Again, one of the shepherds thus invites his love—
“To where the saugh-tree shades the mennin-pool,
I’ll frae the hill come doun, when day grows cool.
—Keep tryst, and meet me there.”
The alder-tree shading the minnow pool—there is a real piece of Lowland scenery brought from the outer world for the first time into poetry. These are but a few samples of the scenery of Scottish rural life with which “The Gentle Shepherd” abounds. Burns, who lived in the generation that followed Ramsay, and always looks back to him as one of his chief forerunners and masters in the poetic art, fixes on Ramsay’s delineations of Nature as one of his chief characteristics. Burns asks, Is there none of the moderns who will rival the Greeks in pastoral poetry?—
“Yes! there is ane; a Scottish callan—
There’s ane; come forrit, honest Allan!
Thou need na jouk behint the hallan,
A chiel sae clever;
The teeth o’ Time may gnaw Tantallan,