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POEMS.

ROBERT BURNS.

1759-1796.

HANDSOME NELL.

TUNE-I am a Man Unmarried.

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"This kind of life- the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before which period I first committed the sin of rhyme. You know our country custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labors of harvest. In my fifteenth autumn, my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that language; but you know the Scottish idiom she was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. ... Among her other love-inspiring qualities she sang sweetly; and it was her favourite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin; but my girl sang a song which was said to be composed by a small country laird's son on one of his father's maids, with whom he was in love, and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he; for, excepting

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that he could smear sheep and cast peats, his father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than myself."- BURNS'S Autobiography.

Oн once I loved a bonnie lass,

Ay, and I love her still;

And whilst that honour warms my breast,

I'll love my handsome Nell.

As bonnie lasses I hae seen,

And mony full as braw;

But for a modest, gracefu' mien,

The like I never saw.

A bonnie lass, I will confess,

Is pleasant to the ee,

But without some better qualities,

She's no the lass for me.

well dressed

But Nelly's looks are blithe and sweet,

And, what is best of a',

Her reputation is complete,
And fair without a flaw.1

1 Variation in Mr. John Dick's MS.:

But Nelly's looks are blithe and sweet,
Good-humoured, frank, and free;

And still the more I view them o'er,
The more they captive me.

The next verse is wanting in that MS.

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