No More Learning

Burns was probably aware of this; he takes occasion in some of
his letters to suggest, that the hour may be at hand when he shall be
accounted by scholars as a meteor, rather than a fixed light, and to
suspect that the praise bestowed on his genius was partly owing to the
humility of his condition. From his lingering so long about Edinburgh,
the nobility began to dread a second volume by subscription, the
learned to regard him as a fierce Theban, who resolved to carry all
the outworks to the temple of Fame without the labour of making
regular approaches; while a third party, and not the least numerous,
looked on him with distrust, as one who hovered between Jacobite and
Jacobin; who disliked the loyal-minded, and loved to lampoon the
reigning family. Besides, the marvel of the inspired ploughman had
begun to subside; the bright gloss of novelty was worn off, and his
fault lay in his unwillingness to see that he had made all the sport
which the Philistines expected, and was required to make room for some
"salvage" of the season, to paw, and roar, and shake the mane. The
doors of the titled, which at first opened spontaneous, like those in
Milton's heaven, were now unclosed for him with a tardy courtesy: he
was received with measured stateliness, and seldom requested to repeat
his visit. Of this changed aspect of things he complained to a friend:
but his real sorrows were mixed with those of the fancy:--he told Mrs.
Dunlop with what pangs of heart he was compelled to take shelter in a
corner, lest the rattling equipage of some gaping blockhead should
mangle him in the mire. In this land of titles and wealth such
querulous sensibilities must have been frequently offended.

Burns, who had talked lightly hitherto of resuming the plough, began
now to think seriously about it, for he saw it must come to that at
last. Miller, of Dalswinton, a gentleman of scientific acquirements,
and who has the merit of applying the impulse of steam to navigation,
had offered the poet the choice of his farms, on a fair estate which
he had purchased on the Nith: aided by a westland farmer, he selected
Ellisland, a beautiful spot, fit alike for the steps of ploughman or
poet. On intimating this to the magnates of Edinburgh, no one lamented
that a genius so bright and original should be driven to win his bread
with the sweat of his brow: no one, with an indignant eye, ventured to
tell those to whom the patronage of this magnificent empire was
confided, that they were misusing the sacred trust, and that posterity
would curse them for their coldness or neglect: neither did any of the
rich nobles, whose tables he had adorned by his wit, offer to enable
him to toil free of rent, in a land of which he was to be a permanent
ornament;--all were silent--all were cold--the Earl of Glencairn
alone, aided by Alexander Wood, a gentleman who merits praise oftener
than he is named, did the little that was done or attempted to be done
for him: nor was that little done on the peer's part without
solicitation:--"I wish to go into the excise;" thus he wrote to
Glencairn; "and I am told your lordship's interest will easily procure
me the grant from the commissioners: and your lordship's patronage and
goodness, which have already rescued me from obscurity, wretchedness,
and exile, emboldens me to ask that interest. You have likewise put it
in my power to save the little tie of home that sheltered an aged
mother, two brothers, and three sisters from destruction. I am ill
qualified to dog the heels of greatness with the impertinence of
solicitation, and tremble nearly as much at the thought of the cold
promise as the cold denial. " The farm and the excise exhibit the
poet's humble scheme of life: the money of the one, he thought, would
support the toil of the other, and in the fortunate management of
both, he looked for the rough abundance, if not the elegancies
suitable to a poet's condition.

While Scotland was disgraced by sordidly allowing her brightest genius
to descend to the plough and the excise, the poet hastened his
departure from a city which had witnessed both his triumph and his
shame: he bade farewell in a few well-chosen words to such of the
classic literati--the Blairs, the Stewarts, the Mackenzies, and the
Tytlers--as had welcomed the rustic bard and continued to countenance
him; while in softer accents he bade adieu to the Clarindas and
Chlorises of whose charms he had sung, and, having wrung a settlement
from Creech, he turned his steps towards Mossgiel and Mauchline. He
had several reasons, and all serious ones, for taking Ayrshire in his
way to the Nith: he desired to see his mother, his brothers and
sisters, who had partaken of his success, and were now raised from
pining penury to comparative affluence: he desired to see those who
had aided him in his early struggles into the upper air--perhaps
those, too, who had looked coldly on, and smiled at his outward
aspirations after fame or distinction; but more than all, he desired
to see one whom he once and still dearly loved, who had been a
sufferer for his sake, and whom he proposed to make mistress of his
fireside and the sharer of his fortunes. Even while whispering of love
to Charlotte Hamilton, on the banks of the Devon, or sighing out the
affected sentimentalities of platonic or pastoral love in the ear of
Clarinda, his thoughts wandered to her whom he had left bleaching her
webs among the daisies on Mauchline braes--she had still his heart,
and in spite of her own and her father's disclamation, she was his
wife. It was one of the delusions of this great poet, as well as of
those good people, the Armours, that the marriage had been dissolved
by the destruction of the marriage-lines, and that Robert Burns and
Jean Armour were as single as though they had neither vowed nor
written themselves man and wife. Be that as it may, the time was come
when all scruples and obstacles were to be removed which stood in the
way of their union: their hands were united by Gavin Hamilton,
according to law, in April, 1788: and even the Reverend Mr. Auld, so
mercilessly lampooned, smiled forgivingly as the poet satisfied a
church wisely scrupulous regarding the sacred ceremony of marriage.

Though Jean Armour was but a country lass of humble degree, she had
sense and intelligence, and personal charms sufficient not only to win
and fix the attentions of the poet, but to sanction the praise which
he showered on her in song. In a letter to Mrs. Dunlop, he thus
describes her: "The most placid good nature and sweetness of
disposition, a warm heart, gratefully devoted with all its powers to
love me; vigorous health and sprightly cheerfulness, set off to the
best advantage by a more than commonly handsome figure: these I think
in a woman may make a good wife, though she should never have read a
page but the Scriptures, nor have danced in a brighter assembly than
a penny-pay wedding. " To the accomplished Margaret Chalmers, of
Edinburgh, he adds, to complete the picture, "I have got the
handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and
kindest heart in the country: a certain late publication of Scots'
poems she has perused very devoutly, and all the ballads in the land,
as she has the finest wood-note wild you ever heard. " With his young
wife, a punch bowl of Scottish marble, and an eight-day clock, both
presents from Mr. Armour, now reconciled to his eminent son-in-law,
with a new plough, and a beautiful heifer, given by Mrs. Dunlop, with
about four hundred pounds in his pocket, a resolution to toil, and a
hope of success, Burns made his appearance on the banks of the Nith,
and set up his staff at Ellisland. This farm, now a classic spot, is
about six miles up the river from Dumfries; it extends to upwards of a
hundred acres: the soil is kindly; the holmland portion of it loamy
and rich, and it has at command fine walks on the river side, and
views of the Friar's Carse, Cowehill, and Dalswinton. For a while the
poet had to hide his head in a smoky hovel; till a house to his fancy,
and offices for his cattle and his crops were built, his accommodation
was sufficiently humble; and his mind taking its hue from his
situation, infused a bitterness into the letters in which he first
made known to his western friends that he had fixed his abode in
Nithsdale. "I am here," said he, "at the very elbow of existence: the
only things to be found in perfection in this country are stupidity
and canting; prose they only know in graces and prayers, and the value
of these they estimate as they do their plaiden-webs, by the ell: as
for the muses, they have as much an idea of a rhinoceros as of a
poet. " "This is an undiscovered clime," he at another period exclaims,
"it is unknown to poetry, and prose never looked on it save in drink.
I sit by the fire, and listen to the hum of the spinning-wheel: I
hear, but cannot see it, for it is hidden in the smoke which eddies
round and round me before it seeks to escape by window and door. I
have no converse but with the ignorance which encloses me: No kenned
face but that of my old mare, Jenny Geddes--my life is dwindled down
to mere existence. "

When the poet's new house was built and plenished, and the atmosphere
of his mind began to clear, he found the land to be fruitful, and its
people intelligent and wise. In Riddel, of Friar's Carse, he found a
scholar and antiquarian; in Miller, of Dalswinton, a man conversant
with science as well as with the world; in M'Murdo, of Drumlanrig, a
generous and accomplished gentleman; and in John Syme, of Ryedale, a
man much after his own heart, and a lover of the wit and socialities
of polished life. Of these gentlemen Riddel, who was his neighbour,
was the favourite: a door was made in the march-fence which separated
Ellisland from Friar's Carse, that the poet might indulge in the
retirement of the Carse hermitage, a little lodge in the wood, as
romantic as it was beautiful, while a pathway was cut through the
dwarf oaks and birches which fringed the river bank, to enable the
poet to saunter and muse without lot or interruption. This attention
was rewarded by an inscription for the hermitage, written with
elegance as well as feeling, and which was the first fruits of his
fancy in this unpoetic land. In a happier strain he remembered Matthew
Henderson: this is one of the sweetest as well as happiest of his
poetic compositions. He heard of his friend's death, and called on
nature animate and inanimate, to lament the loss of one who held the
patent of his honours from God alone, and who loved all that was pure
and lovely and good. "The Whistle" is another of his Ellisland
compositions: the contest which he has recorded with such spirit and
humour took place almost at his door: the heroes were Fergusson, of
Craigdarroch, Sir Robert Laurie, of Maxwelltown, and Riddel, of the
Friar's Carse: the poet was present, and drank bottle and bottle about
with the best, and when all was done he seemed much disposed, as an
old servant at Friar's Carse remembered, to take up the victor.

