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We come now to the man who is the great representative of a class which
is the peculiar glory of Great Britain; that is, to Robert Burns. It is
a brilliant feature of English literature, that the people, the mass,
the multitude, call them what you will, have contributed to it their
share, and that share a glorious one. We may look in vain into the
literature of every other nation for the like fact. It is true that
there may be found in all countries men who, born in the lowest walks of
life, orphans, outcasts, slaves even, men laboring under not only all
the weight of social prejudices, but under the curse of personal
deformity, have, through some one fortunate circumstance, generally the
favor of some one generous and superior person, risen out of their
original position, and through the advantages of academical or artistic
education, have taken their place among the learned and illustrious of
their race. We need not turn back to the Esops and Terences of antiquity
for such characters; they are easy to select from the annals of middle
age, and modern art and learning; but there is a class, and this class
is found in Great Britain alone, which, belonging to the body of the
people, has caught, as it were passingly, just the quantum of education
which had come within the people's reach, and who, on this slender
participation of the general intellectual property, have raised for
themselves a renown, great, glorious, and enduring as that of the most
learned or most socially exalted of mankind. Those extraordinary
individuals to whom I have alluded as to be found in the literature of
all civilized nations--these men, who, admitted from the ranks of the
people to the college or the studio, have distinguished themselves in
almost every walk of science or letters--these have vindicated the
general intellect of the human race from every possible charge of
inequality in its endowments. They have shown triumphantly that "God is
no respecter of persons." They have thus vindicated not only man's
universal capacity for greatness, but the Creator's justice. They have
demonstrated that "God has made of one blood all the nations of the
earth," and still more, that he has endowed them all with one intellect.
Over the whole bosom of the globe its divine Architect has spread
fertility; he has diffused beauty adapted to the diversity of climes,
and made that beauty present itself in such a variety of forms, that the
freshness of its first perception is kept alive by ever-occurring
novelties of construction, hue, or odor. It is the same in the
intellectual as in the physical world. In the universal spirit of man he
has implanted the universal gifts of his divine goodness. Genius,
sentiment, feeling, the vast capacity of knowledge and of creative art,
are made the common heritage of mankind. But climate and circumstance
assert a great and equal influence on the outer and the inner life of
the earth. Some nations, under the influences of certain causes, have
advanced beyond others; some individuals, under the like causes, have
advanced beyond the generality of their cotemporaries. But these facts
have not proved that those nations, or those individuals, were more
highly endowed than the rest; they have rather proved that the soil of
human nature is rich beyond all conception; the extent of that wealth,
however, becoming only palpable through the operation of peculiar
agencies. The causes which developed in Greece, in Rome, in India, in
Egypt, such manifestations of grace, spirit, and power at certain
periods, as never were developed even there at any other periods, before
or since, present a subject of curious inquiry, but they leave the grand
fact the same, and this fact is, that the soul of universal man is
endowed with every gift and faculty which any possible circumstances can
call upon him to exert for his benefit, and the adornment of his life.
He is furnished for every good word and work. He is a divine creature,
that, when challenged, can prove amply his divinity, though under
ordinary circumstances he may be content to walk through this existence
in an ordinary guise. Every great social revolution, every great popular
excitement of every age, has amply demonstrated this. There never was a
national demand for intellect and energy, from the emancipation of the
Israelites from the Egyptian yoke, or the destruction of the Thirty
Tyrants of Athens, down to the English or the French Revolution, which
was not met, to the astonishment of the whole world, with such a supply
of orators, poets, warriors, and statesmen, speakers and actors,
inventors and constructors, in every shape of art, wisdom, and ability,
as most completely to certify that the powers which slumber in the human
bosom are far beyond those which are ever called into activity. The
fertility of the soil of the earth is there in winter, but it lies
unnoticed. The sun breaks out, and, like a giant alarmist thundering at
the doors of the world, he awakens a thousand hidden powers. Life,
universal as the earth itself, starts forth in its thousand shapes, and
all is movement, beauty, sweetness, hurrying on through a charmed being
into an exuberant fruit.
Those men, then, who have risen through the medium of a finished
education to literary, artistic, or scientific eminence, have, I repeat,
vindicated the universality of intellectual endowment; but there is
still another class, and that, as I have said, peculiar to these
islands, who have shown that a finished or academical education even is
not absolutely necessary to the display of the highest order of genius.
Circumstances again have been at work here. The circumstances of this
country are different to those of any other. We have preserved our
liberties more entire. The British people have disdained from age to age
to suffer the curb and the bit that have been put upon the neck, and
into the mouth, of the more pliant nations of the Continent. Whether
these circumstances are to be looked for in the peculiar mixture of
races, or in this particular mixture coexisting with peculiarities of
climate and insular position, might afford scope to much argument;
enough, these circumstances have existed, and their results do exist in
a race, proud, active, free, and indomitable.
"Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
I see the lords of human kind pass by;
Intent on high designs, a thoughtful band,
By forms unfashioned, fresh from nature's hand,
Fierce in their native hardiness of soul;
True to imagined right, above control;
While e'en the peasant boasts these rights to scan,
And learns to venerate himself as man."
GOLDSMITH, _The Traveler_.
Thus it is that this free constitution of the British Empire; this
spirit of general independence; this habit of the peasant and the
artisan of venerating themselves as men, has led to a universal
awakening of mind in the people. In other countries few think; it is a
few who are regularly educated, and arrogate the right to think, and
write, and govern. If the poor man become an acknowledged genius, it is
only through the passage of the high school. The mass is an inert mass;
it is a laboring, or, at best, a singing and dancing multitude. But in
Great Britain there is not a man who does not feel that he is a member
of the great thinking, acting, and governing whole. Without books often
he has caught the spark of inspiration from his neighbor. In the field,
the work-shop, the ale-house, the Chartist gathering, he has come to the
discussion of his rights, and in that discussion all the powers of his
spirit have felt the rousing influence of the sea of mind around, that
has boiled and heaved from its lowest depths in billows of fire. Under
the operation of this oral, and, as it were, forensic education, which
has been going on for generations in the British Empire, the whole man,
with all his powers, has become wide awake; and it required only the
simple powers of writing and reading to enable the peasant or artisan to
gather all the knowledge that he needed, and to stand forth a poet, an
orator, a scientific inventor, a teacher himself of the nation.
To these circumstances we owe our Burnses, Hoggs, Bloomfields, Clares,
Elliotts, Allan Cunninghams, Bamfords, Nicolls; Thoms; our Thomas
Millers and Thomas Coopers. To these circumstances we owe, however, not
merely poets, but philosophers, artists, and men of practical science.
Such were Drew, Opie, Smeaton, Brindley, Arkwright, Strutt, Crompton,
Watt; such men are Joseph Barker, the great religious reformer of the
people, and Carlton, the vigorous delineator of Irish actual life. For
such men we look in vain abroad; and at home they constitute themselves
a constellation of genius, such as more than one country of Continental
Europe can not muster from all the gathered lights of all its ages.
It is with pride, and more than pride, that I call the attention of my
countrymen to this great and unique section of their country's glorious
literature. I look to the future, and see in these men but the
forerunners of a numerous race springing from the same soil. They are
evidences of the awakened mind of the common people of England. They
are pledges that out of that awakened mind there will, as general
education advances, spring whole hosts of writers, thinkers, and actors,
who shall not so merely represent the working classes of our society,
but shall point out the people as the grand future source of the
enrichment of our literature. They are luminous proofs, and the
forerunners of multitudinous proofs of the same kind, that genius is not
entirely dependent upon art; but can, having once the simple machinery
of reading and writing, seize on sufficient art to enable it to exhibit
all the nobler forms of intellectual life, and to speak from heart to
heart the living language of those passions and emotions, which are the
elements of all human exertion after the good and the great, which
console in distress, harden to necessary endurance, or fire to the
generous rage of conquest over difficulties, and over the enemies of
their just rights. These men are the starry lights that glitter on the
verge of that dawn in which mankind shall emerge to its true position;
the many being the enlightened spirits, and the few the weak exceptions,
shrinking like shadows from the noon-day of human progress.
