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Description: | Burns when he was in Edinburgh decided to create his second Commonplace Book where he could record his thoughts and compositions as they occurred to him. Commenced on April 9th 1787, its pages are numbered from 1 to 40 with pages 23-26 missing. The bulk of the pages contain copies of poems, which he saved for later use, and his personal reflections are confined to the first dozen or so pages.
In this Burns addresses men of high or low degree. Telling them to think on his words, life is short accept that. There will be good times and bad. Contentment is more important than happiness, just as peace is preferable to ambition, fame or transient pleasures. Those who seek solitude should look to nature for a solution.
Page 16 contains all but the last two lines of the Verses in (Friars) Carse Hermitage (poem no 223A) which he copied into the Common-place book on 16th June 1788. This poem was included in the Afton MS unpublished collection which he presented to Mrs Catherine Gordon Stewart in 1791. | License: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0 | Publisher: | Burns Monument Trust | Temporal: | 1788-01-01 - 1788-12-31 | Source: | Burns Scotland | Identifier: | The Second Commonplace Book of Robert Bu | Go to resource |
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