Burns had become fully reconciled to Nithsdale, and was on the most
intimate terms with the muse when he produced Tam O' Shanter, the
crowning glory of all his poems. For this marvellous tale we are
indebted to something like accident: Francis Grose, the antiquary,
happened to visit Friar's Carse, and as he loved wine and wit, the
total want of imagination was no hinderance to his friendly
intercourse with the poet: "Alloway's auld haunted kirk" was
mentioned, and Grose said he would include it in his illustrations of
the antiquities of Scotland, if the bard of the Doon would write a
poem to accompany it. Burns consented, and before he left the table,
the various traditions which belonged to the ruin were passing through
his mind. One of these was of a farmer, who, on a night wild with
wind and rain, on passing the old kirk was startled by a light
glimmering inside the walls; on drawing near he saw a caldron hung
over a fire, in which the heads and limbs of children were simmering:
there was neither witch nor fiend to guard it, so he unhooked the
caldron, turned out the contents, and carried it home as a trophy. A
second tradition was of a man of Kyle, who, having been on a market
night detained late in Ayr, on crossing the old bridge of Doon, on his
way home, saw a light streaming through the gothic window of Alloway
kirk, and on riding near, beheld a batch of the district witches
dancing merrily round their master, the devil, who kept them "louping
and flinging" to the sound of a bagpipe. He knew several of the old
crones, and smiled at their gambols, for they were dancing in their
smocks: but one of them, and she happened to be young and rosy, had on
a smock shorter than those of her companions by two spans at least,
which so moved the farmer that he exclaimed, "Weel luppan, Maggie wi'
the short sark! " Satan stopped his music, the light was extinguished,
and out rushed the hags after the farmer, who made at the gallop for
the bridge of Doon, knowing that they could not cross a stream: he
escaped; but Maggie, who was foremost, seized his horse's tail at the
middle of the bridge, and pulled it off in her efforts to stay him.

This poem was the work of a single day: Burns walked out to his
favourite musing path, which runs towards the old tower of the Isle,
along Nithside, and was observed to walk hastily and mutter as he
went. His wife knew by these signs that he was engaged in composition,
and watched him from the window; at last wearying, and moreover
wondering at the unusual length of his meditations, she took her
children with her and went to meet him; but as he seemed not to see
her, she stept aside among the broom to allow him to pass, which he
did with a flushed brow and dropping eyes, reciting these lines
aloud:--

"Now Tam! O, Tum! had thae been queans,
A' plump and strapping in their teens,
Their sacks, instead o' creeshie flannen,
Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linen!
Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair,
That ance were plush, o' gude blue hair,
I wad hae gien them off my hurdies,
For ae blink o' the bonnie burdies! "

He embellished this wild tradition from fact as well as from fancy:
along the road which Tam came on that eventful night his memory
supplied circumstances which prepared him for the strange sight at the
kirk of Alloway. A poor chapman had perished, some winters before, in
the snow; a murdered child had been found by some early hunters; a
tippling farmer had fallen from his horse at the expense of his neck,
beside a "meikle stane"; and a melancholy old woman had hanged herself
at the bush aboon the well, as the poem relates: all these matters the
poet pressed into the service of the muse, and used them with a skill
which adorns rather than oppresses the legend. A pert lawyer from
Dumfries objected to the language as obscure: "Obscure, sir! " said
Burns; "you know not the language of that great master of your own
art--the devil. If you had a witch for your client you would not be
able to manage her defence! "

He wrote few poems after his marriage, but he composed many songs: the
sweet voice of Mrs. Burns and the craving of Johnson's Museum will in
some measure account for the number, but not for their variety, which
is truly wonderful. In the history of that mournful strain, "Mary in
Heaven," we read the story of many of his lyrics, for they generally
sprang from his personal feelings: no poet has put more of himself
into his poetry than Burns, "Robert, though ill of a cold," said his
wife, "had been busy all day--a day of September, 1789, with the
shearers in the field, and as he had got most of the corn into the
stack-yard, was in good spirits; but when twilight came he grew sad
about something, and could not rest: he wandered first up the
waterside, and then went into the stack-yard: I followed, and begged
him to come into the house, as he was ill, and the air was sharp and
cold. He said, 'Ay, ay,' but did not come: he threw himself down on
some loose sheaves, and lay looking at the sky, and particularly at a
large, bright star, which shone like another moon. At last, but that
was long after I had left him, he came home--the song was already
composed. " To the memory of Mary Campbell he dedicated that touching
ode; and he thus intimates the continuance of his early affection for
"The fair haired lass of the west," in a letter of that time to Mrs.
Dunlop. "If there is another life, it must be only for the just, the
benevolent, the amiable, and the humane. What a flattering idea, then,
is a world to come! There shall I, with speechless agony of rapture,
again recognise my lost, my ever dear Mary, whose bosom was fraught
with truth, honour, constancy, and love. " These melancholy words gave
way in their turn to others of a nature lively and humorous: "Tam
Glen," in which the thoughts flow as freely as the waters of the Nith,
on whose banks he wrote it; "Findlay," with its quiet vein of sly
simplicity; "Willie brewed a peck o' maut," the first of social, and
"She's fair and fause," the first of sarcastic songs, with "The deil's
awa wi' the Exciseman," are all productions of this period--a period
which had besides its own fears and its own forebodings.

For a while Burns seemed to prosper in his farm: he held the plough
with his own hand, he guided the harrows, he distributed the seed-corn
equally among the furrows, and he reaped the crop in its season, and
saw it safely covered in from the storms of winter with "thack and
rape;" his wife, too, superintended the dairy with a skill which she
had brought from Kyle, and as the harvest, for a season or two, was
abundant, and the dairy yielded butter and cheese for the market, it
seemed that "the luckless star" which ruled his lot had relented, and
now shone unboding and benignly. But much more is required than toil
of hand to make a successful farmer, nor will the attention bestowed
only by fits and starts, compensate for carelessness or oversight:
frugality, not in one thing but in all, is demanded, in small matters
as well as in great, while a careful mind and a vigilant eye must
superintend the labours of servants, and the whole system of in-door
and out-door economy. Now, during the three years which Burns stayed
in Ellisland, he neither wrought with that constant diligence which
farming demands, nor did he bestow upon it the unremitting attention
of eye and mind which such a farm required: besides his skill in
husbandry was but moderate--the rent, though of his own fixing, was
too high for him and for the times; the ground, though good, was not
so excellent as he might have had on the same estate--he employed more
servants than the number of acres demanded, and spread for them a
richer board than common: when we have said this we need not add the
expensive tastes induced by poetry, to keep readers from starting,
when they are told that Burns, at the close of the third year of
occupation, resigned his lease to the landlord, and bade farewell for
ever to the plough. He was not, however, quite desolate; he had for a
year or more been appointed on the excise, and had superintended a
district extending to ten large parishes, with applause; indeed, it
has been assigned as the chief reason for failure in his farm, that
when the plough or the sickle summoned him to the field, he was to be
found, either pursuing the defaulters of the revenue, among the
valleys of Dumfrieshire, or measuring out pastoral verse to the
beauties of the land. He retired to a house in the Bank-vennel of
Dumfries, and commenced a town-life: he commenced it with an empty
pocket, for Ellisland had swallowed up all the profits of his poems:
he had now neither a barn to produce meal nor barley, a barn-yard to
yield a fat hen, a field to which he could go at Martinmas for a mart,
nor a dairy to supply milk and cheese and butter to the table--he had,
in short, all to buy and little to buy with. He regarded it as a
compensation that he had no farm-rent to provide, no bankruptcies to
dread, no horse to keep, for his excise duties were now confined to
Dumfries, and that the burthen of a barren farm was removed from his
mind, and his muse at liberty to renew her unsolicited strains.

But from the day of his departure from "the barren" Ellisland, the
downward course of Burns may be dated. The cold neglect of his country
had driven him back indignantly to the plough, and he hoped to gain
from the furrowed field that independence which it was the duty of
Scotland to have provided: but he did not resume the plough with all
the advantages he possessed when he first forsook it: he had revelled
in the luxuries of polished life--his tastes had been rendered
expensive as well as pure: he had witnessed, and he hoped for the
pleasures of literary retirement, while the hands which had led
jewelled dames over scented carpets to supper tables leaded with
silver took hold of the hilts of the plough with more of reluctance
than good-will. Edinburgh, with its lords and its ladies, its delights
and its hopes, spoiled him for farming. Nor were his new labours more
acceptable to his haughty spirit than those of the plough: the excise
for a century had been a word of opprobrium or of hatred in the
north: the duties which it imposed were regarded, not by peasants
alone, as a serious encroachment upon the ancient rights of the
nation, and to mislead a gauger, or resist him, even to blood, was
considered by few as a fault. That the brightest genius of the
nation--one whose tastes and sensibilities were so peculiarly its
own--should be, as a reward, set to look after run-rum and smuggled
tobacco, and to gauge ale-wife's barrels, was a regret and a marvel to
many, and a source of bitter merriment to Burns himself.

