How everything that was beautiful and tender and helpless in nature appealed to him we know from his poems. There is the field mouse—the "wee sleekit,* cow'rin', tim'rous beastie," whose nest he turned up and destroyed in his November plowing. "Poor little mouse, I would not hurt you," he says—
*Smooth.
"Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin;
Its silly wa's the win's are strewin'!"
And thou poor mousie art turned out into the cold, bleak, winter weather!—
"But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In providing foresight may be vain;
Gang aft agley,*
An' lea'e us nought but grief and pain
For promised joy."
*Go often wrong.
It goes to his heart to destroy the early daisies with the plow—
"Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow'r,
Thou's met me in an evil hour;
For I maun crush amang the stoure
Thy slender stem.
To spare thee now is past my pow'r,
Thou bonnie gem.
"Alas! it's no thy neebor sweet,
The bonnie lark, companion meet,
Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet,
Wi' spreckl'd breast,
When upward springing, blythe, to greet
The purpling east.
"Cauld blew the bitter-biting North
Upon thy early, humble birth;
Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth
Amid the storm,
Scarce rear'd above the parent earth
Thy tender form.