"Where Mungo's mither hanged hersel,"
which is just on the banks of the Doon itself. Anon we reached the
cottage in which Burns was born. This stands on the right-hand side of
the road, about a quarter of a mile from Kirk Alloway and the Brig o'
Doon. It is a genuine Scotch cottage of two rooms on the ground floor,
thatched and whitewashed. It is now, and has been long, a little public
house. It stands close up to the road, and over the door is a portrait
of Burns, an evident copy from the portrait by Nasmyth, and under it, in
large and noticeable letters, "ROBERT BURNS, THE AYRSHIRE POET, WAS BORN
UNDER THIS ROOF, THE 25TH JAN., A.D. 1759. DIED A.D. 1796, AGED 37-1/2
YEARS."
It is well known to most readers that this house was built by Burns's
father, and that about a week after Robert, his first child, was born,
the roof fell in during a tempest at midnight, and that mother and child
had to be carried forth in a hurry, through the storm and darkness, to a
cottage, which still remains, not far off, on the opposite side of the
road. Robert Burns was born in what is now the kitchen, in one of those
recess beds so common in Scotch cottages. This is still shown to
visitors by the occupiers of the house. The better room, in which the
guests are entertained, that nearest to the town of Ayr, bears abundant
marks of the zeal of these visitors. The walls are well written over
with names, but not in that extraordinary manner that the walls of
Shakspeare's birth-place at Stratford are. The rage here has taken
another turn, that of cutting the names into the furniture. There are
two plane-tree tables, which are cut and carved in the most singular
completeness. There does not seem to be left space, neither on the top,
the sides, nor the legs, even for another initial. There were formerly
three of these tables, but one of them was sold some years ago. There is
a cupboard and chairs all cut over, the chairs having been obliged to be
renewed, but the fresh ones are now as much cut as ever. We were
informed by Mrs. Gondie, the widow of the old miller, John Gondie, of
Doonside Mill, who had lived in the house nearly forty years, that the
lease of the property had been bought of Burns's father, by the
Shoemaker's Company of Ayr, for one hundred and sixty guineas; but that
the property now let for £45 a year; and that the said Shoemaker's
Company wishing again to raise the rent, the widow was going to quit at
Michaelmas last, and that another person had taken the house and small
piece of ground adjoining, at a rental of £60 a year. Mrs. Gondie said
that she had been once bid £15 for one of the tables, but had refused
it; that, however, being now about to quit the premises, she had sold
the chairs and tables to a broker at Glasgow, who was announcing them as
the actual furniture of Burns, though it was well known that when
Burns's father left this house for Mount Oliphant, a few miles off, when
Robert Burns was not seven years of age, he took all his furniture with
him. Conspicuous among the carved names in this room was that of an
ambitious Peter Jones, of Great Bear Lake, North America.
Burns's father, who was, when he lived here, gardener to Mr. Ferguson,
of Doonholm, was a man of an excitable temperament, but of a most
upright disposition; and his mother, like the mothers of most remarkable
men, was a woman of clear, clever, and superior mind, of a winning
address, and full of ballads and traditions. From both sides the son
drew the elements of a poet; and we can well imagine him sitting by the
humble fireside of this cottage, and receiving into his childish heart,
from the piety of the father, and the imaginative tales of the mother,
those images of genuine Scottish life which poured themselves forth as
well in Tam O'Shanter as in the grave and beautiful Cotter's Saturday
Night.
Having insisted on my worthy guide getting some refreshment, we again
sallied forth to make a more thorough exploration of the youthful haunts
of the poet. And now, indeed, we were surrounded by mementoes of him and
of his fame on all hands. The cottage stands on a pleasant plain; and
about a quarter of a mile onward you see, on the left hand of the road,
the monument erected to his memory: a dome, surmounted with a lyre and
the significant wine-cup, and supported on Corinthian pillars. On the
opposite, that is, on the right-hand side of the road, is the old Kirk
of Alloway; beyond, away to the right, is heard the sea, while the airy
range of the Carrick Hills stretches across, closing the landscape
before you. At their feet a mass of trees marks the course of the Doon;
but, before you reach any of these objects, you pass, on your left, the
large open field in which was held the Burns Festival on the 6th of
August, 1844. The place where the wall had been broken down to admit the
procession was plainly discernible by its new mortar; and a fine crop of
corn was now waving where such thousands had, but a year before, met in
honor of the immortal exciseman.
Of this festival copious particulars are to be found in all the
newspapers of the day, but in none so complete and accurate as "The Full
Report" published by Mr. Maxwell Dick, the worthy publisher of the
Ayrshire News Letter at Irvine, one of the most enthusiastic admirers of
the genius of Burns, and of genius in general. By this report it appears
that the procession, forming on the Low Green of Ayr, near the County
Buildings, met at ten o'clock in the morning, and consisted of the
magistrates of the town, public bodies, farmers, numerous freemasons'
lodges, societies of gardeners, archers, and odd fellows, King Crispin
in his most imposing style, with Souter Johnny in character, accompanied
by attendants with banners floating, and bands playing music of Burns's
songs. In this procession were seen gentlemen and noblemen, and literary
men of the highest distinction, from all parts of the empire. It reached
a mile along the high road, three abreast. The whole number of persons
present--that is, in the procession and on the ground--was calculated at
eighty thousand. A splendid triumphal arch was erected at the cottage
where the poet was born, and, as the procession drew near it, the band
played, "There was a Lad was born in Kyle;" the vast multitude uncovered
at once, and the flags were lowered as they passed the humble but much
respected spot. Platforms were erected in various places, so that people
could get a _coup-d'oeil_ of the procession. As it approached Kirk
Alloway, the old bell, which still occupies the belfry, was set a
ringing, and continued so while the procession marched under the
triumphal arch along the new bridge. Deploying round toward the old
bridge of Doon, the circling line, partially obscured by the houses and
trees, had a truly picturesque effect; the waving banners, the music of
the bands, mellowed and echoed by "the banks and braes o' bonnie Doon,"
were deeply impressive. On reaching the Auld Brig, over which was thrown
a triumphal arch, the band struck up "Welcome, Royal Charlie," while the
procession, uncovering and lowering their flags, passed over in front
of the platform, on which stood the three sons of Burns, his sister Mrs.
Begg, her son, and two daughters. The procession occupied at least an
hour in coming from the new bridge to the field, on entering which the
band played "Duncan Gray," followed by "The Birks of Aberfeldy." A large
circle was then formed round the platform for the musicians in the
field; and the whole company, led by professional vocalists, joined in
singing "Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon," and "Auld Lang Syne." The
bands were then stationed in various parts of the field: the regimental
and Glasgow St. Andrew's bands in the center of the field; the
Kilwinning and Cumnock bands at the cottage; and the bagpipers played at
a distance from the pavilion. There were two inclosures for dancing: one
near the head of the field, and the other on the brow overlooking the
Doon. Immediately after the procession was over, the crowd were
astonished by the sudden appearance of Tam O'Shanter, "well mounted on
his gray mare Meg," and a flight of witches in full pursuit of her, till
he reached and passed the keystone of the arch of the Auld Brig. At two,
the Earl of Eglinton took the chair at the banquet in the pavilion, with
Professor Wilson as croupier. To the right of the chairman sat Robert
Burns, Esq., the eldest son of the poet; Major Burns, his youngest son;
on the left, Colonel Burns, second son of the poet; Mrs. Begg, Burns's
sister; and right and left, other members of the family, amid many noble
and distinguished persons: as Mrs. Thomson, of Dumfries, the Jessie
Lewars of the poet; Sir John M'Neill, late plenipotentiary to the court
of Persia; the lord-justice-general, the Countess of Eglinton, Alison,
the historian, Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, Robert Chambers, of Edinburgh,
Douglas Jerrold, William Thom, the poet of Inverury, &c., &c. The chairs
of the chairman and croupier were made of oaken rafters from Kirk
Alloway, and many mementoes of the poet decorated the table. The scene
in the pavilion is described as splendid, and like one of fairy-land;
and the most enthusiastic speeches were made in honor of the poet,
especially by the noble chairman and the eloquent John Wilson.
It will be seen, by those acquainted with the ground, that the
procession had thus taken a course contrived to include every object of
interest connected with Burns here. It had passed the cottage of his
birth; passed between Kirk Alloway and his monument; crossed by the new
bridge over the Doon to the side of the river, and returned over the old
bridge, so as to see all "the banks and braes o' bonnie Doon," and so
entered the field of the festival, having entirely encircled the
monument. There, in full view of all these objects, the cottage, the old
ruins of the kirk, the monument, and the banks of Doon, they
celebrated--eighty thousand persons--the festival of his honor, amid the
music of his own enchanting songs, among which were, "A Man's a Man for
a' That;" "This is na my ain House;" "Green Grow the Rashes, O;" "My
Love she's but a Lassie yet;" "What ye wha's in yon Toun."