The duties of his situation were however performed punctually, if not
with pleasure: he was a vigilant officer; he was also a merciful and
considerate one: though loving a joke, and not at all averse to a
dram, he walked among suspicious brewers, captious ale-wives, and
frowning shop-keepers as uprightly as courteously: he smoothed the
ruggedest natures into acquiescence by his gayety and humour, and yet
never gave cause for a malicious remark, by allowing his vigilance to
slumber. He was brave, too, and in the capture of an armed smuggler,
in which he led the attack, showed that he neither feared water nor
fire: he loved, also, to counsel the more forward of the smugglers to
abandon their dangerous calling; his sympathy for the helpless poor
induced him to give them now and then notice of his approach; he has
been known to interpret the severe laws of the excise into tenderness
and mercy in behalf of the widow and the fatherless. In all this he
did but his duty to his country and his kind: and his conduct was so
regarded by a very competent and candid judge. "Let me look at the
books of Burns," said Maxwell, of Terraughty, at the meeting of the
district magistrates, "for they show that an upright officer may be a
merciful one. " With a salary of some seventy pounds a year, the chance
of a few guineas annually from the future editions of his poems, and
the hope of rising at some distant day to the more lucrative situation
of supervisor, Burns continued to live in Dumfries; first in the
Bank-vennel, and next in a small house in a humble street, since
called by his name.

In his earlier years the poet seems to have scattered songs as thick
as a summer eve scatters its dews; nor did he scatter them less
carelessly: he appears, indeed, to have thought much less of them than
of his poems: the sweet song of Mary Morison, and others not at all
inferior, lay unregarded among his papers till accident called them
out to shine and be admired. Many of these brief but happy
compositions, sometimes with his name, and oftener without, he threw
in dozens at a time into Johnson, where they were noticed only by the
captious Ritson: but now a work of higher pretence claimed a share in
his skill: in September, 1792, he was requested by George Thomson to
render, for his national collection, the poetry worthy of the muses of
the north, and to take compassion on many choice airs, which had
waited for a poet like the author of the Cotter's Saturday Night, to
wed them to immortal verse. To engage in such an undertaking, Burns
required small persuasion, and while Thomson asked for strains
delicate and polished, the poet characteristically stipulated that his
contributions were to be without remuneration, and the language
seasoned with a sprinkling of the Scottish dialect. As his heart was
much in the matter, he began to pour out verse with a readiness and
talent unknown in the history of song: his engagement with Thomson,
and his esteem for Johnson, gave birth to a series of songs as
brilliant as varied, and as naturally easy as they were gracefully
original. In looking over those very dissimilar collections it is not
difficult to discover that the songs which he wrote for the more
stately work, while they are more polished and elegant than those
which he contributed to the less pretending one, are at the same time
less happy in their humour and less simple in their pathos. "What
pleases _me_ as simple and naive," says Burns to Thomson, "disgusts
_you_ as ludicrous and low. For this reason 'Fye, gie me my coggie,
sirs,' 'Fye, let us a' to the bridal,' with several others of that
cast, are to me highly pleasing, while 'Saw ye my Father' delights me
with its descriptive simple pathos:" we read in these words the
reasons of the difference between the lyrics of the two collections.

The land where the poet lived furnished ready materials for song:
hills with fine woods, vales with clear waters, and dames as lovely as
any recorded in verse, were to be had in his walks and his visits;
while, for the purposes of mirth or of humour, characters, in whose
faces originality was legibly written, were as numerous in Nithsdale
as he had found them in the west. He had been reproached, while in
Kyle, with seeing charms in very ordinary looks, and hanging the
garlands of the muse on unlovely altars; he was liable to no such
censure in Nithsdale; he poured out the incense of poetry only on the
fair and captivating: his Jeans, his Lucys, his Phillises, and his
Jessies were ladies of such mental or personal charms as the
Reynolds's and the Lawrences of the time would have rejoiced to lay
out their choicest colours on. But he did not limit himself to the
charms of those whom he could step out to the walks and admire: his
lyrics give evidence of the wandering of his thoughts to the distant
or the dead--he loves to remember Charlotte Hamilton and Mary
Campbell, and think of the sighs and vows on the Devon and the Doon,
while his harpstrings were still quivering to the names of the Millers
and the M'Murdos--to the charms of the lasses with golden or with
flaxen locks, in the valley where he dwelt. Of Jean M'Murdo and her
sister Phillis he loved to sing; and their beauty merited his strains:
to one who died in her bloom, Lucy Johnston, he addressed a song of
great sweetness; to Jessie Lewars, two or three songs of gratitude and
praise: nor did he forget other beauties, for the accomplished Mrs.
Riddel is remembered, and the absence of fair Clarinda is lamented in
strains both impassioned and pathetic.

But the main inspirer of the latter songs of Burns was a young woman
of humble birth: of a form equal to the most exquisite proportions of
sculpture, with bloom on her cheeks, and merriment in her large bright
eyes, enough to drive an amatory poet crazy. Her name was Jean
Lorimer; she was not more than seventeen when the poet made her
acquaintance, and though she had got a sort of brevet-right from an
officer of the army, to use his southron name of Whelpdale, she loved
best to be addressed by her maiden designation, while the poet chose
to veil her in the numerous lyrics, to which she gave life, under the
names of "Chloris," "The lass of Craigie-burnwood," and "The lassie
wi' the lintwhite locks. " Though of a temper not much inclined to
conceal anything, Burns complied so tastefully with the growing demand
of the age for the exterior decencies of life, that when the scrupling
dames of Caledonia sung a new song in her praise, they were as
unconscious whence its beauties came, as is the lover of art, that the
shape and gracefulness of the marble nymph which he admires, are
derived from a creature who sells the use of her charms indifferently
to sculpture or to love. Fine poetry, like other arts called fine,
springs from "strange places," as the flower in the fable said, when
it bloomed on the dunghill; nor is Burns more to be blamed than was
Raphael, who painted Madonnas, and Magdalens with dishevelled hair and
lifted eyes, from a loose lady, whom the pope, "Holy at Rome--here
Antichrist," charitably prescribed to the artist, while he laboured in
the cause of the church. Of the poetic use which he made of Jean
Lorimer's charms, Burns gives this account to Thomson. "The lady of
whom the song of Craigie-burnwood was made is one of the finest women
in Scotland, and in fact is to me in a manner what Sterne's Eliza was
to him--a mistress, or friend, or what you will, in the guileless
simplicity of platonic love. I assure you that to my lovely friend you
are indebted for many of my best songs. Do you think that the sober
gin-horse routine of my existence could inspire a man with life and
love and joy--could fire him with enthusiasm, or melt him with pathos,
equal to the genius of your book? No! no! Whenever I want to be more
than ordinary in song--to be in some degree equal to your diviner
airs--do you imagine I fast and pray for the celestial emanation?
Quite the contrary. I have a glorious recipe; the very one that for
his own use was invented by the divinity of healing and poesy, when
erst he piped to the flocks of Admetus. I put myself in a regimen of
admiring a fine woman; and in proportion to the adorability of her
charms, in proportion are you delighted with my verses. The lightning
of her eye is the godhead of Parnassus, and the witchery of her smile,
the divinity of Helicon. "

Most of the songs which he composed under the influences to which I
have alluded are of the first order: "Bonnie Lesley," "Highland Mary,"
"Auld Rob Morris," "Duncan Gray," "Wandering Willie," "Meg o' the
Mill," "The poor and honest sodger," "Bonnie Jean," "Phillis the
fair," "John Anderson my Jo," "Had I a cave on some wild distant
shore," "Whistle and I'll come to you, my lad," "Bruce's Address to
his men at Bannockburn," "Auld Lang Syne," "Thine am I, my faithful
fair," "Wilt thou be my dearie," "O Chloris, mark how green the
groves," "Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair," "Their groves of
sweet myrtle," "Last May a braw wooer came down the long glen," "O
Mally's meek, Mally's sweet," "Hey for a lass wi' a tocher," "Here's
a health to ane I loe dear," and the "Fairest maid on Devon banks. "
Many of the latter lyrics of Burns were more or less altered, to put
them into better harmony with the airs, and I am not the only one who
has wondered that a bard so impetuous and intractable in most matters,
should have become so soft and pliable, as to make changes which too
often sacrificed the poetry for the sake of a fuller and more swelling
sound. It is true that the emphatic notes of the music must find their
echo in the emphatic words of the verse, and that words soft and
liquid are fitter for ladies' lips, than words hissing and rough; but
it is also true that in changing a harsher word for one more
harmonious the sense often suffers, and that happiness of expression,
and that dance of words which lyric verse requires, lose much of their
life and vigour. The poet's favourite walk in composing his songs was
on a beautiful green sward on the northern side of the Nith, opposite
Lincluden: and his favourite posture for composition at home was
balancing himself on the hind legs of his arm-chair.