At the head of this great class stands, first in stature as in era,
Robert Burns. True, before him there had been a Stephen Duck and a
Robert Dodsley--glow-worms preceding the morning star; wonders, because
the day of genuine minds had not yet come; respectable men, but not
geniuses of that Titanic stamp which, by its very appearance, puts an
end to every question as to its rank or nature in the utter astonishment
at its gigantic presence. There have been many small geniuses paraded
before the public as curiosities, because they were uneducated; but when
Burns came forth from the crowd of his fellow-men, it was as the poet of
the people; issuing like Moses from the cloud of God's presence, with a
face so radiant with divine light, that the greatest prophets of the
schools were dazzled at the apparition. He needed no apologies of want
of academic discipline; he was a man with all the gifts and powers of a
man, fresh and instinctive in their strength as if direct from the
Creator's hand. Burns was the representative of the common man in
representative perfection. He was a combination of all the powers and
the failings, the strength and the weakness of human nature. He had the
great intellect of such a specimen man, awakened to its full
consciousness, but not polished to the loss of any of its prominences.
He was manly, blunt, daring, independent; full of passion and the thirst
of pleasure; yet still, tender as a woman, sensitive as a child, and
capable of sinking to the humblest penitent at the suggestions of his
conscience, or rising to the dignity of a prophet or the sanctity of an
apostle, as the oppressions of man or the sublimity of God aroused or
exalted his spirit. He had the thrilling nerves and the changing moods
of the poet; quick, versatile, melancholy, or humorous, he reflected all
the changes of the social sky. His sensations were too acute to obey the
sole dictates of mere reason--they carried him to every extreme. He was
now bursting with merriment in the midst of his convivial comrades,
singing like the lark or the nightingale in the joy of his heart; now
thundering against the outrages of the strong and arbitrary, or weeping
in convulsive grief over his follies or his wounded affections. But if
his sensations were too acute to obey reason at all times, his
moral-nature was too noble not to obey the clear voice of a conscience,
which he often outraged, but never strove systematically to destroy.
There have not wanted numbers who have wondered that David should be
called "a man after God's own heart." But to me there is nothing
wonderful in such an appellation. God knows that we are weak and
imperfect, that in proportion to the strength of our passions are we
liable to go wrong, and he does not expect miracles from us. What he
expects is, that errors committed in the hurricane of passion shall be
abhorred and repented of, as soon as they are fully displayed to our
consciences. To endeavor to do right, yet, if overtaken with error, to
abhor our crime, and to repent in the dust and ashes of prostrate
remorse, marks a heart frail, yet noble; and such is human nature at
best. The evidence of a corrupt spirit, of a truly criminal nature, is
that leaven of malignity, which goes doggedly wrong, substituting the
base purposes of its selfishness for the broad commands of God, and
finding a satanic pleasure in working evil against its fellow-men. Such
was not Robert Burns. He was no faultless monster, nor yet a monster
with all his faults. His vivid sensibilities--those sensibilities which
gave him the capacity of poetry, those qualities which were the
necessary requisites for his vocation--often led him astray, often
stained the purity of his mind; but they never succeeded in debasing his
moral nature. That was too generous, too noble, too true to the godlike
gift of a great human heart, which was to feel for all mankind, and to
become the inspirer of the general mass with truer and higher ideas of
themselves, and of their rank in creation. Woefully fell David of
old--the poet taken from the sheepfold and the solitude of the
wilderness to sit on the throne of a great people--and bitterly in the
sight of that people did he lie in the dust and deplore his errors.
