Excerpt from Whisperings From the Hillside It is not necessary now to apologise for the appearance of a volume of poems by one from the humbler ranks of life. Ploughboy and shepherd have long ere now proved their right, and have stood side by side with, if not far above, the more favoured of fortune who have cultivated the muses. The occupation of the shepherd seems peculiarly favourable to that converse with nature in her various moods which, in a contemplative mind, leads to the cultivation of the poetic faculty. Whether in the present case the productions of our shepherd's muse have attained to such a standard as to justify their appearance before the public in a printed volume, must now be left to that public to decide. Of this, meantime, we are sure, that their merit is such as to repay the trouble of the large circle of friends who desired, by their publication, to possess them in a permanent form. Robert Stirling Inglis was born in the year 1835, near the head of Gala Water, in the parish of Heriot, and county of Midlothian. When about two years old, his parents removed to Outterstone, in the parish of Temple, where his father was engaged as shepherd. Here, in the neighbourhood of the Moorfoot Hills, his childhood was passed, and his schooling he got at Temple. The child of a poor shepherd, however, in those days, did not as a rule get even a fair chance at a country school. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.