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The Complete Works

CXXXII. TO MRS. DUNLOP

[Mrs. Miller, of Dalswinton, was a lady of beauty and talent: she wrote verses with skill and taste. Her maiden name was Jean Lindsay.]

Ellisland, 16th August, 1788.

I am in a fine disposition, my honoured friend, to send you an elegiac epistle; and want only genius to make it quite Shenstonian:—

“Why droops my heart with fancied woes forlorn?

Why sinks my soul, beneath each wintry sky?”

My increasing cares in this, as yet strange country—gloomy conjectures in the dark vista of futurity—consciousness of my own inability for the struggle of the world—my broadened mark to misfortune in a wife and children;—I could indulge these reflections till my humour should ferment into the most acid chagrin, that would corrode the very thread of life.

To counterwork these baneful feelings, I have sat down to write to you; as I declare upon my soul I always find that the most sovereign balm for my wounded spirit.

I was yesterday at Mr. Miller’s to dinner for the first time. My reception was quite to my mind: from the lady of the house quite flattering. She sometimes hits on a couplet or two, impromptu. She repeated one or two to the admiration of all present. My suffrage as a professional man, was expected: I for once went agonizing over the belly of my conscience. Pardon me, ye my adored household gods, independence of spirit, and integrity of soul! In the course of conversation, “Johnson’s Musical Museum,” a collection of Scottish songs with the music, was talked of. We got a song on the harpsichord, beginning,

“Raving winds around her blowing.”^[190]

The air was much admired: the lady of the house asked me whose were the words. “Mine, Madam—they are indeed my very best verses;” she took not the smallest notice of them! The old Scottish proverb says well, “king’s caff is better than ither folks’ corn.” I was going to make a New Testament quotation about “casting pearls” but that would be too virulent, for the lady is actually a woman of sense and taste.

After all that has been said on the other side of the question, man is by no means a happy creature. I do not speak of the selected few, favoured by partial heaven, whose souls are tuned to gladness amid riches and honours, and prudence and wisdom. I speak of the neglected many, whose nerves, whose sinews, whose days are sold to the minions of fortune.

If I thought you had never seen it, I would transcribe for you a stanza of an old Scottish ballad, called, “The Life and Age of Man;” beginning thus:

 
“’Twas in the sixteenth hunder year
Of God and fifty-three,
Frae Christ was born, that bought us dear,
As writings testifie.”
I had an old grand-uncle, with whom my mother lived awhile in her girlish years; the good old man, for such he was, was long blind ere he died, during which time his highest enjoyment was to sit down and cry, while my mother would sing the simple old song of “the Life and Age of Man.”
 

It is this way of thinking; it is these melancholy truths, that make religion so precious to the poor, miserable children of men.—If it is a mere phantom, existing only in the heated imagination of enthusiasm,

 
“What truth on earth so precious as a lie.”
 

My idle reasonings sometimes make me a little sceptical, but the necessities of my heart always give the cold philosophisings the lie. Who looks for the heart weaned from earth; the soul affianced to her God; the correspondent devout thanksgiving, constant as the vicissitudes of even and morn; who thinks to meet with these in the court, the palace, in the glare of public life? No: to find them in their precious importance and divine efficacy, we must search among the obscure recesses of disappointment, affliction, poverty, and distress.

I am sure, dear Madam, you are now more than pleased with the length of my letters. I return to Ayrshire middle of next week: and it quickens my pace to think that there will be a letter from you waiting me there. I must be here again very soon for my harvest.

R. B.

CXXXIII. TO MR. BEUGO, Engraver, Edinburgh.

[Mr. Beugo was at well-known engraver in Edinburgh: he engraved Nasmyth’s portrait of Burns, for Creech’s first edition of his Poems; and as he could draw a little, he improved, as he called it, the engraving from sittings of the poet, and made it a little more like, and a little less poetic.]

Ellisland, 9th Sept. 1788.

My dear Sir,

There is not in Edinburgh above the number of the graces whose letters would have given me so much pleasure as yours of the 3d instant, which only reached me yesternight.

I am here on the farm, busy with my harvest; but for all that most pleasurable part of life called social communication, I am here at the very elbow of existence. The only things that are to be found in this country, in any degree of perfection, are stupidity and canting. Prose they only know in graces, prayers, &c., and the value of these they estimate as they do their plaiding webs—by the ell! As for the muses, they have as much an idea of a rhinoceros as of a poet. For my old capricious but good-natured huzzy of a muse—

 
“By banks of Nith I sat and wept
When Coila I thought on,
In midst thereof I hung my harp
The willow-trees upon.”
 

