Page:Life of Robert Burns, the Ayrshire Bard.pdf/12

12 new farm, and in the following November brought home Jean Armour, whom he had married some time previously, and for a while matters went on pretty smoothly. In several of his letters he speaks with much affection of his wife, and of her admirable qualities. Many of his best pieces were composed here; and the poet at last seemed to be in a fair way of doing well. But the vehemence of his temperament, the keenness of his sensibility, and a constitutional melancholy to which he had through life been subject, were often to him the source of uneasiness and disquiet. "The fate and characters of the rhyming tribe," writes the poet, "often employ my thoughts when I am disposed to be melancholy. There is not among all the martyrologies that ever were penned, so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets. In the comparative view of wretches, the criterion is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a being of our kind, give him a stronger imagination and a more delicate sensibility, which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable set of passions than are the usual lot of man; implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, such as arranging wild-flowers in fantastic nosegays, tracing the grasshopper to his haunt by his chirping song, watching the