So, too, in regard to the physiology and psychology of composition, Burns, before he ever published a line, had reached closer to fundamentals than an academician like Hugh Blair could ever go. Like Milton he had recognized from his own experience that there is in many poets a seasonal rhythm of creativeness. In himself it usually began in August, and continued for several months. That month, he said in his autobiography, was always a carnival in his bosom; in 1793 he told Thomson, ‘Autumn is my propitious season. I make more verses in it, than all the year else,’ and at the beginning of the next summer he repeated the assertion: ‘Now, & for six or seven months _I shall be quite in song_.’ In other words, it took all the scanty sunshine of the Scottish summer to bring him physically to that level of well-being at which creation was possible. The psychology of composition, moreover, which he explained in prose in 1793 he had defined in poetry in the epistle to William Simpson of Ochiltree, composed in May, 1785, and published in the Kilmarnock volume. It is surprisingly like A. E. Housman’s, who recorded that some of his best poems came to him spontaneously while walking on Hampstead Heath and thinking of nothing in particular, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon. Burns’s formula is precisely similar: The Muse, nae Poet ever fand her, Till by himself he learn’d to wander Adown some trottin burn’s meander, An’ no think lang. In these circumstances, when his emotional pressure was high enough, lines and stanzas would come unsought to his mind, and it was to this experience he referred when he repeatedly called himself ‘a Bard of Nature’s making’. Burns knew as well as Housman did that this spontaneous birth was only the beginning and not the end of composition. Gilbert reported the process without realizing its significance: ‘Robert often composed without any regular plan. When anything made a strong impression on his mind, so as to rouse it to any poetic exertion, he would give way to the impulse, and embody the thought in rhyme. If he hit on two or three stanzas to please him, he would then think of proper introductory, connecting, and concluding stanzas; hence the middle of a poem was often first produced.’ It suited with the role of inspired ploughman which Burns assumed among the Edinburgh gentry to give the impression that the finished poem also was spontaneous, but he knew better. His poetry was often born under the open sky, with the physical rhythm of his farm-work supplying the muscular accompaniment he later sought in strolls on the banks of Nith, but it was matured and revised by concentrated study of the implications of his theme. As the piper has to walk his measure, so Burns’s body moved to the rhythm of the tune which was in his mind, and the rhythm brought the words which expressed his mood.