I am generally about half my time in Ayrshire with my “darling Jean,” and then I, at lucid intervals, throw my horny fist across my becob-webbed lyre, much in the same manner as an old wife throws her hand across the spokes of her spinning-wheel.

I will send you the “Fortunate Shepherdess” as soon as I return to Ayrshire, for there I keep it with other precious treasure. I shall send it by a careful hand, as I would not for anything it should be mislaid or lost. I do not wish to serve you from any benevolence, or other grave Christian virtue; ’tis purely a selfish gratification of my own feelings whenever I think of you.

If your better functions would give you leisure to write me, I should be extremely happy; that is to say if you neither keep nor look for a regular correspondence. I hate the idea of being obliged to write a letter. I sometimes write a friend twice a week, at other times once a quarter.

I am exceedingly pleased with your fancy in making the author you mention place a map of Iceland instead of his portrait before his works: ’twas a glorious idea.

Could you conveniently do me one thing?—whenever you finish any head I should like to have a proof copy of it. I might tell you a long story about your fine genius; but as what everybody knows cannot have escaped you, I shall not say one syllable about it.

R. B.

CXXXIV. TO MISS CHALMERS, Edinburgh.

[To this fine letter all the biographer of Burns are largely indebted.]

Ellisland, near Dumfries, Sept. 16th, 1788.

Where are you? and how are you? and is Lady Mackenzie recovering her health? for I have had but one solitary letter from you. I will not think you have forgot me, Madam; and for my part—

 
“When thee, Jerusalem, I forget,
Skill part from my right hand!”
 

“My heart is not of that rock, nor my soul careless as that sea.” I do not make my progress among mankind as a bowl does among its fellows—rolling through the crowd without bearing away any mark of impression, except where they hit in hostile collision.

I am here, driven in with my harvest-folks by bad weather; and as you and your sister once did me the honour of interesting yourselves much à l’égard de moi, I sit down to beg the continuation of your goodness. I can truly say that, all the exterior of life apart, I never saw two, whose esteem flattered the nobler feelings of my soul—I will not say more, but so much as Lady Mackenzie and Miss Chalmers. When I think of you—hearts the best, minds the noblest of human kind—unfortunate even in the shades of life—when I think I have met with you, and have lived more of real life with you in eight days than I can do with almost any body I meet with in eight years—when I think on the improbability of meeting you in this world again—I could sit down and cry like a child! If ever you honoured me with a place in your esteem, I trust I can now plead more desert. I am secure against that crushing grip of iron poverty, which, alas! is less or more fatal to the native worth and purity of, I fear, the noblest souls; and a late important step in my life has kindly taken me out of the way of those ungrateful iniquities, which, however overlooked in fashionable license, or varnished in fashionable phrase, are indeed but lighter and deeper shades of villany.

Shortly after my last return to Ayrshire, I married “my Jean.” This was not in consequence of the attachment of romance, perhaps; but I had a long and much-loved fellow-creature’s happiness or misery in my determination, and I durst not trifle with so important a deposit. Nor have I any cause to repent it. If I have not got polite tattle, modish manners, and fashionable dress, I am not sickened and disgusted with the multiform curse of boarding-school affectation: and I have got the handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the kindest heart in the county. Mrs. Burns believes, as firmly as her creed, that I am le plus bel esprit, et le plus honnête homme in the universe; although she scarcely ever in her life, except the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, and the Psalms of David in metre, spent five minutes together either on prose or verse. I must except also from this last a certain late publication of Scots poems, which she has perused very devoutly; and all the ballads in the country, as she has (O the partial lover! you will cry) the finest “wood-note wild” I ever heard. I am the more particular in this lady’s character, as I know she will henceforth have the honour of a share in your best wishes. She is still at Mauchline, as I am building my house; for this hovel that I shelter in, while occasionally here, is pervious to every blast that blows, and every shower that falls; and I am only preserved from being chilled to death by being suffocated with smoke. I do not find my farm that pennyworth I was taught to expect, but I believe, in time, it may be a saving bargain. You will be pleased to hear that I have laid aside idle éclat, and bind every day after my reapers.

To save me from that horrid situation of at any time going down in a losing bargain of a farm, to misery, I have taken my Excise instructions, and have my commission in my pocket for any emergency of fortune. If I could set all before your view, whatever disrespect you, in common with the world, have for this business, I know you would approve of my idea.

I will make no apology, dear Madam, for this egotistic detail; I know you and your sister will be interested in every circumstance of it. What signify the silly, idle gewgaws of wealth, or the ideal trumpery of greatness! When fellow-partakers of the same nature fear the same God, have the same benevolence of heart, the same nobleness of soul, the same detestation at everything dishonest, and the same scorn at everything unworthy—if they are not in the dependence of absolute beggary, in the name of common sense are they not equals? And if the bias, the instinctive bias, of their souls run the same way, why may they not be friends?

