‘I never expressly told her that I loved her.--Indeed I did not well know myself, why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from our labors; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an Eolian harp; and particularly, why my pulse beat such a furious ratann when I looked and fingered over her hand, to pick out the nettle-stings and thistles.--Among her other love-inspiring qualifications, she sung sweetly, and ’twas her favorite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme.--I was not so presumtive as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a small country laird’s son, on one of his father’s maids, with whom he was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he, for ... he had no more Scholarcraft than I had.’ ‘Thus’, Burns summed up, with a juxtaposition of ideas never far separated in his mind, ‘with me began Love and Poesy.’ In all respects save one the episode was the commonest experience of calf-love. But that one difference was decisive. When a girl roused him to lyric fervour, Burns did not sit down and merely string his emotions together in rime. Another element went to make the song; an element that ultimately would mean more, poetically, to Burns than any girl--namely, a tune. His mind did not work from emotion directly to words; it worked from emotion to music, and the music brought the words which expressed its mood. Herein Burns was almost unique among modern poets. Fully to appreciate his lyrics one must hear them sung to the airs which evoked them. To read many of them in bare print is like reading the libretto of an opera. Even in his satires and epistles the process of composition was usually the same, though another man’s poem, instead of music, fired the train. Acquaintance with his models is almost as illuminating as acquaintance with his tunes. His first effort at song-writing led to a conscious study of the poet’s craft. The elaborate criticism appended to ‘Handsome Nell’ when Burns copied the poem into his Commonplace Book is too obviously a bravura piece to merit consideration; more noteworthy is his account of how he studied his collection of English songs: ‘I pored over them, verse by verse; carefully noting the true tender or sublime from affectation and fustian.--I am convinced I owe much to this for my critic-craft such as it is.’ But these were _English_ songs, and their effect on his early work shows mainly in such things as ‘My father was a farmer’ and ‘Man was made to mourn’, which latter in the Commonplace Book is entitled, ‘A Song: Tune, Peggy Bawn’. Even his most doleful lines came to him in music.