8. =gree=, palm, supremacy. "Burns was not only the poet of love, but also of the new excitement about man. Himself poor, he sang the poor. Neither poverty nor low birth made a man the worse--the man was 'a man for a' that.'"--_Stopford Brooke._ BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. ROBERT BURNS was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1759. His childhood and youth were spent in poverty on his father's farm, where he learned to plough, reap, mow, and thresh in the barn, but where opportunities for education were such only as Scottish peasants know. In 1784 his father died, and he attempted to manage a farm of his own at Mossgiel. The experiment proving to be a failure, he resolved to leave Scotland, and secured an appointment to a clerkship in Jamaica. Just before the time set for his departure, he learned of the success of a volume of his poems which had just been published at Kilmarnock; and, instead of departing for the West Indies, he made a visit to Edinburgh. He was welcomed by the best society, and received at once into the literary circles of the Scottish capital. "His name and fame flashed like sunshine over the land: the shepherd on the hill, the maiden at her wheel, learned his songs by heart, and the first scholars of Scotland courted his acquaintance." A second edition of his poems was published in 1787, and with the proceeds--about $2500--he took a farm at Ellisland, in Nithsdale. But his habits were such that he made sad failure a second time in the experiment of farming; and, after two years of mismanagement, to eke out his scanty income he accepted an appointment as exciseman. In 1791, "unfortunately both for his health and for his reputation," he removed to Dumfries, where, five years later, he died. "While the Shakespeares and Miltons roll on like mighty rivers through the country of Thought, bearing fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves, this little Valclusa Fountain will also arrest our eye; for this also is of Nature's own and most cunning workmanship, bursts from the depths of the earth, with a full gushing current, into the light of day; and often will the traveller turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and muse among its rocks and pines."--_Carlyle._ "Burns is not the poet's poet, which Shelley no doubt meant to be, or the philosopher's poet, which Wordsworth, in spite of himself, is. He is the poet of homely human nature, not half so homely or prosaic as it seems. His genius, in a manner all its own, associates itself with the fortunes, experiences, memorable moments, of human beings whose humanity is their sole patrimony; to whom 'liberty and whatever, like liberty, has the power To raise a man above the brute, And mak him ken himsel,'