Hew Ainslie, the foremost Scottish-Kentucky poet, was born at Bargery
Mains, Ayrshire, April 5, 1792. Ill-health cut short Ainslie's
education at the Ayr Academy, but some years later he went up to
Glasgow to study law. Law and Hew Ainslie were not congenial fellows,
and he shortly embarked upon the art of landscape gardening. He was
next a clerk in Edinburgh, and also amanuensis for Professor Dugald
Stewart. "Gradually the clouds of [Ainslie's] tobacco smoke began to
curl into seven letters which looked like America." He was thirty
years of age when he arrived at New York. He spent his first years in
New York and Indiana as a farmer, but he soon relinquished this work
and went, in 1829, to Louisville, Kentucky, where, three years later,
an Ohio river flood swept his property away. And two years after this
disastrous flood, fire destroyed his property in Indiana. Undismayed
by misfortune, Ainslie became a contractor and supervised the erection
of many large business structures in Louisville and other cities.
During all these years he was assiduously courting the Muse, and
making a great reputation for himself as a poet. Ainslie's first book,
_A Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns_ (Deptford, 1822), is the English
edition of his charming lyrics; and his _Scottish Songs, Ballads, and
Poems_ (New York, 1855), is the only American edition of his work. In
1864, forty-two years after his departure, Ainslie revisited the land
of his birth, where he was hailed as one of Scotland's finest singers
since Robert Burns. Kentucky was in the poet's blood, however, and a
year later he returned to his home at Louisville. His American friends
were not to be outdone by his home people, and they arranged a great
home-coming for him. In 1871, when the Scots of Louisville assembled
to celebrate the birthday of Burns, Ainslie, the toastmaster, arose
and smilingly confessed to having once kissed "Bonnie Jean," Burns's
widow. He died at Louisville, March 11, 1878. A comprehensive Scottish
edition of his _A Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns, and Poems_, was
issued in 1892. _The Ingle Side_, a little song of sixteen lines, is
Ainslie's masterpiece; but it was as a poet of the sea that he won his
great reputation. "As Lloyd Mifflin is America's greatest sonneteer,
so Hew Ainslie, the adopted Kentuckian, may perhaps be ranked as
America's most ardent singer of the sea."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New
York, 1887, v. i); _Hew Ainslie_, by A. S. Mackenzie (Library of
Southern Literature, Atlanta, Georgia, 1909, v. i).