In this destitute condition, the family experienced the friendship and
assistance of Mr Brydon, tenant of the neighbouring farm of Crosslee,
who, leasing Ettrick-house, employed Robert Hogg as his shepherd. But
the circumstances of the family were much straitened by recent reverses;
and the second son, young as he was, and though he had only been three
months at school, was engaged as a cow-herd, his wages for six months
being only a ewe-lamb and a pair of shoes! Three months' further
attendance at school, on the expiry of his engagement, completed the
future bard's scholastic instructions. It was the poet's lot, with the
exception of these six months' schooling, to receive his education among
the romantic retreats and solitudes of Nature. First as a cow-herd, and
subsequently through the various gradations of shepherd-life, his days,
till advanced manhood, were all the year round passed upon the hills.
And such hills! The mountains of Ettrick and Yarrow are impressed with
every feature of Highland scenery, in its wildest and most striking
aspects. There are stern summits, enveloped in cloud, and stretching
heavenwards; huge broad crests, heathy and verdant, or torn by fissures
and broken by the storms; deep ravines, jagged, precipitate, and
darksome; and valleys sweetly reposing amidst the sublimity of the awful
solitude. There are dark craggy mountains around the Grey-Mare's-Tail,
echoing to the roar of its stupendous cataract; and romantic and
beautiful green hills, and inaccessible heights, surrounding and
towering over St Mary's Loch, and the Loch of the Lowes. To the
sublimity of that vast academy, in which he had learned to invoke the
Muse, the poet has referred in the "Queen's Wake":--

"The bard on Ettrick's mountain green,
In Nature's bosom nursed had been;
And oft had mark'd in forest lone
The beauties on her mountain throne;