Awfully went Robert Burns astray--the poet taken from the plow to sit on
the throne of the realm of poetry--and bitterly did he, too, bow down
and weep in the ashes of repentance. God gave, in both instances,
impressive proofs to the world, that glorious talents given to men leave
them but men still; and that they who envy the gift should not forget
that they too would be exposed to the imminent danger of the fall. There
is a comfort and a warning, there is a great moral lesson for mankind in
the lives of such men; there is a great lesson of humility and charity.
Who shall say that with a nature equally igneous and combustible, his
delinquencies would not be far greater? Where is the man in ten millions
that, with such errors on one side of the account, can place the same
talents and virtues on the other? In the words of Burns himself,
"Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord its--various tone,
Each spring--its various bias;
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What's _done_ we partly may compute,
But know not what's _resisted_."
The errors of Burns were visited upon him severely in his day; they
stand recorded against him; no man can plead his example, for he
condemned himself, and the consequences of his aberrations stand
warningly side by side with the deeds themselves; but who is he that,
with all the perfections of a monotonous propriety, shall confer the
same benefits on his country and on his fellow-men? There was in the
nature of Burns a manliness, a contempt of every thing selfish and mean,
a contempt of all distinctions not based on nature, a hatred of tyranny,
a withering scorn of hypocrisy, which, had he not possessed the
brilliant genius that he did, would, among his cotemporaries, have
diffused that tone of honest uprightness and justness of thinking which
are the truest safeguards of a country's liberties and honor, and would
have stamped him as a remarkable man. But all these qualities were but
the accompaniments of a genius the most brilliant, the wonders and
delights of which stand written, as it were, in lightning forever.
Besides the irresistible contagion of his merriment, the flashes of wit,
the tenderness of his sentiment, the wild laughter of his satiric scorn
of cant, and priestcraft, and self-righteousness, the ardor of his
patriotism, the gayety of his social songs, there is a tone in his
graver writing which breathes over the hearts of his countrymen, and of
all the world, the highest and most dignifying feeling that ever
hallowed the heart of man.
With Burns, to be a man is the grand distinction. All other
distinctions are but the clothes which wrap the figure--the figure
itself is the real thing. To be a man, in his eye, was to be the most
glorious thing that we have any conception of on this side of heaven; to
be an honest man was to be "the noblest work of God!" That was the great
sentiment which animated him, and made him come forth from between the
stilts of his plow, from his barn or his byre, into the presence of
wealth and title, with a calm dignity and a proud bearing which
astonished the artificial creatures of society. Titles, carriages, gay
garments, great houses, what are they but the things which _the man_ had
gathered about him for his pride or his comfort? It was for _the man_
that they were created and gathered together. Without _the man_ they
were nothing, had no value, could have no existence. Without that solid,
and central, and sentient monarch, titles are but air, gay clothes but
the furniture of a Jew's shop, great houses but empty, useless shells,
carriages no better than wheel-barrows. From _the man_ they derived all
they were or counted for; and Burns felt that he and his poorest brother
of the spade, and poorest sister of the spindle, were as entirely and
essentially that as the king upon his throne. The king upon his throne!