This stirring and tumultuous expression of a nation's veneration was
gone by; silence had again fallen, as it were, with a musing sense of
the poet's glory on the scene; and with my worthy old guide I went over
the same ground leisurely, noting all its beauties and characteristics.
First, we turned into the grave-yard of Kirk Alloway. Here stood the
roofless old kirk, just such a plain, simple ruin as you see in a
hundred places in Ireland. One of the first objects that arrests your
attention is the bell in the little belfry, with a rope hanging outside,
only sufficiently low for the sexton, on any occasion of funeral, to
reach it with a hooked pole, and thus to prevent any idle person ringing
it at other times. This bell, when the parishes of Alloway and Ayr were
joined, was attempted to be carried away by the authorities of Ayr, by
no means to their honor, but the crofters of Alloway manfully rose and
resisted successfully the removal. There are plenty of open windows
where Tam O'Shanter could take a full view of the uncanny dancing-party;
and "the winnock bunker in the east," a small window, "where sat Auld
Nick, in shape o' beast," as fiddler, is conspicuous enough. The
interior of the kirk is divided by a wall. The west-end division is the
burial-place of the Cathcarts, which is kept very neat. The other end,
and where the witch-dance met Tam's astonished eyes, is now full of
briers and nettles, bearing sufficient evidence of no recent displays of
this kind. The kirk-yard is crowded with tombs, and the first memorial
of the dead which meets your eye is the headstone of the poet's father,
just before you as you enter by the stile, with this inscription:
"Sacred to the memory of William Burns, farmer in Lochlea, who died
Feb., 1784, in the 63d year of his age; and of Agnes Brown, his spouse,
who died the 14th of Jan., 1820, in the 88th year of her age. She was
interred in Bolton Church-yard, East Lothian.
"O ye whose cheek the tear of pity stains,
Draw near with pious reverence, and attend!
Here lie the loving husband's dear remains,
The tender father, and the generous friend.
The pitying heart that felt for human woe;
The dauntless heart that feared no human pride;
The friend of man, to vice alone a foe;
'For e'en his failings leaned to virtue's side.'"
This epitaph was written expressly for this tomb by Burns, the last line
being quoted from Goldsmith.
Advancing now to the new bridge, you stand between two remarkable
monuments of the poet. On your right hand, close on the banks of the
Doon, and adjoining the bridge, stands a handsome villa, in beautiful
grounds which occupy part of "the banks and braes." This is the house of
Mr. Auld, the enterprising hair-dresser of Ayr, who was the first to
recognize the genius of Thom the sculptor, then a poor stone-mason of
Ayr. Thom, seeing a picture of Tam O'Shanter in Auld's window, requested
the loan of it for a few days. Being asked by Auld what he wanted it
for, he said he had a notion that he could make a figure from it. It was
lent, and in a few days he returned with a model of Tam in clay. Mr.
Auld was so struck with the genius displayed in it, that he suggested to
Thom to complete the group by adding Souter Johnny. That was soon done;
and then, by the assistance of Mr. Auld, the well-known group was cut in
stone. The enterprising hair-dresser now prepared to set out on an
expedition of exhibition of this group, the proceeds of which, I
understand, were agreed to be equally divided between Auld, Thom, and
the committee for a monument to Burns, near his birth-place. Such was
the success of the scheme, that Thom, I am told, received £4000 as his
share of the proceeds, which, however, he soon contrived to lose by
taking stone-quarries, and entering on building schemes. Having lost his
money, he retired to America. Auld, more careful, quitted the wig-block
and lather-brush, and building himself a house, sat down as a country
gentleman opposite to the monument, which seems to be in his keeping. It
has been said that the monument committee never received any thing like
a third of the proceeds of the exhibition, or the monument might now be
opened free of cost to the public. That, however, is a point which the
committee and Mr. Auld must be best informed about. One thing is
certain, that Mr. Auld's present residence is a grand specimen of the
effect of the united genius of Burns, Thom, and Auld; an exciseman, a
stone-mason, and a barber. To the left hand of the road, opposite to
_this_ monument, stands, in a pleasant garden, the _other_ monument of
Burns, as already described, and which also, it seems, partly owed its
existence to the same bold enterprise of this barber of Ayr, who seems
actually to have had the art of "cutting blocks with a razor." In this
monument is no statue of Burns, but merely a framed copy of that
admirable colored print of Burns, published by Mr. Maxwell Dick, of
Irvine, from Nasmyth's picture; and on the table in the center, the
Bible and Testament given by Burns to his Mary at their last parting
near Montgomery Castle. These are two separate volumes, and are
displayed at the beginning of each, where Burns has placed a masonic
sign, and written his name, now nearly obliterated; adding the two
texts, Leviticus, xix., 12; Matthew, v., 33; which are, "Ye shall not
swear by my name falsely; I am the Lord;" and, "Thou shalt not forswear
thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths." These precious
volumes were known to be in the possession of the sister of Burns's
"Mary," in America; and a society of young men, ardent admirers of
Burns, resolved to regain them, if possible, for the public. This, after
great trouble and expense, they finally effected, and here they are,
objects certainly of the deepest interest.
[Illustration: [Masonic sign]]
In a separate and small building in the same garden stands the
celebrated group, by Thom, of Tam and Souter Johnny. This, however, it
being Sunday, was, by an order of the authorities of Ayr, not allowed to
be seen, though the monument was. I asked the youth who showed the
monument if he could explain to me why it was a sin to show the group,
and not a sin to show the monument on a Sunday; but the lad very
properly replied that he did not pretend to a metaphysical sagacity so
profound; his business was to _show_ the monument, and _not_ to _show_
either the group or the reason why; for that he referred me to the
superior hair-splitting piety and acumen of the corporate authorities of
Ayr.
Quitting this garden, you encounter, at the foot of the new bridge, a
new inn called Burns's Inn and Hotel, with a fine painted sign, with a
blackbird singing upon a bough, with a crook and a house, and an oak in
the center of a shield laid on branches of olive and oak; and over it
the words, "Better a small bush than nae bield." The auld brig is some
little distance up the stream, and the view from it is very beautiful.
You are surrounded by "the banks and braes o' bonnie Doon," steep, hung
with orchards and fine woodland trees. At some little distance still
further up the stream, you descry the old mill of Alloway, half buried
in umbrageous trees, and all round rise sweet woodland fields at the
feet of the hills. The bridge is well carved over with names, and
overgrown with masses of ivy. Standing on this remarkable old gray
bridge, my companion exhibited a trait of delicate and genuine feeling,
which no man of the most polished education in the school of politeness
could have surpassed. Gathering a sprig of ivy, he said, presenting it,
"May be ye would like to send this to your leddy in England; it's
gathered just frae the keystane." I accepted it with the liveliest
pleasure, and it is now carefully preserved where the good man wished
it. We now returned to Ayr, talking of Burns, his history, his poetry,
and his fine qualities all the way; and after one of the pleasantest
rambles I ever made in any company, I bid my old friend good-by at his
door, leaving in his hand a trifle to mend his Sunday supper. "But,"
said he, as I was going away, "might I request the favor of your name,
that I may know who it was that I had the honor of a walk with to
Burns's monument, when I am thinking of it?" I told him; his face passed
from its usual paleness to a deep flush; and he exclaimed, "Eh, sir! I
ken yer name, and that o' yer leddy too, right weel!" Depend upon it,
the recollection of that walk has been as pleasant to my old friend as
to myself.
The next day, with a driver well acquainted with the country, I issued
forth in a gig to visit all the various residences of Burns, between Ayr
and Mauchline. Burns, in his life, seemed like a bird leaving its nest.
He took two or three short flights till he flew quite away to Dumfries.
At every move he got further from Ayr. He was like an emigrant, still
going on and on in one direction, and his course was southeast. First he
went, that is, with his father, to Mount Oliphant, a farm about four
miles from Alloway, where he lived from his sixth to his twelfth year.
This farm has nothing particular about it. It lies on a bare ridge of
hill, an ordinary little Scotch farm-steading, with bare and treeless
fields. Then he went on to another farm--to Lochlea, still further out
on this long, high, and bleak tract of country, near Tarbolton. This
farm ruined his father, and there he died. Lochlea is a neat farm-house,
lying in a hollow more sheltered than Mount Oliphant, but still
possessing no picturesque features. In fact, the family was seeking, not
the picturesque, but a livelihood. At Lochlea, Burns lived till he was
twenty-four, and here he attended the masonic lodge at the Cross Keys,
at Tarbolton, which still remains. There he became acquainted with Mr.
David Sillar, the schoolmaster of Tarbolton, and addressed to him his
Epistle to Davie. It was about three miles from Tarbolton, but that was
nothing to Burns, full of life and poetry. The Bachelor's Society that,
with David Sillar and other young men, he formed there, had infinite
charms for him. Humble were these companions; in David Sillar's words,
"Of birth and blood we do not boast,
No gentry does our club afford,
But plowmen and mechanics we
In nature's simple dress record;"
but they were men after Burns's own heart. He judged of men as his
father had taught him:
"My father was a farmer upon the Camek Border,
And carefully he bred me up in decency and order;
He bade me act a manly part, though I had ne'er a farthing,
For without an honest, manly heart, no man was worth regarding."
It was during his abode here that he wrote John Barleycorn; Corn Riggs
are Bonnie; Winter, a Dirge; the Death of Poor Mailie; Mailie's Elegy;
and Now Whistling Winds, &c. But the love affairs he was now continually
getting into, and the dissipations that he became acquainted with at
Kirkoswald and Irvine, at which places he spent some months, rendered
his poetical growth far less than it otherwise might have been there.
One incident in his life, and one of his most beautiful poems consequent
on it, however, arose out of an attachment, which, though said to be
formed at Mauchline, was certainly cultivated here. Just below Tarbolton
lies Montgomerie Castle, beautifully situated amid its woods on the
banks of the Faile, where he fell in love with Mary Campbell. Here was
the house at which, according to his own beautiful poem, they used to
meet, and here it was that he finally took leave of her. She was
dairy-maid in the house then belonging to Colonel Hugh Montgomerie,
afterward Earl of Eglinton, and grandfather of the present earl.
"Ye banks, and braes, and streams around
The castle of Montgomerie,
Green be your woods and fair your flowers,
Your waters never drumlie.
There summer first unfaulds her robes,
And there they longest tarry,
For there I took my last farewell
Of my sweet Highland Mary."
There is a story mentioned in the Life of Burns of this parting being on
the banks of Ayr, and Cromek repeats it, adding that "the lovers stood
on each side of a small purling brook; they laved their hands in the
limpid stream, and, holding a Bible between them, pronounced their vows
to be faithful to each other."
All this may be true, for they took a day to this final solitary
enjoyment of each other's society in the woods before parting. They
might wander by the Ayr, and so on up to the Faile, and at some small
rivulet on the way perform this simple and affecting ceremony. Mary was
going to the Western Highlands to see her friends before she married
Robert Burns, but she died on her way back, and they never met again.
This Bible, as we have seen, has been recovered, and is deposited in the
monument at Alloway Wherever this ceremony, however, took place, the
parting assuredly took place here. Burns says, not only that "there I
took my last farewell," but also
"How sweetly bloomed the gay green birk,
How rich the hawthorn's blossom,
As, underneath the fragrant shade,
I clasped her to my bosom."
There still stands the thorn, called by all the country "Highland Mary's
Thorn."
The house and park are sold or leased by the Earl of Eglinton to a
solicitor in Ayr. My driver appeared afraid of going into the park,
saying "the writer," that is, the solicitor, was a queer fellow, and
would not let any body go to the thorn, and certainly a large board at
each park gate, warning all persons to avoid those hallowed precincts,
appeared to confirm the man's opinion; but, having come so far, I did
not mean to pass without a glance at the parting scene of Burns and
Highland Mary. I bade him drive down to the house, where I was speedily
assured by the servants about that I was quite at liberty to go to the
tree. "How shall I know it?" "Oh! a child may know it: it is all hacked,
and the twigs broken, by people who carry away some of it to keep." By
these signs I readily recognized the tree. It is not far from the house,
close to the carriage drive, and on the top of the slope that descends
to the Faile, which murmurs on beneath its sweet woodland shade.[30]
The last abode of Burns in Ayrshire was at Mossgiel. This is some four
miles beyond Tarbolton, and close to Mauchline, which is merely a large
village. Mossgiel farm lies, as it were, at the end of that long, high,
barren ridge of hills, which extends almost all the way from Ayr
thither, and on which Burns's father had sought a poor living, and found
ruin. It stands near the line of the slope which descends into
Mauchline, and overlooks a large extent of bleak and bare country, and
distant, bare hills. In the vales of the country, however, lie many
scenes of great beauty and classic fame. Such are the banks of the Ayr,
which winds on deep between its braes and woods, like the Nith, the
Doon, and the higher Clyde. Such are Stair, Logan, Crukerne, Catrine,
Dugald Stewart's place, and many others.
The farm of Mossgiel, which consists of about 118 acres, lies, as
observed, high, and as Gilbert, the brother of Burns, described it, "on
a cold, wet bottom." The farms occupied by the Burns family in this part
of the country were all of a thankless and ungenial kind; in fact, they
lacked the means to command better. The two brothers, Robert and
Gilbert, had taken this farm some time before their father's death, in
the hope of assisting the family in that poverty which came still after
them, spite of the most laborious exertion, like an armed man, and which
was weighing their father to the grave. At his death they removed
altogether from Lochlea, and with their mother and sisters became here
one household. Here Burns made the firmest resolves of steadiness,
industry, and thriving; but the seasons were against him, and he soon
became mixed up with all the dissipations of Mauchline, where he
established a club after the fashion of that at Tarbolton. Very soon,
too, he plunged into the midst of Church disputes, in which his friend
Gavin Hamilton, a lawyer of the place, was personally embroiled. Here he
wrote The Holy Tuilzie, Holy Fair, Holy Willie's Prayer, The Ordination,
The Kirk's Alarm--those scalping poems, in which he lays bare to the
skull bone, bigotry, hypocrisy, and all sanctimonious bitterness in
religion. Here he fell in love with Jean Armour, the daughter of a
stone-mason of Mauchline, who, after many troubles, and much opposition
on the part of the family, became afterward his wife. Here he wrote the
greater part of his poems, and his very finest ones, and here he broke
forth upon the world like a new-risen sun, his poems, which were first
published at Kilmarnock, attracting such extraordinary attention, that
he was called to Edinburgh, and a new and more complete edition there
published, while he himself was introduced as a sort of miracle to the
highest circles of aristocracy and literature. The four years which he
lived here, though they were sinking him, in a pecuniary point of view,
into such a slough of despair that he seriously resolved to emigrate to
the West Indies, and only published his poems to raise the means, were,
as regarded his fame, glorious and most interesting years. It was here
that he might be said, more expressly than any where else,
"To walk in glory and in joy,
Following his plow along the mountain side;
for, spite of the iron destiny which seemed to pursue him, and in an
ungenial soil and the most untoward seasons, to endeavor to crush him
with "carking care," he was full of life and vigor, and often rose in
the entrancement of his spirit above all sense of earth and its
darkness. By the testimony of his cotemporaries, there were few that
could vie with him in all the operations of the farm. In mowing,
reaping, binding after the reapers, thrashing, or loading, there were
few who could compete with him. He stood five feet ten in height, and
was of singular strength and activity. He prided himself on the
straightness of the furrow that he drew, and the skill with which he
threw his corn in sowing. On one occasion, a man having succeeded in a
hard strife in setting up as many shocks in a given time, said, "There,
I am not far behind this time;" to which Burns replied, "In one thing,
John, you are still behind; I made a song while I was stooking." Allan
Cunningham says that his father, who was steward to Miller of
Dalswinton, Burns's landlord, and lived just opposite to him at
Ellisland, declared that "he had the handsomest cast of the hand in
sowing corn that he ever saw on a furrowed field." It was here, then, at
Mossgiel, that, young, vigorous, and full of desire to advance in
worldly matters, he worked assiduously with his brother Gilbert in the
fields, undivided in his attentions by the duties of the Excise. But
poetry, spite of all resolves to the contrary, came over him like a
flood. As his hand worked, his heart was full of inspiration, and as
Gilbert held the plow, Robert would come and walk beside him, and repeat
what he had just composed; or as they went with the cart to carry out
corn or bring home coals, he would astonish him with some such display.
"The verses to the Mouse and the Mountain Daisy," says Gilbert, "were
composed on these occasions, and while the author was holding the plow.
I could point out the spot where each was composed. Holding the plow was
a favorite situation with Robert for poetic composition, and some of his
best verses were produced while he was at that exercise." With what
interest, then, do we look over the fields at Mossgiel, scarcely an inch
of which has not been strode over by Burns, while engaged at once in
turning up the soil, sowing or gathering its crops, and in working out,
in the depth of his mind, those compositions which were to remain for
all time the watchwords of liberty and of noble thought. Besides the
polemic poems already spoken of, here he wrote Halloween; Address to the
De'il; Death and Dr. Hornbrook, a satire on the poor schoolmaster and
self-appointed apothecary, Wilson of Tarbolton, which drove him from the
place, but only to thrive in Glasgow; The Jolly Beggars; Man was made to
Mourn; The Vision; The Cotter's Saturday Night, which he very
appropriately repeated to Gilbert during a Sunday afternoon walk.
The very interesting scene of the creation of these exquisite poems lies
on the left hand of the road proceeding from Tarbolton to Mauchline.
The house stands at a field's distance from the road. It is a thatched
house with but and ben, just as it was, and the buildings behind it
forming two wings, exactly as he built his house at Ellisland. To the
northwest the house is well sheltered with fine, full-grown trees. A
handsome young mother, the farmer's wife, worthy for her comely and
intelligent look to have been celebrated by Burns, told me that great
numbers of people came to see the place, and that it was very much as
Burns left it. There were the barn, the byre, the garden near, in all
which the poet had labored like any other son of earth for his daily
bread, and on the yearly allowance--for every one of the family had a
specific allowance for clothes and pocket-money--of seven pounds, which,
says his brother, he never exceeded! Very extravagant he could not have
been. You see the ingle where he sat and composed some of his most
pathetic and most humorous pieces. It is said to be in the spence, a
better room, which has a boarded floor, and the recess beds so common in
Scotland, that he chiefly wrote. Who can contemplate this humble room,
and recall the image of the young poet, with a heart of melancholy, here
inditing, Man was made to Mourn, or his Vision, without the liveliest
emotion? There is no feeling of utter sadness more strongly expressed
than in the opening of the Vision.
"The sun had closed the winter day,
The curlers quat their roaring play,
An' hunger'd mawkin ta'en her way
To kail-yard green,
While faithless snaws ilk step betray
Whare she has been.
"The threshers weary flinging tree
The lee-lang day had tired me;
And when the day had closed his e'e
Far i' the west,
Ben i' the spence, right pensively,
I gaed to rest
"There, lanely, by the ingle cheek,
I sate and eyed the spewing reek,
That filled with hoast-provoking smeek,
The auld clay biggin;
And heard the restless rattons squeak
About the riggin.
"All in this mottie, misty clime,
I backward mused on wasted time,
How I had spent my youthful prime
An' done naething
But stringin blethers up in rhyme,
For fools to sing.
"Had I to gud advice but harkit,
I might, by this, hae led a markit,
Or strutted in a bank and clarkit
My cash account.
While here, half mad, half fed, half sarket,
Is a' th' amount."
Gilbert, it seems, continued on this farm after Robert left for
Ellisland till 1800; and the next tenant had occupied it till but a year
or two ago, when the present young people came in.
Mauchline, at the distance of a few minutes, abounds with recollections
of Burns. There is the inn where Burns used to meet his merry club.
There is the church-yard where the scene of the Holy Fair is laid,
though the old church which stood in Burns's time has disappeared, and a
new one taken its place. Opposite to the church-yard gates runs the
street called "The Cowgate," up which he makes Common Sense escape; just
by is the house of "Posie Nansie," where Burns fell in with the "Jolly
Beggars;" not far off is the public house of John Dow, that Burns and
his companions frequented at the opening of the Cowgate. Posie Nansie,
or Nance Tinnock's, was the house mentioned in the Holy Fair, where the
public crowded in during the intervals of the service, having a back
door most convenient into the area.
"Now but an' ben, the change-house fills
Wi' yill-caup commentators;
Here's crying out for bakes and gills,
An' there the pint stoup clatters."
Every body can tell of the haunts and places of Burns and his jolly
companions in Mauchline. The women came out of their houses as they saw
me going about, and were most generously anxious to point out every
noted spot. Many of the older people remembered him. "A fine, handsome
young fellow, was he not?" I asked of an old woman that would show me
where Jean Armour lived. "Oh! jus a black-avised chiel," said she,
hurrying up a narrow street parallel to the Cowgate; "but here lived
Jean Armor's father. Come in, come," added she, unceremoniously opening
the door, when an old dame appeared, who occupied the house. "I am only
going to show the gentleman where Robin Burns's Jean lived. Come along,
sir, come along," continued she, hastening as unceremoniously up stairs;
"ye maun see where the bairns were born. Ha! ha! ha!" "Ha! ha! ha!"
screamed the old dame of the house, apparently highly delighted; "ay,
show the gentleman! show him! he! he! he!" So up went my free-making
guide, up went I, and up came the old lady of the house. "There! there!"
exclaimed the first old woman, pointing to a recess bed in one of the
chambers, "there were three o' Robin Burns's bairns born. It's true,
sir, as I live!" "Ay, gude faith is it," re-echoed the old lady of the
house, and the two gossips again were very merry. "But ye maun see where
Rob an' Jean were married!" so out of the house the lean and nimble
woman again hurried, and again, at a rapid pace, led me down another
narrow street just to the back of what they call the castle, Gavin
Hamilton's old house. It was in Burns's time Gavin Hamilton's office,
and in that office Burns was married. It is now a public house.
Having taken a survey of all the scenes of Burns's youthful life here,
I proceeded to that house where he was always so welcome a guest--the
house of Gavin Hamilton itself. Though called the castle, it is, in
fact, a mere keep, with an ordinary house attached to it in a retired
garden. The garden is surrounded by lofty walls, with a remarkably large
tree in the center. The house, a mere cottage, is huddled down in the
far right-hand corner, and opposite to it stands the old keep, a
conspicuous object as you descend the hill into the town. It is
maintained in good order, and used as a laundry. A bare-legged lassie
was spreading out her wash on the grass-plot, who informed me that not
only was Gavin Hamilton dead, but his son too, and that his son's widow
and her children were living there. I was shown the room where Burns,
one Sunday, on coming in after kirk, wrote the satirical poem of the
Calf, on the clergyman. An ordinary little parlor.
In traversing the streets of Mauchline, it was impossible to avoid not
only recalling all the witty jollity of Burns here, but his troubles
that wellnigh drove him from the land. The opposition of Jean Armour's
family; the tearing up of her secret marriage-lines by herself in her
despair; Burns's distraction, his poverty, his hidings from the
myrmidons of the law, and his daily thirteen miles' walk to correct the
proofs of his poems at Kilmarnock, to save postage. But now the Muse
which had made him poor refused to permit him to quit his native land.
Out burst the sun of his glory, and our scene changes with this change
to Edinburgh.[31]
To describe all the haunts of Burns in Edinburgh were a long affair.
They were the houses of all the great and gay: of the Gordons, the
Hamiltons, the Montgomeries, of the learned, and the beautiful. The
celebrated Duchess of Gordon, at that time at the zenith of beauty and
fashion, was one of his warmest admirers, and had him to her largest
parties. The young plowman of Ayrshire sat hob-nobbing in the temples of
splendor and luxury with the most distinguished in every walk of life.
Yet his haunts also lay equally among the humble and the
undistinguished. Burns was true to his own maxim, "a man's a man for a'
that;" and where there were native sense, wit, and good-humor, there he
was to be found, were it even in a cellar with only a wooden stool to
sit on. At his first arrival in Edinburgh he took up his quarters with a
young Ayrshire acquaintance, Richmond, a writer's apprentice, in the
house of a Mrs. Carfrae, Baxter's Close, Lawn Market, where he had a
share of the youth's room and bed. From the most splendid entertainments
of the aristocracy he described himself as groping his way at night
through the dingy alleys of the "gude town to his obscure lodgings, with
his share of a deal table, a sanded floor, and a chaff bed, at eighteen
pence a week." This was during the winter and spring of 1786-7, on his
first visit to Edinburgh, where he became the great fashionable lion,
and while his new edition by Creech was getting out. In the spring,
finding his popularity had brought him so much under the public eye that
his obscure lodgings in the Lawn Market were not quite befitting him, he
went and lodged with his new acquaintance, William Nicol, one of the
masters of the High School, who lived in the Buccleugh Road. In the
_winter_ of 1787, on his second visit to Edinburgh, he had lodgings in a
house at the entrance of James's Square, on the left hand. As you go up
East Register-street, at the end of the Register House, you see the end
of a house at the left-hand side of the top of the street. There is a
perpendicular row of four windows: the top window belongs to the room
Burns occupied. Here it was that he was visited by the lady with whom at
this time he corresponded under the name of Sylvander, and she with him
as Clarinda. His leg had been hurt by an overturn of a carriage by a
drunken coachman, and he was laid up some time, and compelled to use
crutches. Allan Cunningham tells us that this lady "now and then visited
the crippled bard, and diverted him by her wit, and soothed him by her
presence." She was the Mrs. Mac of his toasts. A blithe, handsome, and
witty widow, a great passion or flirtation grew up between Burns and
her. In one of his letters to his friend, Richard Brown, December 30,
1787, he says, "Almighty love still reigns and revels in my bosom, and I
am at this moment ready to hang myself for a young Edinburgh widow." In
a letter of their correspondence which has recently been published, he
bids Clarinda look up at his window as she occasionally goes past, and
in another complains that she does not look high enough for a bard's
lodgings, and so he perceives her only gazing at one of the lower
windows. If we are to believe the stanza of hers quoted by Burns, we
must suppose Clarinda to have been unhappily married:
"Talk not of love--it gives me pain--
For love has been my foe;
He bound me with an iron chain,
And plunged me deep in woe."
If it be true, as Allan Cunningham surmises, that those inimitable
verses in the song of "Ae fond kiss, and then we sever," which expresses
the pain of a final parting better than any other words ever did, have
reference to Clarinda, then Burns must have been passionately attached
to her indeed:
"Who shall say that Fortune grieves him,
While the star of hope she leaves him?
Me, nae cheerfu' twinkle lights me;
Dark despair around benights me.
Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met, or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted."
Of the generous and true-hearted disposition of Clarinda, we shall
possess a juster idea when we reflect that Burns was not at this time
any longer the lion of the day. The first warm flush of aristocratic
flattery was over. The souls of the great and fashionable had subsided
into their native icy contempt of peasant merit. "What he had seen and
endured in Edinburgh," says honest Allan Cunningham, "during his second
visit, admonished him regarding the reed on which he leaned, when he
hoped for a place of profit and honor from the aristocracy on account of
his genius. On his first appearance the doors of the nobility opened
spontaneously, 'on golden hinges turning,' and he ate spiced meats, and
drank rare wines, interchanging nods and smiles 'with high dukes and
mighty earls.' A colder reception awaited his second coming: the doors
of lords and ladies opened with a tardy courtesy; he was received with a
cold and measured stateliness, was seldom requested to stop, seldom to
repeat his visit; and one of his companions used to relate with what
indignant feelings the poet recounted his fruitless calls and his
uncordial receptions in the good town of Edinburgh."
It is related, that on one occasion being invited to dine at a
nobleman's, he went, and, to his astonishment, found that he was not to
dine with the guests, but with the butler! After dinner he was sent for
into the dining-room; and a chair being set for him near the bottom of
the table, he was desired to sing a song. Restraining his indignation
within the bounds of outward appearance, Burns complied, and he sung,
'Is there, for honest poverty,
Wha hangs his head and a' that?
The coward slave, we pass him by,
And dare be poor for a' that.
For a' that, and a' that,
A man's a man for a' that!
"You see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,
(_Pointing to the nobleman at the head of the table_)
Who struts, and stares, and a' that,
Though hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a coof for a' that.
For a' that, and a' that,
A man's a man for a' that."
As the last word of these stanzas issued from his lips, he rose, and not
deigning the company a syllable of adieu, marched out of the room and
the house.
Burns himself expressed in some lines to Clarinda all this at this very
moment:
"In vain would Prudence, with her decent sneer,
Point to the censuring world and bid me fear:
Above that world on wings of love I rise,
I know its worst, and can that worst despise.
Wronged, slandered, shunned, unpitied, unredressed,
The mocked quotation of the scorners' jest,
Let Prudence direst bodements on me fall--
Clarinda, rich reward! o'erpays them all."
But Clarinda could never be Burns's. To say the least of it, his
attachment to her was one of the least defensible things of his life.
Jean Armour had now the most inviolable claims upon him, and, in fact,
as soon as his leg was well enough, he tore himself from the
fascinations of Clarinda's society, went to Mauchline, and married Jean.
But we must not allow ourselves to follow him till we have taken a peep
at the house of Clarinda at this time, where Burns used to visit her,
and where, no doubt, he took his melancholy farewell. This house is in
Potter's Row; now old and dingy-looking, but evidently having been at
one time a superior residence. It is a house memorable on more accounts
than one, having been occupied by General Monk while his army lay in
Edinburgh, and the passage which goes under it to an interior court is
still called the General's Entrance. To the street the house presents
four gabled windows in the upper story, on the tops of which stand a
rose, thistle, fleur-de-lis, with a second rose or thistle to make out
the four. The place is now inhabited by the poorest people; and on a
little shop window in front is written up, "Rags and Metals bought!" The
flat which was occupied by Clarinda is now divided into two very poor
tenements. In the room which used to be Clarinda's sitting-room, a poor
woman was at once busy with her work and two or three very little
children. My companion told her that her house had been once frequented
by a great man; she said, "Oh yes, General Monk." When he, however,
added that he was then thinking of Robert Burns, this was news to her,
and seemed to give to the wretched abode quite a charm in her eyes.
Clarinda lived to a great age, as a Mrs. Maclehose, and only died a few
years ago. Mrs. Howitt and myself were once introduced to her by our
kind friend, Mr. Robert Chambers, at her house near the Calton Hill; and
a very characteristic scene took place. The old lady, evidently charmed
with our admiration of Burns, and warmed up by talking of past days,
declared that we should drink out of the pair of glasses which Burns had
presented to her in the days of their acquaintance. She brought these
sacred relics out of the cupboard, and rang for the servant to bring in
wine. An aged woman appeared, who, on hearing that we were to drink out
of Burns's glasses, which stood ready on the table, gave a look as if
sacrilege were going to be committed, took up the glasses without a
word, replaced them in the cupboard, locking them up, and brought us
three ordinary wine-glasses to take our wine out of. It was in vain for
Mrs. Maclehose to remonstrate; the old and self-willed servant went away
without deigning a reply, with the key in her pocket.
Disheartened and chagrined, treated with the utmost contempt by those
who once flattered and lionized him beyond bounds, Burns now turned his
back on Edinburgh, and went to seek that obscure country life which he
saw well enough was his destiny. The man to whom that very city was to
raise a splendid monument on the Calton Hill; the man who was to have
monuments raised to his honor in various spots of his native land; the
man to whose immortal memory jubilees were to be held, to which people
of all ranks were to flock by eighty thousands at a time; the man who
was to take the highest rank of all the poets of Scotland,
"Whose lines are mottoes of the heart,
Whose truths electrify the sage,"
in the eloquent words of Campbell, and whose genius was to be the
dearest memory of his countrymen in regions of the earth whither their
adventurous spirit leads them, now, with a sad and wounded heart,
pursued his way homeward with an exciseman's appointment in his pocket,
the highest and only gift of his country. Burns knew and felt that his
genius had a just claim to a good and honorable post in his native land,
and his remaining letters sufficiently testify that from this hour the
arrow of blighted ambition rankled in his heart, which never ceased its
irritation till it had pulled down his gallant strength, and sent him to
an early grave. He married his Jean, and chose his farm on the banks of
the Nith, as Allan Cunningham's father remarked to him at the time, not
with a farmer's, but a poet's choice. But here, half farmer, half
exciseman, poverty came rapidly upon him once more; in three years' time
only he quitted it, a man ruined in substance and constitution, and went
to depend on his excise salary of £70 a year in the town of Dumfries.
I visited this farm in August, 1845. The coach from Dumfries to Glasgow
set me down at Ellisland, lying about seven miles from Dumfries. Here I
found a road running at right angles from the highway at a field's
distance, and saw the gray roof of the farm homestead and its white
chimneys peeping over the surrounding trees. The road, without gate or
fence, leads you across a piece of watery ground, one of those hollows
left undrained for the growth of what they call bog-hay, that is, rushes
and coarse grass, which they give to the cows in winter. This was quite
gay with cotton-rush, bog-beans, orchises, and other bog flowers, and
with its fragrant marginal fringe of meadow sweet. After about a hundred
yards, the road becomes a lane, inclosed on one side by a rough stone
wall, and on the other by a tall hedge, with a row of flourishing ashes,
each fence standing on a bold bank well hung with broom. The barley
stood green on the one hand, and the hay in cock in the field on the
other, and all had a pleasant summer air and feeling about it.
Advancing up this lane, I soon stood on the ascent, and saw the
farm-house shining out white from among its trees, and half a dozen
young men and women busily hoeing turnips in the adjoining fields. The
farm, in fact, is a very pleasant farm. It lies somewhat high, and its
fields swell and fall in a very agreeable manner, though it is still low
compared to the hills that rise around it at a distance, green and
cultivated, but bare. It is distinguished from all the farms round it by
being so completely planted with hedgerow trees, particularly ashes and
larches. The land is light, yet tolerably fertile--is dry and healthy.
Close below the house sweeps along that fine vale of the Nith, with all
its rich meadows and woods, its stately old houses, and its river dark
and swift, overhung with noble and verdurous trees. This seems the place
where Burns might have been happy, had happiness and prosperity been
easily secured by a temperament and circumstances such as his. He had a
home fit for a poet, though humble. It was a home amid the goodliness
and the godliness of nature. It was the home of a brave, a free, and an
honest man--of a great man and great poet, whose name and fame were
allowed and honored by the sound hearts and sound minds, if not by the
baser and vainer ones of his country. Here he was a man and a farmer;
and both man and farmer are gentlemen, if they choose to be so. He had
no need to doff his bonnet, or to pull it in shame over his brow before
any man, so that he cultivated his acres and the glorious soil of his
intellect with the heart and hand of an enthusiast in his labor. He had
built his own bower in the spot chosen by himself, in a spot beautiful
and pure, and calm as a poet could desire; and had brought to it the
woman of his love, and his children were springing up around him, making
the green and woodland banks of the Nith ring with the rapture of their
young sports. He had a stalwart frame, and a giant intellect, and a
heart true in its feelings to the divinity of human nature, to the
divinity within him, to the divinity of those aims, and objects, and
truths for which man exists, and for whose advance and illustration the
poet is, beyond all men, born and endowed. Ah! if he could but have
guided with a safe hand those passions which are given to feed and
kindle the glorious impulses of the glorious nature of the poet, the
friend, and prophet, and counselor of mankind, what a great and what a
happy man might he have lived and died here. If he had really
"Followed his plow along the mountain side,"
instead of the exciseman's horse over the hills and through the hamlets
of the country round, to what a venerable age might he have lived among
his children and his admiring countrymen. But the tact for business and
the turn for prudence, how rarely _can_ they exist with the fervid
temperament which has to evolve the living meteors of poetry. The
volcano _will_ have its crater and its desolations, and not green and
peaceful ridges of peace; particularly in this case, where the poet had
been called out of the ranks of the poor, and had had at once to contend
against the flatteries of exaltation unprepared by the discipline of
education. Burns and Hogg may therefore be excused, where Byron could
not stand; Ebenezer Elliott is almost the only instance of contrary
success.
One can not, however, see this Arcadian scene, this sort of Sabine farm,
so well calculated for the "_otium cum dignitate_" of the poet, without
feeling one's heart wrung at the idea that it was a vain gift--a haven
of peace only offered to a struggling and doomed swimmer; and that the
foul exciseman craft, and the degrading dipstick, and the whisky-firkin
were in the rear. The very next neighbors of Burns were Mr. Miller, of
Dalswinton, and Mr. Riddell, of Friars' Carse. There he went to meet,
and dine, and revel with distinguished guests. Heavens! why should he
not have been able to go there as the honest British farmer, and not as
the exciseman? Could he feel that he was a poet, and fit society for the
wealthy, the refined, and the learned, and that he was not degraded? He
was glorious--and an exciseman. Here he wrote Mary in Heaven, and
mounted his jaded steed and trotted off to the hell of whisky
distilleries and whisky dram-shops. He wrote here, in one day, Tam
O'Shanter, in a fever of laughter and excitement, and perhaps the next
day would repeat the lines to the rude and fuddled rabble of a "public,"
where he was in the way of his business and his ruin. There is something
so anomalous in the genius and the grade, in the magnificent endowments
and the bare necessities of Robert Burns, that one can not now conceive
how they could have been permitted to occur by his fellow-men, or
tolerated by himself. To think of him here, in his own white farm-house,
like a dove's nest, amid its green and overshadowing leaves, and hung
over the pure lapsing waters; and then of him in that little dirty house
in Dumfries, in that street of tramps and beggars, living degraded,
despised, and persecuted, and dying the poorest exciseman and greatest
poet of his country! In the hour of his death the soul of his country
awoke with one great throb to the consciousness of who and what he was;
what a pity that the revelation did not come a little sooner! And this
I say not to taunt his country with it. The sense of the national
treatment of Robert Burns has been expressed with such manly eloquence
by his countrymen, Lockhart, Wilson, and Allan Cunningham, that it needs
not us English to cast a single stone, who have the memory of Chatterton
among us. All great nations have similar sins to answer for. Scotland
does not stand alone; but there is something so peculiarly strange in
the fate of Burns, and that comes over one as we tread the ground that
he had chosen for his home, and the floor of the house that he built,
that it has forced me involuntarily to follow my own feelings instead of
my descriptions.
The farm, as I have said, is a very pleasant one. Burns is supposed to
have chosen the particular situation of his house not only for its fine
situation on the banks of the river, and overlooking the vale and
country round, but on account of a beautiful spring which gushes from
the slope just below the house. The ground-plan of his house is very
much like that of most Scotch farms. The buildings form three sides of a
quadrangle. The house and buildings are only one story high, white, and
altogether a genuine Scotch steading. The house is on the lower side,
next to the river. Burns's bed-room has yet two beds in it, of that sort
of cupboard fashion, with check curtains, which are so often seen in
Scotch farm-houses. The humble rooms are much as they were in his time.
Near the house, and running parallel with the river, is a good large
garden which he planted. The side of the farm-yard opposite to the house
is pleasantly planted off with trees. The farm is just as it was, about
one hundred acres. By places it exhibits that stony soil which made
Burns call it "the riddlings of creation," and say that when a plowed
field was rolled it looked like a paved street; but still it carries
good crops. Burns had it for £50 a year, or ten shillings an acre. I
suppose the present tenant pays three times the sum, and is proud of his
bargain. He observed it was an ill wind that blew nobody any profit.
"Mr. Burns," said he, "had the farm on lease for ninety years, and had
he not thrown it up, I should not have been here now." The farmer seemed
a very sensible man, and though he was just mounting his gig to go on
business to Dumfries, he stopped, and would go over the farm and house,
and point out every thing to me. He said what Lockhart and Cunningham
say, that Burns had so many servants that they ate and drank all that
came off the farm. "The maids baked new bread, and the men ate it hot
with ale." But it is said, too, on the spot, that most of these servants
were relatives, and that presents of whisky and other good things were
sent from far and near to Burns, and that, while he was absent on his
excise rounds, they sat in the house and drank, and ate to it, instead
of being at work. Burns once observed to his neighbor, the next farmer,
that he wondered how it was that the farm left no surplus for rent; and
the farmer said, "Why, Mr. Burns, it would be a wonder if it did, for
your servants can not eat it and leave it for rent too." It is said,
also, that being once invited to dinner at Dalswinton House, and not
coming, the guests asked how he was getting on. Mr. Miller said he hoped
very well, "for," added he, "I think I have set him up." This being
repeated to Burns, is said to have hurt his proud feelings extremely,
and to have induced him to remark that he did not like to live on the
estate of a man who thought he had set him up. Long he did not live
there--more's the pity. The good-will of his haughty landlord had gone
before.
It was here, too, that the story is told of his being found by two
Englishmen fishing in the Nith. "On a rock that projected into the
stream, they saw a man angling. He had a cap of foxskin on his head, a
loose great-coat fixed round him by a belt, from which hung an enormous
Highland broadsword: it was Burns." The story is likely enough. The
banks of the Nith here are steep, and full of wild thickets; and one may
very well imagine Burns not being over particular in his toilet while
pursuing his amusement in this solitude.
It was one of his delights to range along these steep river banks; and
it was along them, between the house and the fence at the bottom of the
field, down the river, that he paced to and fro as he composed Tam
O'Shanter. Mrs. Burns relates, "that observing Robert walking with long,
swinging strides, and apparently muttering as he went, she let him alone
for some time. At length she took the children with her, and went forth
to meet him. He seemed not to observe her, but continued his walk. On
this," said she, "I stepped aside with the bairns among the broom, and
past us he came, his brow flushed, and his eyes shining; he was reciting
these lines:
'Now Tam, O Tam! had thae been queans
A' plump an' strapping, i' their teens;
Their sarks, instead o' creeshie flannen,
Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linnen!
Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair,
That ance were plush, o' gude blue hair
I wad hae gi'en them aff my hurdies,
For ae blink o' the bonnie burdies.'
I wish ye had but seen him! He was in such ecstasy that the tears were
happing down his cheeks." He had taken writing materials with him, and,
leaning on a turf fence which commanded a view down the river, he
committed the poem to paper, walked home, and read it in great triumph
at the fireside. The remains of this turf fence may be seen to this day
in the shape of a green bank, close above the river, under the shade of
a narrow plantation of larches which bounds the field. The farmer said
that Professor Wilson, when he visited the spot, rolled himself on the
bank, saying it was worth while trying to catch any remains of genius
and humor that Burns might have left there.
The farmer said--what, indeed, Allan Cunningham states--that when Burns
came the farm was all open; "there were no dikes," walls, or fences.
That he introduced the first dairy of Ayrshire cows, all splendid
cattle, some of them being presents from such friends as the Dunlops,
&c. Presents or no presents, poor Burns laid out on the farm, in his
first year, all the proceeds of his Edinburgh edition of his poems, and
never saw them again.
The view from the house is very charming. The river runs clear and fleet
below, broad as the Thames at Hampton Court, or the Trent at Nottingham,
and its dark trees hang far along it over its waters. Beyond the stream
lie the broad, rich meadows and house of Dalswinton, a handsome mansion
of red freestone aloft amid its woods, and still beyond and higher up
the river rise still bolder hills. The very next residence upward on the
same side of the river is Friar's Carse, the seat of Burns's friend, Mr.
Riddell, into whose grounds he had a private key, so that he could enjoy
all the beauty and solitude of his woods at pleasure, or take the
nearest cut to the house. Up the valley, about two miles or so, is the
farm-house belonging to his friend Nicol, of the High School, where
"Willie brewed a peck o' malt,
And Rob and Allan cam to see."
Friar's Carse deserves a few more words before we shift to the last sad
scene, Dumfries. It is a beautiful estate, which you enter from the
Glasgow road by a neat lodge, and advance a quarter of a mile, perhaps,
along a carriage drive, one side of which is planted with shrubs and
flowers, and the other consists of the steep, wild bank of a fine wood.
The way winds on, and here and there you have an old stone gray cross,
or old picturesque saint, or such thing, which has a good effect. At
last you emerge in an open meadow, surrounded by fine hills and woods,
and at the head of which, on a green and graceful esplanade, stands a
good, though not very large house. In the meadows, which are of great
extent, roves a numerous herd of as fine cattle as ever roamed the meads
of Asphodel, and much finer, I suspect, for they are Ayrshire cows of
the most splendid description; and some very fine trees rear their heads
to beautify the ground. As you approach the house, it is along the foot
of a beautiful slope enriched by noble old trees. Behind the house there
is a green and airy sort of table-land, on which flower-stands of rustic
work, filled with roses and geraniums, stand, and down which money-wort,
with all its golden blossoms, streams, and then the ground sinks rapidly
into a deep dell full of tall trees, and containing a garden of the old
pleached walk kind, and which, through the latticed gate, gives you such
a peep at its beauties as enchants you.
In this house used to live Mr. Riddell. Here the Whistle was caroused
for, and here the original copy of Burns's poem on the subject is kept
still. Pity it was that the lady of the house, a young widow, Mrs.
Crichton, was just bowling out at her lodge gates as I walked in, or I
would have made bold to call and request the favor of a sight of this
paper. But the butler assured me that there it was; and in the pine
wood, on the side by which you enter, are the remains of the hermitage
where Burns wrote the well-known lines on the window. The pine wood has
grown; there are silver firs that need not shame to claim kindred with
those of the Black Forest; but the hermitage is gone down. A single
gable, a few scattered stones, and a mass of laurels that have grown
high and hidden it, are all that remain of the hermitage, which I only
found by dint of long traversing the dusky wood.
But Burns is gone; Miller of Dalswinton is gone; Riddell of Friar's
Carse is gone; their estates are in other families; and it is to be
hoped that the exciseman's gauging-stick is gone too. I do not see it
hung aloft in any hall. I dare say the sons of Burns have not preserved
it, as the walking-stick of Sir Walter Scott now hangs aloft in the
study at Abbotsford. But the memory of the poet and his friends lives
all over these walks, and meadows, and woods, more livingly than ever.
It is the quick spirit of the place. Poetry is not dead here. It is the
soul and haunting shadow of these fair and solemn scenes, and a thousand
years hence will startle young and beating hearts as the wood-pigeon
dashes out through the magic hush of the forest, and the streamlet leaps
down the mossy stone, and laughs and glitters in the joyous glance of
the sun. The exciseman's stick is turned into the magic wand of nature,
and there will be bitter satire, and deep melancholy, and wonder and
love, as it waves a thousand times self-multiplied in the bough of the
pine-tree, and the bent of the grass, while the heart of man can suffer
or enjoy. You see that already in every thing. Burns no longer walks on
one side of the market-place of Dumfries, solitary and despised, while
the great and gay crowd and flutter on the other; but as the daily coach
rolls on its way, the coachman, pointing with his whip, says softly,
"That is the Farm of Ellisland!" And every man and woman, every
trade-traveler and servant-maid says, "Where?" All rise up and look,
_and there is a deep silence_.
For that silence, and the thoughts that live in it, who would not have
lived, and suffered, and been despised? It is the triumph of genius and
the soul of greatness over the freaks of fortune, and even over its own
sins and failings. It is something to have walked over the farm of
Ellisland; it is still more to have stood on the spot in his farm-yard
where the heart of Burns rose up in a flame of hallowed affection to
Mary in Heaven--a more glorious shrine than the mausoleum of Dumfries.
The neighborhood of Dumfries, to which the last scene of our subject
leads us, is very charming. The town is just a quiet country town, but
the Nith is a fine river, and runs through it, and makes both town and
country very agreeable. The scenery is not wild and rocky, but the vale
of the Nith is rich, and beautiful in its richness. The river runs in
the finest sweeps imaginable; it seems to disdain to go straight, but
makes a circle for a mile, perhaps, at a time, as clean and perfect as
if struck with compasses, and then away in another direction; while on
its lofty banks alders and oaks hang richly over the water, and fine
herds of cattle are grouped in those deep meadows, and salmon-fishers
spread their nets and are busy mending them on the broad expanse of
gravel that covers here and there the bends of the river; while high
above the lapsing waters, your eye wanders over abroad extent of fresh,
rich meadow country, with scattered masses of trees, and goodly farms,
and far around are high and airy hills cultivated to the top. A more
lovely pastoral country, more retired and poetical, you can not well
find. This is the scenery to which Burns, during his abode in Dumfries,
loved to resort. "When he lived in Dumfries," says Allan Cunningham, "he
had three favorite walks: on the dock-green by the river side, among the
ruins of Lincluden College, and toward the Martingam Ford, on the north
side of the river. The latter place was secluded, commanded a view of
the distant hills and the romantic towers of Lincluden, and afforded
soft greensward banks to rest upon, and the sight and sound of the
stream. As soon as he was heard to hum to himself, his wife saw that he
had something in his mind, and was quite prepared to see him snatch up
his hat and set off silently for his musing ground."
About three miles up the river we came upon the beautiful ruins of the
abbey of Lincluden, standing on an elevated mound overlooking the
junction of the Cluden and the Nith, and overlooked by a sort of large
tumulus covered with larches, where the monks are said to have sat to
contemplate the country, and where the country people still resort to
loiter or read on Sundays. A profound tranquillity reigns over all the
scene--a charm indescribable, which Burns, of all men, must have felt.
For myself, I knew not where to stop. I advanced up the left bank of the
river, opposite to the ruins, now treading the soft turf of the Nith's
margin, now pent in a narrow track close on the brink of the stream
among the alders, now emerging into a lofty fir clump, and now into a
solemn grove of beech overhanging the stream. Further on lay the broad
old meadows again, the fisher watching in his wooden hut the ascent of
the salmon, the little herdboy tending his black cattle in the solitary
field, old woods casting a deep gloom on the hurrying water, gray old
halls standing on fine slopes above the Nith, amid trees of magnificent
size and altitude. The mood of mind which comes over you here is that of
unwritten poetry.
When one thinks of Burns wandering amid this congenial nature, where the
young now wander and sing his songs, one is apt to forget that he bore
with him a sad heart and a sinking frame. When we see his house in
Dumfries, we are reminded pretty forcibly of these things. We have to
dive at once into a back street in the lower part of the town, and turn
and wind from one such hidden and poor street to another, till, having
passed through a sufficient stench of tan-yards, which seem to abound in
that neighborhood, you come to a little street with all the character of
the abode of the poor, which is honored with the name of BURNS-STREET.
The house is the first you come to on the left hand. There is the
thatched one on the opposite side, and I set it down at once to be the
poet's; but no; at a regularly formal poor man's house, of a dingy
white-wash, with its stone door and window frames painted of a dingy
blue, a bare-legged girl, very dirty, was washing the floors, and went
from the bucket and showed me the house. On the right hand of the door
was the kitchen, in which the girl informed me that there was nothing
left belonging to the Burnses except two bells, which she pointed out,
and a gas-pipe which Mr. Burns had put in. On the left hand was the
sitting-room, furnished very well for a poor man, with a carpet on the
floor. The girl said her father was an undertaker, but when I asked
where was his shop, she said he was an undertaker of jobs on railroads
and embankments. Up stairs there was a good, large chamber unfurnished,
which she said was the one occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Burns, and where
both of them died. Out of the other chamber a little closet was taken,
including one front window, and here, she said, Burns wrote, or it was
always said so. There were two garrets; and that was the poet's, or,
rather, the exciseman's house. It was just about suited to the income of
an ordinary exciseman, and had no attribute of the _poet's_ home about
it. Mr. Robert Chambers, in his Picture of Scotland, calls it a neat
little house. Unfortunately, at my visit it was any thing but neat or
clean, and its situation in this miserable quarter, and amid the odor of
tan-yards, must give to any foreigner who visits it an odd idea of the
abodes of British poets. I wonder that in some improvement the
Dumfriesians don't contrive to pull it down.
From this abode of the living poet I adjourned to that of the dead one.
This is situated in St. Michael's church-yard, not far from the house,
but on an eminence, and on the outside of the town. The _lane_ in which
the _house_ is, is just one of the _worst_. It looks as though it were
only inhabited by keepers of lodging-houses for tramps, and, I believe,
mainly is so. It is a sort of Tinker's Lane. The church-yard, though not
more than two hundred yards off, is one of the most respectable, and the
poet's house _there_ is the very grandest. One naturally thinks how much
easier it is to maintain a dead poet than a living one.
A church-yard in this part of the country has a singular aspect to an
English eye. As you approach the Scottish border you see the headstones
getting taller and taller, and the altar-tombs more and more massive. At
Carlisle, the headstones had attained the height of six or seven feet at
least, and were deeply carved with coats of arms, &c., near the top, but
here the whole church-yard is a wilderness of huge and ponderous
monuments. Pediments and entablature, Grecian, Gothic, and nondescript;
pillars and obelisks, some of them at least twenty feet high--I use no
exaggeration in this account--stand thick and on all sides. To our eyes,
accustomed to such a different size and character of church-yard tombs,
they are perfectly astonishing. I imagine there is stone enough in the
funeral monuments of this church-yard to build a tolerable street of
houses. You would think that all the giants, and, indeed, all the
_great_ people of all sorts that Scotland had ever produced, had here
chosen their sepulture. Such ambitious and gigantic structures of
freestone, some red, some white, for dyers, iron-mongers, gardeners,
slaters, glaziers, and the like, are, I imagine, nowhere else to be
seen. There are vintners who have tombs and obelisks fit for genuine
Egyptian Pharaohs; and slaters and carpenters, who were accustomed to
climb high when alive, have left monuments significant of their soaring
character. These far outvie and overlook those of generals, writers to
the signet, esquires, and bailiffs of the city.
Your first view of the church-yard strikes you by the strange aspect of
these ponderous monuments. A row of very ancient ones, in fact, stands
on the wall next to the street. Two of them most dilapidated, and of
deep red stone, have a very singular look. They have Latin inscriptions,
which are equally dilapidated. Another one to Francis Irving fairly
exhausts the Latin tongue with his host of virtues, and then takes to
English thus:
"King James the First me balive named;
Dumfries oft since me provost claimed;
God has for me a crown reserved,
For king and country have I served."
Burns's mausoleum occupies as nearly as possible the center of the
farther end of the church-yard opposite to the entrance, and a broad
walk leads up to it. It stands, as it should do, overlooking the
pleasant fields in the outskirts of the town, and seems, like the poet
himself, to belong half to man and half to nature. It is a sort of
little temple, which at a distance catches the eye as you approach that
side of the town, and reminds you of that of Garrick at Hampton. It is
open on three sides, except for iron gates, the upper border of which
consists of alternating Scottish thistles and spear-heads. A couple of
Ionic pillars at each corner support a projecting cornice, and above
this rises an octagon superstructure, with arches, across the bottom of
which again run thistle-heads, one over each gateway, and is surmounted
by a dome. The basement of the mausoleum is of granite. The building is
inclosed by an iron railing, and that little gate in front of the area
is left unlocked, so that you may approach and view the monument through
the iron gates. The area is planted appropriately with various kinds of
evergreens, and on each side of the gate stand conspicuously the
Scottish thistle.
In the center of the mausoleum floor, a large flag, with four iron rings
in it, marks the entrance to the vault below. At the back stands
Turnarelli's monument of the poet. It consists of a figure of Burns, of
the size of life, in white marble, at the plow, and Coila, his muse,
appearing to him. This is a female figure in alto-relievo on the wall,
somewhat above and in front of him. She is in the act of throwing her
mantle, embroidered with Scotch thistles, over him, according to his own
words: "The poetic genius of my country found me, as the prophetic bard
Elijah did Elisha, at the plow, and threw her inspiring mantle over me."
Burns stands with his left hand on one of the plow stilts, and with the
other holds his bonnet to his breast, while, with an air of surprise and
devotion, he gazes on the muse or genius of his poetry. He appears in a
short coat, knee breeches, and short gaiters. The execution is so-so.
The likeness of the poet is by no means conformable to the best
portraits of him; and Nature, as if resenting the wretched caricature of
her favorite son, has already begun to deface and corrode it. The left
hand on the plow is much decayed, and the right hand holding the bonnet
is somewhat so too. At his feet lies what I suppose was the slab of his
former tomb, with this inscription: "In memory of Robert Burns, who died
the 21st of July, 1796, in the 37th year of his age. And Maxwell Burns,
who died the 25th of April, 1799, aged 2 years and 9 months. Francis
Wallace Burns, who died the 9th of June, 1808, aged 14 years. His sons.
The remains of Burns received into the vault below, 19th of September,
1815. And his two sons. Also, the remains of Jean Armour, relict of the
Poet, born Feb., 1765, died 26th of March, 1834."
The long Latin inscription mentioned by his biographers, a manifest
absurdity on the tomb of a man like Burns, and whose epitaph ought to be
intelligible to all his countrymen, is, I suppose, removed, for I did
not observe it, and the above English inscription, of the elegance of
which, however, nothing can be said, substituted.
The gates of the mausoleum itself are kept locked, and the monument
again inclosed within a plain railing.
Some countrymen were just standing at the gate, with their plaids on
their shoulders, making their observations as I arrived at it. I stood
and listened to them.
_1st Man._ "Ay, there stands Robin, still holding the plow, but the
worst of it is, he has got no horses to it."
_2d Man._ "Ay, that is childish. It is just like a boy on a Sunday, who
sets himself to the plow, and fancies he is plowing when it never moves.
It would have been a deal better if you could have seen even the horses'
tails."
_3d Man._ "Ay, or if he had been sitting on his plow, as I have seen him
sometimes in a picture."
_1st Man._ "But Coila is well drawn, is not she? That arm which she
holds up the mantle with is very well executed."
_2d Man._ "It's a pity, though, that the sculptor did not look at his
own coat before he put the only button on that is to be seen."
_3d Man._ "Why, where is the button?"
_2d Man._ "Just under the bonnet; and it's on the wrong side."
_1st Man._ "Oh! it does not signify if it be a double-breasted coat; or
perhaps Robin buttoned his coat different to other folks, for he was an
unco' chiel."
_2d Man._ "But it's only single-breasted, and it is quite wrong."
The men unbuttoned and then buttoned their coats up again to satisfy
themselves, and they decided that it was a great blunder.
I thought there was much sound sense in their criticism. The allegorical
figure of the muse seems too much, and the absence of the horses too
little. Burns would have looked quite as well standing at the plow, and
looking up inspired by the muse without her being visible.
The plow rests on a rugged piece of marble, laid on a polished basement,
in the center of which is inscribed, in large letters,