No More Learning

Compliment is such a miserable Greenland expression, lies at such a
chilly polar distance from the torrid zone of my constitution, that I
cannot, for the very soul of me, use it to any person for whom I have
the twentieth part of the esteem every one must have for you who knows
you.

As I leave town in three or four days, I can give myself the pleasure
of calling on you only for a minute. Tuesday evening, some time about
seven or after, I shall wait on you for your farewell commands.

The hinge of your box I put into the hands of the proper connoisseur.
The broken glass, likewise, went under review; but deliberative wisdom
thought it would too much endanger the whole fabric.

I am, dear Madam,

With all sincerity of enthusiasm,

Your very obedient servant,

R. B.

* * * * *




XC.


TO MISS CHALMERS.

[Some dozen or so, it is said, of the most beautiful letters that
Burns ever wrote, and dedicated to the beauty of Charlotte Hamilton,
were destroyed by that lady, in a moment when anger was too strong for
reflection. ]

_Edinburgh, Nov. _ 21, 1787.

I have one vexatious fault to the kindly-welcome, well-filled sheet
which I owe to your and Charlotte's goodness,--it contains too much
sense, sentiment, and good-spelling. It is impossible that even you
two, whom I declare to my God I will give credit for any degree of
excellence the sex are capable of attaining, it is impossible you can
go on to correspond at that rate; so like those who, Shenstone says,
retire because they make a good speech, I shall, after a few letters,
hear no more of you. I insist that you shall write whatever comes
first: what you see, what you read, what you hear, what you admire,
what you dislike, trifles, bagatelles, nonsense; or to fill up a
corner, e'en put down a laugh at full length.
Now none of your polite
hints about flattery; I leave that to your lovers, if you have or
shall have any; though, thank heaven, I have found at last two girls
who can be luxuriantly happy in their own minds and with one another,
without that commonly necessary appendage to female bliss--A LOVER.

Charlotte and you are just two favourite resting-places for my soul in
her wanderings through the weary, thorny wilderness of this world. God
knows I am ill-fitted for the struggle: I glory in being a Poet, and I
want to be thought a wise man--I would fondly be generous, and I wish
to be rich. After all, I am afraid I am a lost subject. "Some folk hae
a hantle o' fauts, an' I'm but a ne'er-do-weel. "

_Afternoon_--To close the melancholy reflections at the end of last
sheet, I shall just add a piece of devotion commonly known in Carrick
by the title of the "Wabster's grace:"--

"Some say we're thieves, and e'en sae are we,
Some say we lie, and e'en sae do we!
Gude forgie us, and I hope sae will he!
--Up and to your looms, lads. "

R. B.

* * * * *




XCI.


TO MISS CHALMERS.

[The "Ochel-Hills," which the poet promises in this letter, is a song,
beginning,

"Where braving angry winter's storms
The lofty Ochels rise,"

written in honour of Margaret Chalmers, and published along with the
"Banks of the Devon," in Johnson's Musical Museum. ]

_Edinburgh, Dec. _ 12, 1787.

I am here under the care of a surgeon, with a bruised limb extended on
a cushion; and the tints of my mind vying with the livid horror
preceding a midnight thunder-storm.