He was set there and arrayed in all his pageantry, and armed with all
his power, solely for _the man_ and by _the man_. In _the man_ and his
inner life, the heart, the soul, and the sentiment--that wondrous
mystery which, prisoned in flesh and chained by matter to one corner of
the limitless universe, yet is endowed with power to range through
eternity--to plunge down amid innumerable worlds and their swarming
life--to soar up and worship at the foot-stool of the Framer and
Upholder of suns and systems, the Father of all being--in him the poet
recognized the only monarch of this nether world. For _him_, not for
lords, or millionnaires, or mitered priests, but for him was this august
world created. For him were its lands and waters spread abroad; for him
the seasons set forward in the harmony of their progress; for him were
empires and cities framed, and all the comforts of life, and the
precious flowers of love and intellect breathed into the common air, and
shed into the common heart. That was the feeling of Robert Burns, which
made him tread down all other distinctions as he did the thistles of his
own fields. That was the doctrine which he was as surely created and
sent forth to preach, as Jesus Christ was to promulgate that glorious
Gospel whose especial mission he declared was to the poor. Robert Burns
was the apostle of the dignity of man--man, in his own proper nature,
standing calmly and invincibly above every artful distinction which
sought to thrust him from his place in God's heritage, and set over him
the selfish and the base. When contemplating such delusive distinctions,
the winged words,
"A man's a man for a' that!"
burst like a lightning flash from the poet's bosom, and became the
eternal watchword of self-respecting humanity.
"The king can make a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, and a' that;
The rank is but the guinea stamp,
A man's a man for a' that!"
Brave words! glorious truth! The soul of poetry and the whole science of
social philosophy compressed into a single stanza, to serve as the stay
and comfort of millions of hearts in every moment when most needed.
The pre-eminent merit of Burns, independent of his beauties as a fine
poet, is the vigorous inculcation of these sentiments of a just
self-estimation into the people. To teach them to regard themselves as
objects of worth from their own human nature and destiny, irrespective
of the mere mode by which they live, is to confer on the million the
noblest benefaction. It is to give them at once a shield against "the
proud man's contumely" and the degradations of vice. It is to set their
feet on the firm rock of an eternal truth, and to render them alike
invulnerable to envy and despair. The man who breathes the soul of a
rational dignity into the multitude is the greatest of possible
patriots. He who respects virtue and purity in himself will respect
those qualities in others; and a nation permeated with the philosophy of
Burns would be the noblest nation that the sun ever yet shone upon.
But it is not merely that Robert Burns teaches his fellow-peasants and
citizens to fling out of their bosoms the fiends of envy and
self-depreciation; taught by those errors for which he has been so
severely blamed, he has become, without question, the most efficient,
wise, and tender counselor that they ever had. He knows all their
troubles and temptations, for he has experienced them; and he gives them
the soundest advice under all circumstances. He weeps with them, he
rejoices with them, he worships with them, in such a brotherly, and
occasionally such a fatherly sympathy, that his poems have become to the
poor of Scotland, as they have told me, a sort of second Bible. How
beautifully are blended in these stanzas the indignant sense of those
oppressions which never crushed more directly the laboring poor than
they do at this day in wealthy England, and the consoling truth of a
divine retribution:
"Many and sharp the numerous ills
Inwoven with our frame:
More pointed still we make ourselves
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whose heaven-erected face
The smiles of love adorn,
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn.
"See yonder poor o'erlabored wight,
So abject, mean, and vile,
Who begs a brother of the earth
To give him leave to toil;
And see his lordly fellow worm
The poor petition spurn,
Unmindful, though a weeping wife
And helpless offspring mourn.
"If I'm designed yon lordling's slave,
By nature's law designed,
Why was an independent wish
E'er planted in my mind?
If not, why am I subject to
His cruelty and scorn?
Or why has man the will and power
To make his fellow mourn?
"Yet let not this too much, my son.
Disturb thy youthful breast;
This partial view of human kind
Is surely not the last!
The poor, oppressed, honest man,
Had never, sure, been born,
Had there not been some recompense
To comfort those that mourn!"
Robert Burns ran off the rail-road line of morality; but listen to the
advice, warned by his own folly, which he gives to a Young Friend.
"The sacred lowe o' weel-placed love,
Luxuriantly indulge it,
But never tempt the illicit rove,
Tho' naething should divulge it,
I waive the quantum o' the sin,
The hazard of concealing;
But, och! it hardens a' within,
And petrifies the feeling!
"To catch Dame Fortune's golden smile,
Assiduous wait upon her;
And gather gear by every wile
That's justified by honor:
Not for to hide it in a hedge,
Nor for a train attendant,
But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent.
"The fear o' hell's a hangman's whip
To haud the wretch in order,
But where ye feel your honor grip,
Let that aye be your border:
Its slightest touches, instant pause--
Debar a' side pretenses,
And resolutely keep its laws,
Uncaring consequences.
"The great Creator to revere
Must sure become the creature,
But still the preaching cant forbear,
And e'en the rigid feature;
Yet ne'er with wits profane to range,
Be complaisance extended;
An Atheist's laugh's a poor exchange
For Deity offended!
"When ranting round in pleasure's ring,
Religion may be blinded,
Or if she gie a random sting,
It may be little minded;
But when on life we're tempest driven,
A conscience but a canker--
A correspondence fixed wi' Heaven
Is sure a noble anchor!"
These are golden words, worthy to be committed to memory by every young
person; they are full of the deepest wisdom. But such wisdom, such
golden lines, we might quote from almost every page of Burns. In his
Epistle to Davie, how cordially does he enter into all the miseries of
the poor, yet how eloquently does he also dwell on those blessings which
God has given to all, and which no circumstances can take away!
"To lie in kilns and barns at e'en,
When banes are crazed and bluid is thin,
Is doubtless great distress!"
Yet there are other seasons when Nature, even to the most abject tramp,
pours out royal pleasures.
"What though, 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."
"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; its no in lear;
To make us truly blest;
If happiness hae not her seat
And center 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."
So speaks the humble plowman of Ayrshire, the still humbler exciseman of
Dumfries, but the greatest poet of his country, and one of the noblest
and wisest men of any country or age, spite of all his practical errors.
We must now make our pilgrimage to the spots which were his homes on
earth.
The old town of Ayr, so intimately connected with the memory of Burns,
by his birth near it, by his poem of the Twa Brigs, by the scene of Tam
O'Shanter, by the place of his monument and the festival in his honor,
and by other particulars, is a quiet and pleasant old town of some
twenty thousand population. It lies on a level, sandy coast, on land
which, in fact, appears to have been won from the sea. Though lying
close on the sea, it has no good harbor, and therefore little commerce,
and no manufacture of any account. These circumstances leave much of the
town as it was in Burns's time, though there are also evidences of
modern extension and improvement, in new streets and public buildings,
especially of a county jail lying between the town and the shore. The
moment you step out of the station of the Glasgow railway, which
terminates here, you come upon the mouth of the River Ayr, and behold
the Twa Brigs. That which was the New Brig in Burns's days, is the one
over which you pass into the town. This bridge, whose guardian sprite is
made to swagger over the Auld Brig, if it has not fulfilled the prophecy
of the Auld Brig, and been swept away by a flood, has been in danger of
demolition, having grown too narrow for the increase of traffic. It has
been saved, however, no doubt by the saving power of Burns's poetry,
which has made it sacred, and it was undergoing the process of widening
at the time I was there, in July, 1845. The Auld Brig is some hundred
yards or so higher up the stream, and seems retained really for little
more than its antiquity and poetic classicality. It is now used only as
a footpath, and, not being considered safe for carriages, has posts set
up at the end to prevent every attempt with any carriage to pass it. One
is irresistibly reminded, on going upon it, of the haughty query of the
New Brig:
"Will your poor narrow footpath of a street,
Where two wheel-barrows tremble when they meet,
Your ruined, formless bulk o' stane an' lime,
Compare wi' bonnie brigs o' modern time?"
Mr. Chambers says that the Auld Brig is reported to have been built in
the reign of Alexander III. by two maiden sisters, whose effigies are
still shown in a faded condition on a stone in the eastern parapet, near
the south end of the bridge. There certainly is such a stone, and you
may rather fancy than distinctly trace two outlines of heads. The whole
bridge is, as described by Burns, very old and time-worn.