While indulging in these lyrical nights, politics penetrated into
Nithsdale, and disturbed the tranquillity of that secluded region.
First, there came a contest far the representation of the Dumfries
district of boroughs, between Patrick Miller, younger, of Dalswinton,
and Sir James Johnstone, of Westerhall, and some two years afterwards,
a struggle for the representation of the county of Kirkcudbright,
between the interest of the Stewarts, of Galloway, and Patrick Heron,
of Kerroughtree. In the first of these the poet mingled discretion
with his mirth, and raised a hearty laugh, in which both parties
joined; for this sobriety of temper, good reasons may be assigned:
Miller, the elder, of Dalswinton, had desired to oblige him in the
affair of Ellisland, and his firm and considerate friend, M'Murdo, of
Drumlanrig, was chamberlain to his Grace of Queensbury, on whoso
interest Miller stood. On the other hand, his old Jacobitical
affections made him the secret well-wisher to Westerhall, for up to
this time, at least till acid disappointment and the democratic
doctrine of the natural equality of man influenced him, Burns, or as a
western rhymer of his day and district worded the reproach--Rob was a
Tory. His situation, it will therefore be observed, disposed him to
moderation, and accounts for the milkiness of his Epistle to Fintray,
in which he marshals the chiefs of the contending factions, and
foretells the fierceness of the strife, without pretending to foresee
the event. Neither is he more explicit, though infinitely more
humorous, in his ballad of "The Five Carlins," in which he
impersonates the five boroughs--Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, Lochmaben,
Sanquhar, and Annan, and draws their characters as shrewd and
calculating dames, met in much wrath and drink to choose a
representative.

But the two or three years which elapsed between the election for the
boroughs, and that for the county adjoining, wrought a serious change
in the temper as well as the opinions of the poet. His Jacobitism, as
has been said was of a poetic kind, and put on but in obedience to old
feelings, and made no part of the man: he was in his heart as
democratic as the kirk of Scotland, which educated him--he
acknowledged no other superiority but the mental: "he was disposed,
too," said Professor Walker, "from constitutional temper, from
education and the accidents of life, to a jealousy of power, and a
keen hostility against every system which enabled birth and opulence
to anticipate those rewards which he conceived to belong to genius and
virtue. " When we add to this, a resentment of the injurious treatment
of the dispensers of public patronage, who had neglected his claims,
and showered pensions and places on men unworthy of being named with
him, we have assigned causes for the change of side and the tone of
asperity and bitterness infused into "The Heron Ballads. " Formerly
honey was mixed with his gall: a little praise sweetened his censure:
in these election lampoons he is fierce and even venomous:--no man has
a head but what is empty, nor a heart that is not black: men descended
without reproach from lines of heroes are stigmatized as cowards, and
the honest and conscientious are reproached as miserly, mean, and
dishonourable. Such is the spirit of party. "I have privately," thus
writes the poet to Heron, "printed a good many copies of the ballads,
and have sent them among friends about the country. You have already,
as your auxiliary, the sober detestation of mankind on the heads of
your opponents; find I swear by the lyre of Thalia, to muster on your
side all the votaries of honest laughter and fair, candid ridicule. "
The ridicule was uncandid, and the laughter dishonest. The poet was
unfortunate in his political attachments: Miller gained the boroughs
which Burns wished he might lose, and Heron lost the county which he
foretold he would gain. It must also be recorded against the good
taste of the poet, that he loved to recite "The Heron Ballads," and
reckon them among his happiest compositions.

From attacking others, the poet was--in the interval between penning
these election lampoons--called on to defend himself: for this he
seems to have been quite unprepared, though in those yeasty times he
might have expected it. "I have been surprised, confounded, and
distracted," he thus writes to Graham, of Fintray, "by Mr. Mitchell,
the collector, telling me that he has received an order from your
board to inquire into my political conduct, and blaming me as a person
disaffected to government. Sir, you are a husband and a father: you
know what you would feel, to see the much-loved wife of your bosom,
and your helpless prattling little ones, turned adrift into the world,
degraded and disgraced, from a situation in which they had been
respectable and respected. I would not tell a deliberate falsehood,
no, not though even worse horrors, if worse can be than those I have
mentioned, hung over my head, and I say that the allegation, whatever
villain has made it, is a lie! To the British constitution, on
Revolution principles, next after my God, I am devotedly attached. To
your patronage as a man of some genius, you have allowed me a claim;
and your esteem as an honest man I know is my due. To these, sir,
permit me to appeal: by these I adjure you to save me from that misery
which threatens to overwhelm me, and which with my latest breath I
will say I have not deserved. " In this letter, another, intended for
the eye of the Commissioners of the Board of Excise, was enclosed, in
which he disclaimed entertaining the idea of a British republic--a
wild dream of the day--but stood by the principles of the constitution
of 1688, with the wish to see such corruptions as had crept in,
amended. This last remark, it appears, by a letter from the poet to
Captain Erskine, afterwards Earl of Mar, gave great offence, for
Corbet, one of the superiors, was desired to inform him, "that his
business was to act, and not to think; and that whatever might be men
or measures, it was his duty to be silent and obedient. " The
intercession of Fintray, and the explanations of Burns, were so far
effectual, that his political offense was forgiven, "only I
understand," said he, "that all hopes of my getting officially forward
are blasted. " The records of the Excise Office exhibit no trace of
this memorable matter, and two noblemen, who were then in the
government, have assured me that this harsh proceeding received no
countenance at head-quarters, and must have originated with some
ungenerous or malicious person, on whom the poet had spilt a little of
the nitric acid of his wrath.

That Burns was numbered among the republicans of Dumfries I well
remember: but then those who held different sentiments from the men in
power, were all, in that loyal town, stigmatized as democrats: that he
either desired to see the constitution changed, or his country invaded
by the liberal French, who proposed to set us free with the bayonet,
and then admit us to the "fraternal embrace," no one ever believed. It
is true that he spoke of premiers and peers with contempt; that he
hesitated to take off his hat in the theatre, to the air of "God save
the king;" that he refused to drink the health of Pitt, saying he
preferred that of Washington--a far greater man; that he wrote bitter
words against that combination of princes, who desired to put down
freedom in France; that he said the titled spurred and the wealthy
switched England and Scotland like two hack-horses; and that all the
high places of the land, instead of being filled by genius and talent,
were occupied, as were the high-places of Israel, with idols of wood
or of stone. But all this and more had been done and said before by
thousands in this land, whose love of their country was never
questioned. That it was bad taste to refuse to remove his hat when
other heads were bared, and little better to refuse to pledge in
company the name of Pitt, because he preferred Washington, cannot
admit of a doubt; but that he deserved to be written down traitor, for
mere matters of whim or caprice, or to be turned out of the unenvied
situation of "gauging auld wives' barrels," because he thought there
were some stains on the white robe of the constitution, seems a sort
of tyranny new in the history of oppression. His love of country is
recorded in too many undying lines to admit of a doubt now: nor is it
that chivalrous love alone which men call romantic; it is a love which
may be laid up in every man's heart and practised in every man's life;
the words are homely, but the words of Burns are always expressive:--

"The kettle of the kirk and state
Perhaps a clout may fail in't,
But deil a foreign tinkler loon
Shall ever ca' a nail in't.
Be Britons still to Britons true,
Amang ourselves united;
For never but by British hands
Shall British wrongs be righted. "

But while verses, deserving as these do to become the national motto,
and sentiments loyal and generous, were overlooked and forgotten, all
his rash words about freedom, and his sarcastic sallies about thrones
and kings, were treasured up to his injury, by the mean and the
malicious. His steps were watched and his words weighed; when he
talked with a friend in the street, he was supposed to utter sedition;
and when ladies retired from the table, and the wine circulated with
closed doors, he was suspected of treason rather than of toasting,
which he often did with much humour, the charms of woman; even when he
gave as a sentiment, "May our success be equal to the justice of our
cause," he was liable to be challenged by some gunpowder captain, who
thought that we deserved success in war, whether right or wrong. It is
true that he hated with a most cordial hatred all who presumed on
their own consequence, whether arising from wealth, titles, or
commissions in the army; officers he usually called "the epauletted
puppies," and lords he generally spoke of as "feather-headed fools,"
who could but strut and stare and be no answer in kind to retort his
satiric flings, his unfriends reported that it was unsafe for young
men to associate with one whose principles were democratic, and
scarcely either modest or safe for young women to listen to a poet
whose notions of female virtue were so loose and his songs so free.
These sentiments prevailed so far that a gentleman on a visit from
London, told me he was dissuaded from inviting Burns to a dinner,
given by way of welcome back to his native place, because he was the
associate of democrats and loose people; and when a modest dame of
Dumfries expressed, through a friend, a wish to have but the honour of
speaking to one of whose genius she was an admirer, the poet declined
the interview, with a half-serious smile, saying, "Alas! she is
handsome, and you know the character publicly assigned to me. " She
escaped the danger of being numbered, it is likely, with the Annas and
the Chlorises of his freer strains.

The neglect of his country, the tyranny of the Excise, and the
downfall of his hopes and fortunes, were now to bring forth their
fruits--the poet's health began to decline. His drooping looks, his
neglect of his person, his solitary saunterings, his escape from the
stings of reflection into socialities, and his distempered joy in the
company of beauty, all spoke, as plainly as with a tongue, of a
sinking heart and a declining body. Yet though he was sensible of
sinking health, hope did not at once desert him: he continued to pour
out such tender strains, and to show such flashes of wit and humour at
the call of Thomson, as are recorded of no other lyrist: neither did
he, when in company after his own mind, hang the head, and speak
mournfully, but talked and smiled and still charmed all listeners by
his witty vivacities.

