Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets Part 24

"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 pa.s.s without a glance at the parting scene of Burns and Highland Mary. I bade him drive down to the house, where I was speedily a.s.sured 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 Ayrs.h.i.+re 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 cla.s.sic 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 a.s.sisting 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 fas.h.i.+on 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, thras.h.i.+ng, 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 a.s.siduously 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 n.o.ble 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 la.s.sie was spreading out her wash on the gra.s.s-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 d.u.c.h.ess of Gordon, at that time at the zenith of beauty and fas.h.i.+on, was one of his warmest admirers, and had him to her largest parties. The young plowman of Ayrs.h.i.+re sat hob-n.o.bbing 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 Ayrs.h.i.+re 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sionately 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 n.o.bility 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 n.o.bleman'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 pa.s.s 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 n.o.bleman at the head of the table_) Who struts, and stares, and a' that, Though hundreds wors.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sage 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 gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.ses, which stood ready on the table, gave a look as if sacrilege were going to be committed, took up the gla.s.ses without a word, replaced them in the cupboard, locking them up, and brought us three ordinary wine-gla.s.ses 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 const.i.tution, 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 coa.r.s.e gra.s.s, 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 flouris.h.i.+ng ashes, each fence standing on a bold bank well hung with broom. The barley stood green on the one hand, and the hay in c.o.c.k 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 n.o.ble and verdurous trees. This seems the place where Burns might have been happy, had happiness and prosperity been easily secured by a temperament and circ.u.mstances such as his. He had a home fit for a poet, though humble. It was a home amid the goodliness and the G.o.dliness 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 ill.u.s.tration the poet is, beyond all men, born and endowed. Ah! if he could but have guided with a safe hand those pa.s.sions 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.