Not that it resembles the notebooks of Keats and Shelley, with their evidence of how poems grow in the poet’s mind. Burns’s poems stayed in his mind until they were mature. His poverty and his method of composing to music combined to prevent his committing half-formed ideas to paper. Paper was scarce and expensive; often in his early days he failed to write down his poems even when they were complete. Sometimes he forgot them entirely; sometimes he managed to reconstruct them long afterwards, as he did when he recalled ‘The Mauchline Wedding’ for Mrs. Dunlop’s amusement. One of the few poems composed on paper is the disastrous ‘Elegy on the Death of Sir James Hunter Blair’, which Burns drafted in his Border journal. Here he was working with an English verse-form for which no melody existed. It took him three different sittings painfully to wring out the first seven stanzas. Again in 1791 he reported that he had ‘these several months been hammering at an Elegy’ on Miss Burnet of Monboddo, but found elegy ‘so exhausted a subject that any new idea on the business is not to be expected’; the original manuscript of the ‘Lament for James Earl of Glencairn’ reveals similar struggles. When no tune sang itself in his head, composition was labour and the results were wooden. The ‘Lament’, with a more lyric stanza and with stronger personal feeling at its root, came nearer than the others to success, but even it cannot be ranked among the great elegies. Declining Cunningham’s suggestion of a theme, he once said, ‘I have two or three times in my life composed from the wish, rather than from the impulse, but I never succeeded to any purpose.’ In commemorating Lord Glencairn, wish and impulse combined, yet even here he did not wholly succeed because the tune was lacking. Poetic expression with Burns was not, as with Wordsworth, the fruit of emotion recollected in tranquillity; it was the fruit of emotion expressing itself to music. Though as he grew older the emotion no longer needed to be so strongly personal as when he wrote his earliest songs, the dependence on music became correspondingly greater. How he composed in his later years he told George Thomson in the autumn of 1793: