Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/629

Rh wood, the fabled haunt of Wallace, which the poet confesses to have visited &quot; with as much devout enthusiasm as ever pilgrim did tho shrine of Loretto.&quot; In another reference to the same period he refers to the intense sus ceptibility to the homeliest aspects of Nature which through out characterized his genius. &quot; Scarcely any object gave me more I do not know if I should call it pleasure but something which exalts and enraptures me than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood or high plantation in a cloudy winter day and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees and raving over the plain. I listened to the birds, and frequently turned out of my path lest I should disturb their little songs or frighten them to another station.&quot; Auroral visions were gilding his horizon as he walked in glory, if not in joy, &quot; behind his plough upon the mountain side ; &quot; but the swarm of his many-coloured fancies was again made grey by the atra euro, of unsuc cessful toils. Burns had written his first verses of note, &quot; Behind yon hills where Stinchar (afterwards Lugar) flows,&quot; when in 1781 he went to Irvine to learn the trade of a flax-dresser. &quot; It was,&quot; he says, &quot; an unlucky affair. As we were giving a welcome carousal to the New Year, the shop took fire and burned to ashes ; and I was left, like a true poet, without a sixpence.&quot; His own heart, too, had unfortunately taken fire. He was poring over mathematics till, in his own phraseology, still affected in its prose by the classical pedantries caught from Pope by Ramsay, &quot; the sun entered Virgo, when a charming fillette, who lived next door, overset my trigonometry, and set me off at a tangent from the scene of my studies.&quot; We need not detail the story, nor the incessant repetitions of it, which marked and sometimes marred his career. The poet was jilted, went through the usual despairs, and resorted to the not unusual sources of consolation. He had found that he was &quot; no enemy to social life,&quot; and his mates had dis covered that he was the best of boon companions in the lyric feasts, where his eloquence shed a lustre over wild ways of life, and where he was beginning to be distin guished as a champion of the New Lights and a satirist of the Calvinism whose waters he found like those of Marsh. In Robert s 25th year his father died, full of sorrows and apprehensions for the gifted son who wrote for his tomb, in Alloway kirkyard, the fine epitaph ending with the characteristic line &quot; For even Iris failings leaned to virtue s side. For some time longer the poet, with his brother Gilbert, lingered at Lochlea, reading agricultural books, miscalcu lating crops, attending markets, and in a mood of reforma tion resolving, &quot; in spite of the world, the flesh, and the devil, to be a wise man.&quot; Affairs, however, went no better with the family; and in 1784 they migrated to Mossgiel, where he lived and wrought, during four years, for a return scarce equal to the wage of the commonest labourer in our day. Meanwhile he had become intimate with his future wife, Jean Armour; but the father, a master mason, discountenanced the match, and the girl being dis posed to &quot;sigh as a lover,&quot; as a daughter to obey, Burns, in 1786, gave up his suit, resolved to seek refuge in exile, and having accepted a situation as book-keeper, to a slave estate in Jamaica, had taken his passage in a ship for the West Indies. His old associations seemed to be breaking up, men and fortune scowled, and &quot; hungry ruin had him in the wind,&quot; when he wrote the lines ending &quot;Adieu, my native banks of Ayr,&quot; and addressed to the most famous of the loves, in which he was as prolific as Catullus or Tibullus, the proposal &quot;Will yo go to the Indies, my Mary. He was withheld from his project and, happily or un happily, the current of his life was turned by the success of his first volume, which was published at Kilmarnock in June 1786. It contained some of his most justly celebrated poems, the results of his scanty leisure at Lochlea and Mossgiel ; among others &quot; The Twa dogs,&quot; a graphic idealization of ^Esop, &quot; The Author s Prayer,&quot; the &quot; Address to the Deil,&quot; &quot; The Vision &quot; and &quot; The Dream,&quot; &quot; Halloween,&quot; &quot; The Cottar s Saturday Night,&quot; the lines &quot;To a Mouse&quot; and &quot;To a Daisy,&quot; &quot;Scotch Drink,&quot; &quot; Man .was made to Mourn,&quot; the &quot; Epistle to Davie,&quot; and some of his most popular songs. This epitome of a genius so marvellous and so varied took his audience by storm. &quot; The country murmured of him from sea to sea.&quot; &quot; With his poems,&quot; says Robert Heron, &quot; old and young, grave and gay, learned and ignorant, were alike transported. I was at that time resident in Galloway, and I can well remember how even plough-boys and maid-servants would have gladly bestowed the wages they earned the most hardly, and which they wanted to purchase necessary clothing, if they might but procure the works of Burns. This first edition only brought the author &amp;lt;20 direct return, but it introduced him to the literati of Edinburgh, whither he was invited, and where he was welcomed, feasted, admired, and patronized. He appeared as a portent among the scholars of the northern capital and its university, and manifested, according to Mr Lockhart, &quot; in the whole strain of his bearing, his belief that in the society of the most eminent men of his nation he was where he was entitled to be, hardly deigning to flatter them by exhibiting a symptom of being flattered.&quot; Sir Walter Scott bears a similar testimony to the dignified simplicity and almost exaggerated independence of the poet, during this annus mirabilis of his success. &quot; As for Burns, Virgilium vidi tantum, I was a lad of fifteen when he came to Edinburgh, but had sense enough to be interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him. I saw him one day with several gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom I remember the celebrated Dugald Stewart. Of course we youngsters sat silent, looked, and listened. ... I remember. . . his shedding tears over a print representing a soldier lying dead in the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side, on the other his widow with a child in her arms. His person was robust, his manners rustic, not clownish. . . . His countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. There was a strong expression of shrewdness in his linea ments ; the eye alone indicated the poetic character and temperament. It was large and of a dark cast, and literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without the least intrusive forwardness. I thought his acquaintance with English poetry was rather limited ; and having twenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson he talked of them with too much humility as his models. He was much caressed in Edinburgh, but the efforts made for his relief were extremely trifling.&quot; Laudatur et alget. Burns went from those meetings, where he had been posing professors (no hard task), and turning the heads of duchesses, to share a bed in the garret of a writer s apprentice, they paid together 3s. a week for the room. It was in the house of Mr Carfrae, Baxter s Close, Lawnmarket, &quot; first scale stair on the left hand in going down, first door in the stair.&quot; During Burns s life it was reserved for William Pitt to recognize his place as a great poet, the more cautious critics of the North were satisfied to endorse him as a rustic prodigy, and brought upon themselves a share of his satire. Some of the friendships contracted during this period as for Lord Glencairn and Mrs Dunlop are among the most pleasing and permanent in literature ; for genuine kind- 