On the 20th of June, 1795, he writes thus of his fortunes and
condition to his friend Clarke, "Still, still the victim of
affliction; were you to see the emaciated figure who now holds the pen
to you, you would not know your old friend. Whether I shall ever get
about again is only known to HIM, the Great Unknown, whoso creature I
am. Alas, Clarke, I begin to fear the worst! As to my individual self
I am tranquil, and would despise myself if I were not: but Burns's
poor widow and half-a-dozen of his dear little ones, helpless orphans!
_Here_ I am as weak as a woman's tear. Enough of this! 'tis half my
disease. I duly received your last, enclosing the note: it came
extremely in time, and I am much obliged to your punctuality. Again I
must request you to do me the same kindness. Be so very good as by
return of post to enclose me _another_ note: I trust you can do so
without inconvenience, and it will seriously oblige me. If I must go,
I leave a few friends behind me, whom I shall regret while
consciousness remains. I know I shall live in their remembrance. O,
dear, dear Clarke! that I shall ever see you again is I am afraid
highly improbable. " This remarkable letter proves both the declining
health, and the poverty of the poet: his digestion was so bad that he
could taste neither flesh nor fish: porridge and milk he could alone
swallow, and that but in small quantities. When it is recollected that
he had no more than thirty shillings a week to keep house, and live
like a gentleman, no one need wonder that his wife had to be obliged
to a generous neighbour for some of the chief necessaries for her
coming confinement, and that the poet had to beg, in extreme need, two
guinea notes from a distant friend.

His sinking state was not unobserved by his friends, and Syme and
M'Murdo united with Dr. Maxwell in persuading him, at the beginning of
the summer, to seek health at the Brow-well, a few miles east of
Dumfries, where there were pleasant walks on the Solway-side, and
salubrious breezes from the sea, which it was expected would bring the
health to the poet they had brought to many. For a while, his looks
brightened up, and health seemed inclined to return: his friend, the
witty and accomplished Mrs. Riddel, who was herself ailing, paid him a
visit. "I was struck," she said, "with his appearance on entering the
room: the stamp of death was impressed on his features. His first
words were, 'Well, Madam, have you any commands for the other world? '
I replied that it seemed a doubtful case which of us should be there
soonest; he looked in my face with an air of great kindness, and
expressed his concern at seeing me so ill, with his usual sensibility.
At table he ate little or nothing: we had a long conversation about
his present state, and the approaching termination of all his earthly
prospects. He showed great concern about his literary fame, and
particularly the publication of his posthumous works; he said he was
well aware that his death would occasion some noise, and that every
scrap of his writing would be revived against him, to the injury of
his future reputation; that letters and verses, written with unguarded
freedom, would be handed about by vanity or malevolence when no dread
of his resentment would restrain them, or prevent malice or envy from
pouring forth their venom on his name. I had seldom seen his mind
greater, or more collected. There was frequently a considerable degree
of vivacity in his sallies; but the concern and dejection I could not
disguise, damped the spirit of pleasantry he seemed willing to
indulge. " This was on the evening of the 5th of July; another lady who
called to see him, found him seated at a window, gazing on the sun,
then setting brightly on the summits of the green hills of Nithsdale.
"Look how lovely the sun is," said the poet, "but he will soon have
done with shining for me. "

He now longed for home: his wife, whom he ever tenderly loved, was
about to be confined in child-bed: his papers were in sad confusion,
and required arrangement; and he felt that desire to die, at least,
among familiar things and friendly faces, so common to our nature. He
had not long before, though much reduced in pocket, refused with scorn
an offer of fifty pounds, which a speculating bookseller made, for
leave to publish his looser compositions; he had refused an offer of
the like sum yearly, from Perry of the Morning Chronicle, for poetic
contributions to his paper, lest it might embroil him with the ruling
powers, and he had resented the remittance of five pounds from
Thomson, on account of his lyric contributions, and desired him to do
so no more, unless he wished to quarrel with him; but his necessities
now, and they had at no time been so great, induced him to solicit
five pounds from Thomson, and ten pounds from his cousin, James
Burness, of Montrose, and to beg his friend Alexander Cunningham to
intercede with the Commissioners of Excise, to depart from their usual
practice, and grant him his full salary; "for without that," he added,
"if I die not of disease, I must perish with hunger. " Thomson sent the
five pounds, James Burness sent the ten, but the Commissioners of
Excise refused to be either merciful or generous. Stobie, a young
expectant in the customs, was both;--he performed the duties of the
dying poet, and refused to touch the salary. The mind of Burns was
haunted with the fears of want and the terrors of a jail; nor were
those fears without foundation; one Williamson, to whom he was
indebted for the cloth to make his volunteer regimentals, threatened
the one; and a feeling that he was without money for either his own
illness or the confinement of his wife, threatened the other.

Burns returned from the Brow-well, on the 18th of July: as he walked
from the little carriage which brought him up the Mill hole-brae to
his own door, he trembled much, and stooped with weakness and pain,
and kept his feet with difficulty: his looks were woe-worn and
ghastly, and no one who saw him, and there were several, expected to
see him again in life. It was soon circulated through Dumfries, that
Burns had returned worse from the Brow-well; that Maxwell thought ill
of him, and that, in truth, he was dying. The anxiety of all classes
was great; differences of opinion were forgotten, in sympathy for his
early fate: wherever two or three were met together their talk was of
Burns, of his rare wit, matchless humour, the vivacity of his
conversation, and the kindness of his heart. To the poet himself,
death, which he now knew was at hand, brought with it no fear; his
good-humour, which small matters alone ruffled, did not forsake him,
and his wit was ever ready. He was poor--he gave his pistols, which he
had used against the smugglers on the Solway, to his physician, adding
with a smile, that he had tried them and found them an honour to their
maker, which was more than he could say of the bulk of mankind! He was
proud--he remembered the indifferent practice of the corps to which he
belonged, and turning to Gibson, one of his fellow-soldiers, who stood
at his bedside with wet eyes, "John," said he, and a gleam of humour
passed over his face, "pray don't let the awkward-squad fire over me. "
It was almost the last act of his life to copy into his Common-place
Book, the letters which contained the charge against him of the
Commissioners of Excise, and his own eloquent refutation, leaving
judgment to be pronounced by the candour of posterity.

It has been injuriously said of Burns, by Coleridge, that the man
sunk, but the poet was bright to the last: he did not sink in the
sense that these words imply: the man was manly to the latest draught
of breath. That he was a poet to the last, can be proved by facts, as
well as by the word of the author of Christabel.
As he lay silently
growing weaker and weaker, he observed Jessie Lewars, a modest and
beautiful young creature, and sister to one of his brethren of the
Excise, watching over him with moist eyes, and tending him with the
care of a daughter; he rewarded her with one of those songs which are
an insurance against forgetfulness. The lyrics of the north have
nothing finer than this exquisite stanza:--

"Altho' thou maun never be mine,
Altho' even hope is denied,
'Tis sweeter for thee despairing,
Than aught in the world beside. "

His thoughts as he lay wandered to Charlotte Hamilton, and he
dedicated some beautiful stanzas to her beauty and her coldness,
beginning, "Fairest maid on Devon banks. "

It was a sad sight to see the poet gradually sinking; his wife in
hourly expectation of her sixth confinement, and his four helpless
children--a daughter, a sweet child, had died the year before--with no
one of their lineage to soothe them with kind words or minister to
their wants. Jessie Lewars, with equal prudence and attention, watched
over them all: she could not help seeing that the thoughts of the
desolation which his death would bring, pressed sorely on him, for he
loved his children, and hoped much from his boys. He wrote to his
father-in-law, James Armour, at Mauchline, that he was dying, his wife
nigh her confinement, and begged that his mother-in-law would hasten
to them and speak comfort. He wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, saying, "I have
written to you so often without receiving any answer that I would not
trouble you again, but for the circumstances in which I am. An illness
which has long hung about me in all probability will speedily send me
beyond that bourne whence no traveller returns. Your friendship, with
which for many years you honoured me, was a friendship dearest to my
soul: your conversation and your correspondence were at once highly
entertaining and instructive--with what pleasure did I use to break up
the seal! The remembrance yet adds one pulse more to my poor
palpitating heart. Farewell! " A tremor pervaded his frame; his tongue
grew parched, and he was at times delirious: on the fourth day after
his return, when his attendant, James Maclure, held his medicine to
his lips, he swallowed it eagerly, rose almost wholly up, spread out
his hands, sprang forward nigh the whole length of the bed, fell on
his face, and expired. He died on the 21st of July, when nearly
thirty-seven years and seven months old.

The burial of Burns, on the 25th of July, was an impressive and
mournful scene: half the people of Nithsdale and the neighbouring
parts of Galloway had crowded into Dumfries, to see their poet
"mingled with the earth," and not a few had been permitted to look at
his body, laid out for interment. It was a calm and beautiful day, and
as the body was borne along the street towards the old kirk-yard, by
his brethren of the volunteers, not a sound was heard but the measured
step and the solemn music: there was no impatient crushing, no fierce
elbowing--the crowd which filled the street seemed conscious of what
they were now losing for ever. Even while this pageant was passing,
the widow of the poet was taken in labour; but the infant born in that
unhappy hour soon shared his father's grave. On reaching the northern
nook of the kirk-yard, where the grave was made, the mourners halted;
the coffin was divested of the mort-cloth, and silently lowered to its
resting-place, and as the first shovel-full of earth fell on the lid,
the volunteers, too agitated to be steady, justified the fears of the
poet, by three ragged volleys. He who now writes this very brief and
imperfect account, was present: he thought then, as he thinks now,
that all the military array of foot and horse did not harmonize with
either the genius or the fortunes of the poet, and that the tears
which he saw on many cheeks around, as the earth was replaced, were
worth all the splendour of a show which mocked with unintended mockery
the burial of the poor and neglected Burns. The body of the poet was,
on the 5th of June, 1815, removed to a more commodious spot in the
same burial-ground--his dark, and waving locks looked then fresh and
glossy--to afford room for a marble monument, which embodies, with
neither skill nor grace, that well-known passage in the dedication to
the gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt:--"The poetic genius of my
country found me, as the prophetic bard, Elijah, did Elisha, at the
plough, and threw her inspiring mantle over me. " The dust of the bard
was again disturbed, when the body of Mrs. Burns was laid, in April,
1834, beside the remains of her husband: his skull was dug up by the
district craniologists, to satisfy their minds by measurement that he
was equal to the composition of "Tam o' Shanter," or "Mary in Heaven. "
This done, they placed the skull in a leaden box, "carefully lined
with the softest materials," and returned it, we hope for ever, to the
hallowed ground.

Thus lived and died Robert Burns, the chief of Scottish poets: in his
person he was tall and sinewy, and of such strength and activity, that
Scott alone, of all the poets I have seen, seemed his equal: his
forehead was broad, his hair black, with an inclination to curl, his
visage uncommonly swarthy, his eyes large, dark and lustrous, and his
voice deep and manly. His sensibility was strong, his passions full to
overflowing, and he loved, nay, adored, whatever was gentle and
beautiful. He had, when a lad at the plough, an eloquent word and an
inspired song for every fair face that smiled on him, and a sharp
sarcasm or a fierce lampoon for every rustic who thwarted or
contradicted him. As his first inspiration came from love, he
continued through life to love on, and was as ready with the lasting
incense of the muse for the ladies of Nithsdale as for the lasses of
Kyle: his earliest song was in praise of a young girl who reaped by
his side, when he was seventeen--his latest in honour of a lady by
whose side he had wandered and dreamed on the banks of the Devon. He
was of a nature proud and suspicious, and towards the close of his
life seemed disposed to regard all above him in rank as men who
unworthily possessed the patrimony of genius: he desired to see the
order of nature restored, and worth and talent in precedence of the
base or the dull. He had no medium in his hatred or his love; he never
spared the stupid, as if they were not to be endured because he was
bright; and on the heads of the innocent possessors of titles or
wealth he was ever ready to shower his lampoons. He loved to start
doubts in religion which he knew inspiration only could solve, and he
spoke of Calvinism with a latitude of language that grieved pious
listeners. He was warm-hearted and generous to a degree, above all
men, and scorned all that was selfish and mean with a scorn quite
romantic. He was a steadfast friend and a good neighbour: while he
lived at Ellisland few passed his door without being entertained at
his table; and even when in poverty, on the Millhole-brae, the poor
seldom left his door but with blessings on their lips.

Of his modes of study he has himself informed us, as well as of the
seasons and the places in which he loved to muse. He composed while he
strolled along the secluded banks of the Doon, the Ayr, or the Nith:
as the images crowded on his fancy his pace became quickened, and in
his highest moods he was excited even to tears. He loved the winter
for its leafless trees, its swelling floods, and its winds which swept
along the gloomy sky, with frost and snow on their wings: but he loved
the autumn more--he has neglected to say why--the muse was then more
liberal of her favours, and he composed with a happy alacrity unfelt
in all other seasons. He filled his mind and heart with the materials
of song--and retired from gazing on woman's beauty, and from the
excitement of her charms, to record his impressions in verse, as a
painter delineates oil his canvas the looks of those who sit to his
pencil. His chief place of study at Ellisland is still remembered: it
extends along the river-bank towards the Isle: there the neighbouring
gentry love to walk and peasants to gather, and hold it sacred, as the
place where he composed Tam O' Shanter. His favourite place of study
when residing in Dumfries, was the ruins of Lincluden College, made
classic by that sublime ode, "The Vision," and that level and clovery
sward contiguous to the College, on the northern side of the Nith: the
latter place was his favourite resort; it is known now by the name of
Burns's musing ground, and there he conceived many of his latter
lyrics. In case of interruption he completed the verses at the
fireside, where he swung to and fro in his arm-chair till the task was
done: he then submitted the song to the ordeal of his wife's voice,
which was both sweet and clear, and while she sung he listened
attentively, and altered or amended till the whole was in harmony,
music and words.

The genius of Burns is of a high order: in brightness of expression
and unsolicited ease and natural vehemence of language, he stands in
the first rank of poets: in choice of subjects, in happiness of
conception, and loftiness of imagination, he recedes into the second.
He owes little of his fame to his objects, for, saving the beauty of a
few ladies, they were all of an ordinary kind: he sought neither in
romance nor in history for themes to the muse; he took up topics from
life around which were familiar to all, and endowed them with
character, with passion, with tenderness, with humour--elevating all
that he touched into the regions of poetry and morals. He went to no
far lands for the purpose of surprising us with wonders, neither did
he go to crowns or coronets to attract the stare of the peasantry
around him, by things which to them were as a book shut and sealed:
"The Daisy" grew on the lands which he ploughed; "The Mouse" built her
frail nest on his own stubble-field; "The Haggis" reeked on his own
table; "The Scotch Drink" of which he sang was the produce of a
neighbouring still; "The Twa Dogs," which conversed so wisely and
wittily, were, one of them at least, his own collies; "The Vision" is
but a picture, and a brilliant one, of his own hopes and fears; "Tam
Samson" was a friend whom he loved; "Doctor Hornbook" a neighbouring
pedant; "Matthew Henderson" a social captain on half-pay; "The Scotch
Bard" who had gone to the West Indies was Burns himself; the heroine
of "The Lament" was Jean Armour; and "Tam O' Shanter" a facetious
farmer of Kyle, who rode late and loved pleasant company, nay, even
"The Deil" himself, whom he had the hardihood to address, was a being
whose eldrich croon bad alarmed the devout matrons of Kyle, and had
wandered, not unseen by the bard himself, among the lonely glens of
the Doon. Burns was one of the first to teach the world that high
moral poetry resided in the humblest subjects: whatever he touched
became elevated; his spirit possessed and inspired the commonest
topics, and endowed them with life and beauty.

His songs have all the beauties and but few of them the faults of his
poems: they flow to the music as readily as if both air and words came
into the world together. The sentiments are from nature, they are
rarely strained or forced, and the words dance in their places and
echo the music in its pastoral sweetness, social glee, or in the
tender and the moving. He seems always to write with woman's eye upon
him: he is gentle, persuasive and impassioned: he appears to watch her
looks, and pours out his praise or his complaint according to the
changeful moods of her mind. He looks on her, too, with a sculptor's
as well as a poet's eye: to him who works in marble, the diamonds,
emeralds, pearls, and elaborate ornaments of gold, but load and injure
the harmony of proportion, the grace of form, and divinity of
sentiment of his nymph or his goddess--so with Burns the fashion of a
lady's boddice, the lustre of her satins, or the sparkle of her
diamonds, or other finery with which wealth or taste has loaded her,
are neglected us idle frippery; while her beauty, her form, or her
mind, matters which are of nature and not of fashion, are remembered
and praised. He is none of the millinery bards, who deal in scented
silks, spider-net laces, rare gems, set in rarer workmanship, and who
shower diamonds and pearls by the bushel on a lady's locks: he makes
bright eyes, flushing cheeks, the magic of the tongue, and the
"pulses' maddening play" perform all. His songs are, in general,
pastoral pictures: he seldom finishes a portrait of female beauty
without enclosing it in a natural frame-work of waving woods, running
streams, the melody of birds, and the lights of heaven. Those who
desire to feel Burns in all his force, must seek some summer glen,
when a country girl searches among his many songs for one which
sympathizes with her own heart, and gives it full utterance, till wood
and vale is filled with the melody. It is remarkable that the most
naturally elegant and truly impassioned songs in our literature were
written by a ploughman in honour of the rustic lasses around him.