"Auld Brig appeared o' ancient Pictish race,
The very wrinkles Gothic in his face;
He seemed as he wi' Time had warstled lang,
Yet, teughly doure, he baide an unco bang."
There is a peculiar pleasure in standing on this old Brig, so exactly
has Burns enabled you to place yourself in the very scene that he
contemplated at the moment of conceiving his poem.
"A simple bard,
Unknown and poor, simplicity's reward,
Ae night, within the ancient burgh of Ayr,
By whim inspired, or haply pressed wi' care,
He left his bed, and took his wayward route,
And down by Simpson's wheeled the left about;
The drowsy Dungeon clock had numbered two,
And Wallace Tower had sworn the fact was true;
The tide-swollen Firth, wi' sullen sounding roar,
Through the still night dashed hoarse along the shore.
All else was hushed as Nature's closed e'e;
The silent moon shone high o'er tower and tree;
The chilly frost, beneath the silver beam,
Crept, gently crusting, o'er the glittering stream."
From this scene "the drowsy dungeon clock" is removed, the old jail
having been pulled down; but Simpson's is still to be seen, a public
house at the end of the bridge on the side most distant from the town;
and Wallace Tower, I believe, however, almost wholly rebuilt since then,
and presenting now a very modernized aspect, rears itself in a distant
part of the town. Along the river side the "ancient burgh of Ayr"
presents its antiquated houses, roofs, and gables, much as they did to
the eye of Burns.
Ayr, though it stands on a flat, has still great charm of location, and
this you perceive as you set out to visit the birth-place and monument
of Burns, which lie about three miles south of Ayr. You may, if you
please, take the way along the shore; and here you have the sea with its
living billows, displaying at a distance opposite the craggy mountain
heights of Arran, and the Mull of Cantire. Northward, Troon, with its
new houses, may be seen standing on its naked promontory, and southward,
the Tower of Dunbere is a bold but somber object on an elevated knoll
on the margin of the ocean, and far out southwest, Ailsacraig is
descried, towering amid the waters. It is a fine and animated scene. It
was Sunday forenoon as I advanced over the very level ground near the
shore, toward Alloway. People were walking on the beach enjoying the
sunshine, breeze, and glittering world of waters; lovers were seated
among the broomy hillocks, children were gathering flowers amid the
crimson glare of the heather; all had an air of beauty and gladness. To
my left lay a richly-wooded country, and before me, beyond Alloway and
the Doon, stretched the airy range of the Carrick Hills. It was the
direction which I was pursuing that Tam O'Shanter took from the town to
Alloway, for the old road ran that way; but there is a new and more
direct one now from Ayr, and into that, having been shown the cottage
where Mrs. Begg, Burns's sister, still lives, I struck. This agreeable
road I soon saw diverge into two, and asked a poor man which of the two
led to Burns's monument. At the name of Burns, the poor man's face
kindled with instant animation. "I am going part of the way, sir," he
said, "and will be proud to show it you." I begged him not to put
himself at all out of his way. "Oh," said he, "I am going to look at my
potato plot which lies out here." We fell into conversation about Burns;
the way again showed a fresh branch, which was the way to his potato
field; but the poor fellow gave a hesitating look; he could not find it
in his heart to give up talking about Burns, and begged that I would do
him the honor to allow him to walk on with me. "But your potatoes, my
friend?" "Oh! they'll tak no harm, sir. The weather's very growing
weather; one feels a natural curiosity to see how they thrive, but that
will do next Sunday, if you _would_ allow me to go on with you?"
I assured him that nothing would give me greater pleasure. I only feared
that I might keep him out too long, for I must see all about Burns's
birth-place, Kirk Alloway, the Brig of Doon, the monument, and every
thing of the kind. It was now over noon, and must be his dinner hour. He
said, "No; he never had dinner on a Sunday; for years he had accustomed
himself to only two meals on that day, because he earned nothing on it,
and had ten children! But he generally took a walk out into the country,
and got a good mouthful of fresh air, and that did him a deal of good."
I looked more closely at my new companion. He was apparently sixty, and
looked like a man accustomed to dine on air. He was of a thin and
grasshopper build; his face was thin and pale, his hair grizzled; yet
there was an intelligence in his large gray eyes, but it was a sad
intelligence, one which had long kept fellowship with patience and
suffering. His gray coat, and hat well worn, and his clean but coarse
shirt-collar, turned down over a narrow band of a blue cotton tie
neckerchief, with its long ends dangling over his waistcoat, all denoted
a poor, but a careful and superior man. I can not tell what a feeling of
sympathy came over me; how my heart warmed toward the poor fellow. We
went on; gay groups of people met us, and seemed to cast looks of wonder
at the stranger and his poor associate; but I asked myself whether, if
we could know, as God knows, the hearts and merits of every individual
of those well-dressed and laughing walkers, we should find among them
one so heroic as to renounce his Sunday dinner as a perpetual practice,
because he "earned nothing on that day, and had ten children?" Was there
a man or a woman among them who, if they knew this heroic man as I now
knew him, would not desire to give him, for that one day at least, a
good dinner, and as much pleasure as they could?
"My friend," said I, "I fear you have had more than your share of
hardship in this life?"
"Nay," he replied, "he could not say that. He had had to work hard, but
what poor man had not? But he had had many comforts; and the greatest
comfort in life had been, that all his children had taken good ways; if
I don't except," and the old man sighed, "one lad, who has gone for a
soldier; and I think it a little ungrateful that he has never written to
us since he went, three years ago. Yet I hear that he is alive and well,
in Jamaica. I can not but think that rather ungrateful," he added; "but
of a' Robin Burns's poems, there's none, to my thinking, that comes up
to that one--Man was made to Mourn."
I could not help again glancing at the thin, pale figure, which went as
softly at my side as if it were a ghost, and could not wonder that Burns
was the idol of the poor throughout Scotland, and that the Sunday
wanderer of his native place had clung so fondly to the southern visitor
of the same sacred spot.
"Can you explain to me," I asked, "what it is that makes Burns such a
favorite with you all in Scotland? Other poets you have, and great ones;
out of the same class, too, you had Hogg, but I do not perceive the same
instant flash, as it were, of an electric feeling when any name is named
but that of Burns."
"I can tell," said he, "why it is. It is because he had the heart of a
man in him. He was all heart and all man; and there's nothing, at least
in a poor man's experience, either bitter or sweet, which can happen to
him, but a line of Burns springs into his mouth, and gives him courage
and comfort if he needs it. It is like a second Bible."
I was struck with the admirable criticism of the poor artisan. What
acuteness of genius is like the acuteness of a sharp experience, after
all? I found that, had I picked the whole county of Ayr, I could not
have hit on a man more clearly aware of the real genius of Burns, nor a
more excellent guide to all that related to him hereabouts. He now
stopped me. We were on the very track of Tam O'Shanter.
"Kirk Alloway was drawing nigh,
Where ghaists and houlets nightly cry.
By this time he was cross the ford,
Where in the snaw the chapman smoored:
And past the birks and meikle stane
Where drunken Charley brak 's neck-bane.
And through the whins, and by the cairn
Where hunters found the murdered bairn;
And near the thorn aboon the well
Where Mungo's mither hanged hersel."
The whins, the birks were gone: all was now one scene of richest
cultivation; but in the midst of a cottager's garden still projected the
"meikle stane" from the ground, in a potato bed. To this, by permission
of the cottager, we advanced, and from this spot my guide pointed out
the traditionary course of Tam on that awful night when
"Before him Doon pours all his floods;
The doublin' storm roars through the woods,
And lightnings flash from pole to pole."