Show STUDEXT LIFE lo which lie had always shared Let us pause for a moment and consider the events of his life He was horn in a little cottage which is still standing near “Alloway’s haunted kirk” and the “Auld Brig o’ Doon” alxmt two miles from the town of Ayr on January 25th 1759 Ilis parents were poor hut of the noblest type of Scotch peasantry At the time of the poet’s birth his father was tending a small garden for a livelihood Seven years later he gave up the garden and moved to a farm two miles from the “Brig o’ Doon” called Mount Oliphant Here the family remained for eleven years until Robert was eighteen years old These eleven years were full of hardship and misery and hardest toil for the young poet But the toil of his father anti brother and himself and the efforts of his mother were of no avail — the farm with its barren soil was a failure The father in this hopeless struggle against nature wore out his strength and broke Burns’s health down his health too was greatly weakened in trying to do the work of a man While here however he went two winters to school though his school work was irregular and scanty What learning he got in life he had to pick up for himself except what his father taught him at home and this teaching is one of the inestimable blessings that Burns owed to his father In 1777 the lease ran out and the family moved to another farm at Lochlea Here they remained for seven years until the self-denyi- ng poet was 25 years old This farm proved far better than the other but the farm at Mount Oliphant had so wrecked the financial conditions of the family that when the worn-ou- t father died in 1784 the two brothers could hardly save enough from his belongings to stock another farm Still they did the best they could and the family moved to the little village of Moss-giin the parish of Manchline on the river Ayr Here Burns lived for four years until he set up a home for himself at Ellisland Here the happiest days of his life were spent if happy days he ever had I lere “his genius blossomed into its full flower” Here he was first Here he recognized as a poet wrote many of the poems which have given him a hold on the hearts of his countrvmen and “for which his name will be longest cherished by the lovers of the beautiful and true in every land” From here he went to Fdingborough and was acclaimed as Scotland’s wondrous “poet plowman” Here he met and wooed his Jean and took her from here to the home he had proudly made for her at Ellisland Burns had the good fortune to be born into a good honest familv where virtue and honor and sobriety held sway And though beset with toil and poverty the father mother brothers and sisters remained upright and virtuous Xot so with Robert Burns Though honest to a fault in business matters though a dutiful son and tender and loving husband and el God-feari- ng |