I have some favorite flowers in Spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the wild brier-rose, the budding birk and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over, with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a Summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of grey-plover in an Autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the Enthusiasm of Devotion or Poetry.[501] Again he says: I have various sources of pleasure which are in a manner peculiar to myself.... Such is the peculiar pleasure I take in the season of Winter more than in the rest of the year.... There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more--I don’t know if I should call it pleasure, but something which exalts me, something which enraptures me--than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood or high plantation in a cloudy winter day, and hear a stormy wind howling among the trees and raving o’er the plain. It is my best season for devotion; my mind is rapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to _Him_ who ... walks on the wings of the wind.[502] Note also what Mr. Walker, his companion on the border tour, says of him: I had often, like others, experienced the pleasures which arise from the sublime or elegant landscape, but I never saw those feelings so intense as in Burns. When we reached a rustic hut on the river Tilt, where it is overhung by a woody precipice, from which there is a noble waterfall, he threw himself on the heathy seat, and gave himself up to a tender, abstracted, and voluptuous enthusiasm of imagination.... It was with much difficulty that I prevailed upon him to leave the spot.[503] This susceptibility to Nature was one of the signs by which “Coila” knew that Burns would be the poet of Scotland. He represents her as saying to him: I saw thee seek the sounding shore, Delighted with the dashing roar; Or when the North his fleecy store Drove thro’ the sky I saw grim Nature’s visage hoar Struck thy young eye. Or when the deep green-mantl’d earth Warm cherish’d ev’ry flow’ret’s birth And joy and music pouring forth In ev’ry grove, I saw thee eye the gen’ral mirth With boundless love.[504]