Excerpt from The Cotter's Saturday Night, and Other Poems The poetry of Burns is altogether the most genuine thing that we find in English literature. Unstudied, artless, often rude, it voices the joys and sorrows, the loves, the aspirations of the human heart, and interprets the beauty of the commonplace, - that beauty which lies all about us, if we had but eyes to see. Burns performed the miracle of the old fairy tale, spinning out of the straw upon the cottage floor a thread of finest gold. It is this clear vision of the beautiful in everyday life, this wide humanity, this deep sincerity, that has made him the most loved and - excepting Shakespeare - the most widely read of all the British poets. There was nothing in the circumstances of his life to make a poet; indeed there was everything to discourage the making of one. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from The Cotter's Saturday Night MY loved, my honored, much-respected friend No mercenary bard his homage pays With honest pride I scorn each selfish end My dearest meed, a friend's esteem and praise. To you I sing, in simple Scottish lays, The lowly train in life's sequestered scene; The native feelings strong, the guileless ways What Aiken in a cottage would have been Ah I though his worth unknown, far happier there, I ween. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Excerpt from The Double Night and Other Poems Before his blindness he had received the bare rudiments of an English education in the country schools of that day. Later he spent a year at the Kentucky Institute for the Blind, and fourteen months at the Ohio Institute, leaving the latter when about twenty years of age. Meanwhile he had applied himself earnestly to the study of music. His mental activity seems to have been stimulated by his deprivations. He read eagerly everything printed in raised type, and, until he lost his hearing, extended his knowledge of books with the aid of friends who enjoyed reading aloud to him. Of the poems in this volume, most were written after Mr. Heady's fortieth year. I have said they are almost unique in interest; nor do I use this term simply because their author is blind and deaf. They contain one of the most elaborate experiments in hexameter yet made by an English poet, and that, too, by an English poet entirely ignorant of the classic models. The grammarian, Noble Butler, once congratulated Mr. Heady on this fact, on the ground that a knowledge of Homeric and Virgilian hexameter could not but impede an English poet. Whether fortunate or unfortunate in this respect, Mr. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.