English literature the book is designed to acquaint students with the main outlines

My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here, My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer, Chasing the wild deer and following the roe.

My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I go.

Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North, The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth; Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,

The hills of the Highlands for ever 1 love.

Farewell to the mountains, high covered with snow: Farewell to the straths and green valleys below; Farewell to the forests and high-hanging woods; Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.

My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here,

My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer, Chasing the wild deer and following the roe.

My heart’s in the Highlands wherever 1go.

In 1734 William Burns died. After the father’s death Robert and Gilbert worked hard, but the land gave poor crops, and the affairs of the family went from bad to worse. The young poet keenly felt the injustice of the world, where the best land, pastures, and woods belonged to the landlords. His indignation was expressed in his many verses, which became so dear to the hearts of the common people. (“Is There for Honest Poverty”, “John Barleycorn”, ‘Epistle to Dovie, a Brother Poet”, “Lines Written on a Bank-note”).

Robert was very young, w'hen he understood that poverty could ruin his whole life: he had fallen in love with Jean Armour and was going to marry her, but the girl’s father did not want to have a poor peasant for his son-in-low. The fact that the young people loved each other did not alter his intention to marry Jean to a rich man. Seeing that there was no way fora poor peasant in Scotland, Burns decided to sail for Jamaica. To earn money, Robert decided to pubiisli some ofhis poems. The little volume “Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect” was published in 1786. The book contained lyrical, humorous and satirical poems written in his earlier years, though some ofhis greatest satires such as “Address to the Unco’ Guid”, “Holy Willie’s Prayer” and “The Jolly Beggars” were not included into it. This volume opened for him the doors of fashionable society in Edinburgh, for a season, as the untutored ploughman poet, he was a lionized curiosity. The same year Robert Burns received an invitation from Edinburgh scholars, who praised his verses. The poet accepted the invitation, and went to Edinburgh. A new and enlarged edition ofhis poems was the result. Burns returned to his native village with money enough to buy a farm and many Jean Armour. In 1791 he went bankrupt and was obliged to sell the farm and take a position as customs officer in the town of Dumfries. Sometimes Robert Bums is represented by critics as a child of the French Revolution. It is true but only partially.

His best poems were written before that Revolution. He is rightly judged not against the wide expanse of European polities but against the sanctimonious hypocrisy of the religious, and against the social barriers that divided man from man. This equalitarian philosophy he discovered not in the text-books of political theory, but from his own observation, and he expressed it admirably, even recklessly, in one of the greatest of all his poems “The Jolly Beggars”.