His poetry is all life and energy, and bears the impress of a warm
heart and a clear understanding: it abounds with passions and
opinions--vivid pictures of rural happiness and the raptures of
successful love, all fresh from nature and observation, and not as
they are seen through the spectacles of books. The wit of the clouted
shoe is there without its coarseness: there is a prodigality of humour
without licentiousness, a pathos ever natural and manly, a social joy
akin sometimes to sadness, a melancholy not unallied to mirth, and a
sublime morality which seeks to elevate and soothe. To a love of man
he added an affection for the flowers of the valley, the fowls of the
air, and the beasts of the field: he perceived the tie of social
sympathy which united animated with unanimated nature, and in many of
his finest poems most beautifully he has enforced it. His thoughts are
original and his style new and unborrowed: all that he has written is
distinguished by a happy carelessness, a bounding elasticity of
spirit, and a singular felicity of expression, simple yet inimitable;
he is familiar yet dignified, careless, yet correct, and concise, yet
clear and full. All this and much more is embodied in the language of
humble life--a dialect reckoned barbarous by scholars, but which,
coming from the lips of inspiration, becomes classic and elevated.

The prose of this great poet has much of the original merit of his
verse, but it is seldom so natural and so sustained: it abounds with
fine outflashings and with a genial warmth and vigour, but it is
defaced by false ornament and by a constant anxiety to say fine and
forcible things. He seems not to know that simplicity was as rare and
as needful a beauty in prose as in verse; he covets the pauses of
Sterne and the point and antithesis of Junius, like one who believes
that to write prose well he must be ever lively, ever pointed, and
ever smart. Yet the account which he wrote of himself to Dr. Moore is
one of the most spirited and natural narratives in the language, and
composed in a style remote from the strained and groped-for witticisms
and put-on sensibilities of many of his letters:--"Simple," as John
Wilson says, "we may well call it; rich in fancy, overflowing in
feeling, and dashed off in every other paragraph with the easy
boldness of a great master. "




PREFACE.


[The first edition, printed at Kilmarnock, July, 1786, by John Wilson,
bore on the title-page these simple words:--"Poems, chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect, by Robert Burns;" the following motto, marked
"Anonymous," but evidently the poet's own composition, was more
ambitious:--

"The simple Bard, unbroke by rules of art,
He pours the wild effusions of the heart:
And if inspired, 'tis nature's pow'rs inspire--
Hers all the melting thrill, and hers the kindling fire. "]

The following trifles are not the production of the Poet, who, with
all the advantages of learned art, and perhaps amid the elegancies and
idlenesses of upper life, looks down for a rural theme with an eye to
Theocritus or Virgil. To the author of this, these, and other
celebrated names their countrymen, are, at least in their original
language, _a fountain shut up, and a book sealed. _ Unacquainted with
the necessary requisites for commencing poet by rule, he sings the
sentiments and manners he felt and saw in himself and his rustic
compeers around him in his and their native language. Though a rhymer
from his earliest years, at least from the earliest impulse of the
softer passions, it was not till very lately that the applause,
perhaps the partiality, of friendship awakened his vanity so for as to
make him think anything of his worth showing: and none of the
following works were composed with a view to the press. To amuse
himself with the little creations of his own fancy, amid the toil and
fatigue of a laborious life; to transcribe the various feelings--the
loves, the griefs, the hopes, the fears--in his own breast; to find
some kind of counterpoise to the struggles of a world, always an alien
scene, a task uncouth to the poetical mind--these were his motives for
courting the Muses, and in these he found poetry to be its own reward.

Now that he appears in the public character of an author, he does it
with fear and trembling. So dear is fame to the rhyming tribe, that
even he, an obscure, nameless Bard, shrinks aghast at the thought of
being branded as--an impertinent blockhead, obtruding his nonsense on
the world; and, because he can make a shift to jingle a few doggerel
Scotch rhymes together, looking upon himself as a poet of no small
consequence, forsooth!

It is an observation of that celebrated poet, Shenstone, whose divine
elegies do honour to our language, our nation, and our species, that
"_Humility_ has depressed many a genius to a hermit, but never raised
one to fame! " If any critic catches at the word _genius_ the author
tells him, once for all, that he certainly looks upon himself as
possessed of some poetic abilities, otherwise his publishing in the
manner he has done would be a manoeuvre below the worst character,
which, he hopes, his worst enemy will ever give him. But to the genius
of a Ramsay, or the glorious dawnings of the poor, unfortunate
Fergusson, he, with equal unaffected sincerity, declares, that even in
his highest pulse of vanity, he has not the most distant pretensions.
These two justly admired Scotch poets he has often had in his eye in
the following pieces, but rather with a view to kindle at their flame,
than for servile imitation.

To his Subscriber, the Author returns his most sincere thanks. Not the
mercenary bow over a counter, but the heart-throbbing gratitude of the
Bard, conscious how much he owes to benevolence and friendship for
gratifying him, if he deserves it, in that dearest wish of every
poetic bosom--to be distinguished. He begs his readers, particularly
the learned and the polite, who may honour him with a perusal, that
they will make every allowance for education and circumstances of
life; but if, after a fair, candid, and impartial criticism, he shall
stand convicted of dulness and nonsense, let him be done by as he
would in that case do by others--let him be condemned, without mercy,
in contempt and oblivion.




THE

POETICAL WORKS

OF

ROBERT BURNS.


I.

WINTER.

A DIRGE.

[This is one of the earliest of the poet's recorded compositions: it
was written before the death of his father, and is called by Gilbert
Burns, 'a juvenile production. ' To walk by a river while flooded, or
through a wood on a rough winter day, and hear the storm howling among
the leafless trees, exalted the poet's thoughts. "In such a season,"
he said, "just after a train of misfortunes, I composed _Winter, a
Dirge. _"]


The wintry west extends his blast,
And hail and rain does blaw;
Or the stormy north sends driving forth
The blinding sleet and snaw;
While tumbling brown, the burn comes down,
And roars frae bank to brae;
And bird and beast in covert rest,
And pass the heartless day.

"The sweeping blast, the sky o'ercast,"[1]
The joyless winter day
Let others fear, to me more dear
Than all the pride of May:
The tempest's howl, it soothes my soul,
My griefs it seems to join;
The leafless trees my fancy please,
Their fate resembles mine!

Thou Power Supreme, whose mighty scheme
These woes of mine fulfil,
Here, firm, I rest, they must be best,
Because they are Thy will!
Then all I want (O, do thou grant
This one request of mine! )
Since to enjoy Thou dost deny,
Assist me to resign!

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Dr. Young. ]

* * * * *




II.

THE

DEATH AND DYING WORDS

OF

POOR MAILIE,

THE AUTHOR'S ONLY PET YOWE.

AN UNCO MOURNFU' TALE.

[This tale is partly true; the poet's pet ewe got entangled in her
tether, and tumbled into a ditch; the face of ludicrous and awkward
sorrow with which this was related by Hughoc, the herd-boy, amused
Burns so much, who was on his way to the plough, that he immediately
composed the poem, and repeated it to his brother Gilbert when they
met in the evening; the field where the poet held the plough, and the
ditch into which poor Mailie fell, are still pointed out. ]


As Mailie, an' her lambs thegither,
Were ae day nibbling on the tether,
Upon her cloot she coost a hitch,
An' owre she warsl'd in the ditch:
There, groaning, dying, she did lie,
When Hughoc[2] he cam doytin by.
Wi' glowing e'en an' lifted han's,
Poor Hughoc like a statue stan's;
He saw her days were near-hand ended,
But, waes my heart! he could na mend it!
He gaped wide but naething spak--
At length poor Mailie silence brak.

"O thou, whose lamentable face
Appears to mourn my woefu' case!
My dying words attentive hear,
An' bear them to my master dear.

"Tell him, if e'er again he keep
As muckle gear as buy a sheep,
O bid him never tie them mair
Wi' wicked strings o' hemp or hair!
But ca' them out to park or hill,
An' let them wander at their will;
So may his flock increase, and grow
To scores o' lambs, an' packs of woo'!

"Tell him he was a master kin'
An' ay was gude to me an' mine;
An' now my dying charge I gie him,
My helpless lambs, I trust them wi' him.

"O, bid him save their harmless lives
Frae dogs, and tods, an' butchers' knives!
But gie them guid cow-milk their fill,
Till they be fit to fend themsel;
An' tent them duly, e'en an' morn,
Wi' teats o' hay, an' ripps o' corn.

"An' may they never learn the gaets
Of ither vile, wanrestfu' pets!
To sink thro' slaps, an' reave an' steal
At stacks o' pease, or stocks o' kail.
So may they, like their great forbears,
For monie a year come thro' the sheers;
So wives will gie them bits o' bread,
An' bairns greet for them when they're dead.

"My poor toop-lamb, my son an' heir,
O, bid him breed him up wi' care;
An' if he live to be a beast,
To pit some havins in his breast!
An' warn him what I winna name,
To stay content wi' yowes at hame
An' no to rin an' wear his cloots,
Like ither menseless, graceless brutes.

"An' niest my yowie, silly thing,
Gude keep thee frae a tether string!
O, may thou ne'er forgather up
Wi' ony blastit, moorland toop,
But ay keep mind to moop an' mell
Wi' sheep o' credit like thysel!

"And now, my bairns, wi' my last breath
I lea'e my blessin wi' you baith:
An' when you think upo' your mither,
Mind to be kind to ane anither.

"Now, honest Hughoc, dinna fail
To tell my master a' my tale;
An' bid him burn this cursed tether,
An', for thy pains, thou'se get my blather. "

This said, poor Mailie turn'd her head,
And clos'd her een amang the dead.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: A neibor herd-callan. ]

* * * * *




III.

