Michael Bruce (poet)

His attendance at school was often interrupted, because he had to herd cattle on the Lomond Hills in summer, and this early companionship with nature greatly influenced his poetry.

He studied Latin and Greek, and at fifteen, when his schooling was completed, a small legacy left to his mother, with some additions from kindly neighbours, enabled him to go to the University of Edinburgh, which he attended during the four winter sessions 1762–1765.

[3] In the first summer (1766) of his course at Kinross he was put in charge of a new school at Forestmill, near Clackmannan, where he led a life marred by poverty, disease and loneliness.

There he wrote "Lochleven," a poem inspired by the memories of his childhood, which shows the influence of Thomson and confirmed his reputation as a 'local poet and one of the heralds of the later outburst of Scottish song '.

[4] He had already been threatened with consumption, and now became seriously ill. During the winter he returned on foot to his father's house, where he wrote his last and finest poem, "Elegy written in Spring" considered among ' the sweetest and most moving compositions in the English language'.

[6][7] A poetical genius James Grant Wilson said of him in 1876, 'cut off in life's green spring'[8] As a poet his reputation spread, through sympathy for his early death; and also because of the alleged theft by John Logan of several of his poems.

Pearson and Birrell also wrote to Dr Robert Anderson while he was publishing his British Poets, pointing out Bruce's claims.