When I may have an opportunity of sending you this, Heaven only knows. Shenstone says, “When one is confined idle within doors by bad weather, the best antidote against ennui is to read the letters of or write to, one’s friends;” in that case then, if the weather continues thus, I may scrawl you half a quire.

I very lately—to wit, since harvest began—wrote a poem, not in imitation, but in the manner, of Pope’s Moral Epistles. It is only a short essay, just to try the strength of my muse’s pinion in that way. I will send you a copy of it, when once I have heard from you. I have likewise been laying the foundation of some pretty large poetic works: how the superstructure will come on, I leave to that great maker and marrer of projects—time. Johnson’s collection of Scots songs is going on in the third volume; and, of consequence, finds me a consumpt for a great deal of idle metre. One of the most tolerable things I have done in that way is two stanzas I made to an air, a musical gentleman of my acquaintance composed for the anniversary of his wedding-day, which happens on the seventh of November. Take it as follows:—

“The day returns—my bosom burns,

The blissful day we twa did meet,” &c.^[191]

I shall give over this letter for shame. If I should be seized with a scribbling fit, before this goes away, I shall make it another letter; and then you may allow your patience a week’s respite between the two. I have not room for more than the old, kind, hearty farewell.

To make some amends, mes chères Mesdames, for dragging you on to this second sheet, and to relieve a little the tiresomeness of my unstudied and uncorrectible prose, I shall transcribe you some of my late poetic bagatelles; though I have, these eight or ten months, done very little that way. One day in a hermitage on the banks of Nith, belonging to a gentleman in my neighbourhood, who is so good as give me a key at pleasure, I wrote as follows; supposing myself the sequestered, venerable inhabitant of the lonely mansion.

LINES WRITTEN IN FRIARS-CARSE HERMITAGE.

 
“Thou whom chance may hither lead,
Be thou clad in russet weed.”^[192]
 

R. B.

CXXXV. TO MR. MORISON, Mauchline.

[Morison, of Mauchline, made most of the poet’s furniture, for Ellisland: from Mauchline, too, came that eight-day clock, which was sold, at the death of the poet’s widow, for thirty-eight pounds, to one who would have paid one hundred, sooner than wanted it.]

Ellisland, September 22, 1788.

My dear Sir,

Necessity obliges me to go into my new house even before it be plastered. I will inhabit the one end until the other is finished. About three weeks more, I think, will at farthest be my time, beyond which I cannot stay in this present house. If ever you wished to deserve the blessing of him that was ready to perish; if ever you were in a situation that a little kindness would have rescued you from many evils; if ever you hope to find rest in future states of untried being—get these matters of mine ready. My servant will be out in the beginning of next week for the clock. My compliments to Mrs. Morison.

I am,

After all my tribulation,

Dear Sir, yours,

R. B.

CXXXVI. TO MRS. DUNLOP, of Dunlop

[Burns had no great respect for critics who found blemishes without perceiving beauties: he expresses his contempt for such in this letter.]

Mauchline, 27th Sept. 1788.

I have received twins, dear Madam, more than once; but scarcely ever with more pleasure than when I received yours of the 12th instant. To make myself understood; I had wrote to Mr. Graham, enclosing my poem addressed to him, and the same post which favoured me with yours brought me an answer from him. It was dated the very day he had received mine; and I am quite at a loss to say whether it was most polite or kind.

Your criticisms, my honoured benefactress, are truly the work of a friend. They are not the blasting depredations of a canker-toothed, caterpillar critic; nor are they the fair statement of cold impartiality, balancing with unfeeling exactitude the pro and con of an author’s merits; they are the judicious observations of animated friendship, selecting the beauties of the piece. I have just arrived from Nithsdale, and will be here a fortnight. I was on horseback this morning by three o’clock; for between my wife and my farm is just forty-six miles. As I jogged on in the dark, I was taken with a poetic fit as follows:

 
“Mrs. Ferguson of Craigdarroch’s lamentation for the death of her son; an uncommonly promising youth of eighteen or nineteen years of age.”
“Fate gave the word—the arrow sped,
 

 
And pierced my darling’s heart.”^[193]
 

You will not send me your poetic rambles, but, you see I am no niggard of mine. I am sure your impromptus give me double pleasure; what falls from your pen can neither be unentertaining in itself, nor indifferent to me.

The one fault you found, is just; but I cannot please myself in an emendation.

What a life of solicitude is the life of a parent! You interested me much in your young couple.

I would not take my folio paper for this epistle, and now I repent it. I am so jaded with my dirty long journey that I was afraid to drawl into the essence of dulness with anything larger than a quarto, and so I must leave out another rhyme of this morning’s manufacture.

I will pay the sapientipotent George, most cheerfully, to hear from you ere I leave Ayrshire.

R. B.

CXXXVII. TO MR. PETER HILL

[“The ‘Address to Lochlomond,’ which this letter criticises,” says Currie in 1800, “was written by a gentleman, now one of the masters of the High-school of Edinburgh, and the same who translated the beautiful story of ‘The Paria,’ published in the Bee of Dr. Anderson.”]

Mauchline, 1st October, 1788.

I have been here in this country about three days, and all that time my chief reading has been the “Address to Lochlomond” you were so obliging as to send to me. Were I impannelled one of the author’s jury, to determine his criminality respecting the sin of poesy, my verdict should be “guilty! a poet of nature’s making!”. It is an excellent method for improvement, and what I believe every poet does, to place some favourite classic author in his own walks of study and composition, before him as a model. Though your author had not mentioned the name, I could have, at half a glance, guessed his model to be Thomson. Will my brother-poet forgive me, if I venture to hint that his imitation of that immortal bard is in two or three places rather more servile than such a genius as his required:—e.g.

 
“To soothe the maddening passions all to peace.”
 

Address.

 
“To soothe the throbbing passions into peace.”
 

Thomson.

I think the “Address” is in simplicity, harmony, and elegance of versification, fully equal to the “Seasons.” Like Thomson, too, he has looked into nature for himself: you meet with no copied description. One particular criticism I made at first reading; in no one instance has he said too much. He never flags in his progress, but, like a true poet of nature’s making kindles in his course. His beginning is simple and modest, as if distrustful of the strength of his pinion; only, I do not altogether like—

–“Truth

 
The soul of every song that’s nobly great.”
 

Fiction is the soul of many a song that is nobly great. Perhaps I am wrong: this may be but a prose criticism. Is not the phrase in line 7, page 6, “Great lake,” too much vulgarized by every-day language for so sublime a poem?

 
“Great mass of waters, theme for nobler song,”
 

is perhaps no emendation. His enumeration of a comparison with other lakes is at once harmonious and poetic. Every reader’s ideas must sweep the

 
“Winding margin of an hundred miles.”
 

The perspective that follows mountains blue—the imprisoned billows beating in vain—the wooded isles—the digression on the yew-tree—“Ben-lomond’s lofty, cloud-envelop’d head,” &c. are beautiful. A thunder-storm is a subject which has been often tried, yet our poet in his grand picture has interjected a circumstance, so far as I know, entirely original:—

–“the gloom

 
Deep seam’d with frequent streaks of moving fire.”
 

In his preface to the Storm, “the glens how dark between,” is noble highland landscape! The “rain ploughing the red mould,” too, is beautifully fancied. “Ben-lomond’s lofty, pathless top,” is a good expression; and the surrounding view from it is truly great: the

 
–“silver mist,
Beneath the beaming sun,”
 

is well described; and here he has contrived to enliven his poem with a little of that passion which bids fair, I think, to usurp the modern muses altogether. I know not how far this episode is a beauty upon the whole, but the swain’s wish to carry “some faint idea of the vision bright,” to entertain her “partial listening ear,” is a pretty thought. But in my opinion the most beautiful passages in the whole poem are the fowls crowding, in wintry frosts, to Lochlomond’s “hospitable flood;” their wheeling round, their lighting, mixing, diving, &c.; and the glorious description of the sportsman. This last is equal to anything in the “Seasons.” The idea of “the floating tribe distant seen, far glistering to the moon,” provoking his eye as he is obliged to leave them, is a noble ray of poetic genius. “The howling winds,” the “hideous roar” of the white cascades, are all in the same style.

I forget that while I am thus holding forth with the heedless warmth of an enthusiast, I am perhaps tiring you with nonsense. I must, however, mention that the last verse of the sixteenth page is one of the most elegant compliments I have ever seen. I must likewise notice that beautiful paragraph beginning, “The gleaming lake,” &c. I dare not go into the particular beauties of the last two paragraphs, but they are admirably fine, and truly Ossianic.

I must beg your pardon for this lengthened scrawl. I had no idea of it when I began—I should like to know who the author is; but, whoever he be, please present him with my grateful thanks for the entertainment he has afforded me.

A friend of mine desired me to commission for him two books, “Letters on the Religion essential to Man,” a book you sent me before; and “The World unmasked, or the Philosopher the greatest Cheat.” Send me them by the first opportunity. The Bible you sent me is truly elegant; I only wish it had been in two volumes.

R. B.