POOR MAILIE'S ELEGY.

[Burns, when he calls on the bards of Ayr and Doon to join in the
lament for Mailie, intimates that he regards himself as a poet. Hogg
calls it a very elegant morsel: but says that it resembles too closely
"The Ewie and the Crooked Horn," to be admired as original: the
shepherd might have remembered that they both resemble Sempill's "Life
and death of the Piper of Kilbarchan. "]


Lament in rhyme, lament in prose,
Wi' saut tears trickling down your nose;
Our bardie's fate is at a close,
Past a' remead;
The last sad cape-stane of his woes;
Poor Mailie's dead.

It's no the loss o' warl's gear,
That could sae bitter draw the tear,
Or mak our bardie, dowie, wear
The mourning weed;
He's lost a friend and neebor dear,
In Mailie dead.

Thro' a' the toun she trotted by him;
A long half-mile she could descry him;
Wi' kindly bleat, when she did spy him,
She run wi' speed:
A friend mair faithfu' ne'er cam nigh him,
Than Mailie dead.

I wat she was a sheep o' sense,
An' could behave hersel wi' mense:
I'll say't, she never brak a fence,
Thro' thievish greed.
Our bardie, tamely, keeps the spence
Sin' Mailie's dead.

Or, if he wonders up the howe,
Her living image in her yowe
Comes bleating to him, owre the knowe,
For bits o' bread;
An' down the briny pearls rowe
For Mailie dead.

She was nae get o' moorland tips,[3]
Wi' tawted ket, an hairy hips;
For her forbears were brought in ships
Frae yont the Tweed:
A bonnier fleesh ne'er cross'd the clips
Than Mailie dead.

Wae worth the man wha first did shape
That vile, wanchancie thing--a rape!
It maks guid fellows girn an' gape,
Wi' chokin dread;
An' Robin's bonnet wave wi' crape,
For Mailie dead.

O, a' ye bards on bonnie Doon!
An' wha on Ayr your chanters tune!
Come, join the melancholious croon
O' Robin's reed!
His heart will never get aboon!
His Mailie's dead!

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: VARIATION.

'She was nae get o' runted rams,
Wi' woo' like goats an' legs like trams;
She was the flower o' Farlie lambs,
A famous breed!
Now Robin, greetin, chews the hams
O' Mailie dead. ']

* * * * *




IV.

FIRST EPISTLE TO DAVIE,

A BROTHER POET

[In the summer of 1781, Burns, while at work in the garden, repeated
this Epistle to his brother Gilbert, who was much pleased with the
performance, which he considered equal if not superior to some of
Allan Ramsay's Epistles, and said if it were printed he had no doubt
that it would be well received by people of taste. ]

--_January_, [1784. ]


I.

While winds frae aff Ben-Lomond blaw,
And bar the doors wi' driving snaw,
And hing us owre the ingle,
I set me down to pass the time,
And spin a verse or twa o' rhyme,
In hamely westlin jingle.
While frosty winds blaw in the drift,
Ben to the chimla lug,
I grudge a wee the great folks' gift,
That live sae bien an' snug:
I tent less and want less
Their roomy fire-side;
But hanker and canker
To see their cursed pride.

II.

It's hardly in a body's power
To keep, at times, frae being sour,
To see how things are shar'd;
How best o' chiels are whiles in want.
While coofs on countless thousands rant,
And ken na how to wair't;
But Davie, lad, ne'er fash your head,
Tho' we hae little gear,
We're fit to win our daily bread,
As lang's we're hale and fier:
"Muir spier na, nor fear na,"[4]
Auld age ne'er mind a feg,
The last o't, the warst o't,
Is only but to beg.

III.

To lie in kilns and barns at e'en
When banes are craz'd, and bluid is thin,
Is, doubtless, great distress!
Yet then content could make us blest;
Ev'n then, sometimes we'd snatch a taste
O' truest happiness.
The honest heart that's free frae a'
Intended fraud or guile,
However Fortune kick the ba',
Has ay some cause to smile:
And mind still, you'll find still,
A comfort this nae sma';
Nae mair then, we'll care then,
Nae farther we can fa'.

IV.

What tho', like commoners of air,
We wander out we know not where,
But either house or hall?
Yet nature's charms, the hills and woods,
The sweeping vales, and foaming floods,
Are free alike to all.
In days when daisies deck the ground,
And blackbirds whistle clear,
With honest joy our hearts will bound
To see the coming year:
On braes when we please, then,
We'll sit and sowth a tune;
Syne rhyme till't we'll time till't,
And sing't when we hae done.

V.

It's no in titles nor in rank;
It's no in wealth like Lon'on bank,
To purchase peace and rest;
It's no in makin muckle mair;
It's no in books, it's no in lear,
To make us truly blest;
If happiness hae not her seat
And centre in the breast,
We may be wise, or rich, or great,
But never can be blest:
Nae treasures, nor pleasures,
Could make us happy lang;
The heart ay's the part ay
That makes us right or wrang.

VI.

Think ye, that sic as you and I,
Wha drudge and drive thro' wet an' dry,
Wi' never-ceasing toil;
Think ye, are we less blest than they,
Wha scarcely tent us in their way,
As hardly worth their while?
Alas! how aft, in haughty mood
God's creatures they oppress!
Or else, neglecting a' that's guid,
They riot in excess!
Baith careless and fearless
Of either heaven or hell!
Esteeming and deeming
It's a' an idle tale!

VII.

Then let us cheerfu' acquiesce;
Nor make one scanty pleasures less,
By pining at our state;
And, even should misfortunes come,
I, here wha sit, hae met wi' some,
An's thankfu' for them yet.
They gie the wit of age to youth;
They let us ken oursel';
They make us see the naked truth,
The real guid and ill.
Tho' losses, and crosses,
Be lessons right severe,
There's wit there, ye'll get there,
Ye'll find nae other where.

VIII.

But tent me, Davie, ace o' hearts!
(To say aught less wad wrang the cartes,
And flatt'ry I detest,)
This life has joys for you and I;
And joys that riches ne'er could buy:
And joys the very best.
There's a' the pleasures o' the heart,
The lover an' the frien';
Ye hae your Meg your dearest part,
And I my darling Jean!
It warms me, it charms me,
To mention but her name:
It heats me, it beets me,
And sets me a' on flame!

IX.

O, all ye pow'rs who rule above!
O, Thou, whose very self art love!
Thou know'st my words sincere!
The life-blood streaming thro' my heart,
Or my more dear immortal part,
Is not more fondly dear!
When heart-corroding care and grief
Deprive my soul of rest,
Her dear idea brings relief
And solace to my breast.
Thou Being, All-seeing,
O hear my fervent pray'r!
Still take her, and make her
Thy most peculiar care!

X.

All hail, ye tender feelings dear!
The smile of love, the friendly tear,
The sympathetic glow!
Long since, this world's thorny ways
Had number'd out my weary days,
Had it not been for you!
Fate still has blest me with a friend,
In every care and ill;
And oft a more endearing hand,
A tie more tender still.
It lightens, it brightens
The tenebrific scene,
To meet with, and greet with
My Davie or my Jean!

XI.

O, how that name inspires my style
The words come skelpin, rank and file,
Amaist before I ken!
The ready measure rins as fine,
As Phoebus and the famous Nine
Were glowrin owre my pen.
My spaviet Pegasus will limp,
'Till ance he's fairly het;
And then he'll hilch, and stilt, and jimp,
An' rin an unco fit:
But least then, the beast then
Should rue this hasty ride,
I'll light now, and dight now
His sweaty, wizen'd hide.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 4: Ramsay. ]

* * * * *




V.

SECOND EPISTLE TO DAVIE,

A BROTHER POET.

[David Sillar, to whom these epistles are addressed, was at that time
master of a country school, and was welcome to Burns both as a scholar
and a writer of verse. This epistle he prefixed to his poems printed
at Kilmarnock in the year 1789: he loved to speak of his early
comrade, and supplied Walker with some very valuable anecdotes: he
died one of the magistrates of Irvine, on the 2d of May, 1830, at the
age of seventy. ]


AULD NIBOR,
I'm three times doubly o'er your debtor,
For your auld-farrent, frien'ly letter;
Tho' I maun say't, I doubt ye flatter,
Ye speak sae fair.
For my puir, silly, rhymin clatter
Some less maun sair.

Hale be your heart, hale be your fiddle;
Lang may your elbuck jink and diddle,
To cheer you thro' the weary widdle
O' war'ly cares,
Till bairn's bairns kindly cuddle
Your auld, gray hairs.

But Davie, lad, I'm red ye're glaikit;
I'm tauld the Muse ye hae negleckit;
An' gif it's sae, ye sud be licket
Until yo fyke;
Sic hauns as you sud ne'er be faiket,
Be hain't who like.

For me, I'm on Parnassus' brink,
Rivin' the words to gar them clink;
Whyles daez't wi' love, whyles daez't wi' drink,
Wi' jads or masons;
An' whyles, but ay owre late, I think
Braw sober lessons.

Of a' the thoughtless sons o' man,
Commen' me to the Bardie clan;
Except it be some idle plan
O' rhymin' clink,
The devil-haet, that I sud ban,
They ever think.