his illness involved expenditures he could not afford, and his enlistment in the Volunteers now returned to plague him. The tailor who had made his uniform began to dun for payment, and to the poet’s fevered imagination it seemed that his life was going to close as his father’s had, under the shadow of a debtors’ prison. He spent some of his last days of consciousness in writing frantic letters begging the friends to whom he had lent money to repay their loans and asking others like George Thomson and James Burness to advance him money. Thomson was the only one who gave grudgingly. The others willingly and promptly sent what he asked, but too late to lift the cloud from his dying mind. His last articulate words were an imprecation against the tailor who had threatened him, and he died without the comfort of knowing that his death would awaken the generosity he had never experienced in his life, and that the admirers of his poetry would make it possible for Jean to keep her home together and for his children to be decently educated and launched on respectable careers. VI SONG Burns never wrote a ‘Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind’, and left only a few fragments of his projected satire on ‘The Poet’s Progress’. Yet his letters and journals, as well as the poems themselves, so definitely describe his moods and methods of composition that his poetic psychology can be studied almost as fully as Wordsworth’s own. Conscious pleasure in poetry read or heard first came to him in boyhood through one of Addison’s hymns; mingled with martial and patriotic sentiment he found it also in ‘The History of Sir William Wallace’ and the Life of Hannibal. This latter, he said, ‘gave my young ideas such a turn that I used to strut in raptures up & down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe, and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier, while the story of Wallace poured a Scotish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest.’ But this, like the similar thrills from all the odds and ends of English poetry and Scottish song which came his way, was commonplace boyish emotion. The need and desire to write poetry of his own did not awaken until his adolescent blood was warmed, in his ‘fifteenth autumn’, by the first consciousness of sexual attraction in the company of Nelly Kilpatrick.