No More Learning

Dunlop, with
about four hundred pounds in his pocket, a resolution to toil, and a
hope of success, Burns made his appearance on the banks of the Nith,
and set up his staff at Ellisland. This farm, now a classic spot, is
about six miles up the river from Dumfries; it extends to upwards of a
hundred acres: the soil is kindly; the holmland portion of it loamy
and rich, and it has at command fine walks on the river side, and
views of the Friar's Carse, Cowehill, and Dalswinton. For a while the
poet had to hide his head in a smoky hovel; till a house to his fancy,
and offices for his cattle and his crops were built, his accommodation
was sufficiently humble; and his mind taking its hue from his
situation, infused a bitterness into the letters in which he first
made known to his western friends that he had fixed his abode in
Nithsdale. "I am here," said he, "at the very elbow of existence: the
only things to be found in perfection in this country are stupidity
and canting; prose they only know in graces and prayers, and the value
of these they estimate as they do their plaiden-webs, by the ell: as
for the muses, they have as much an idea of a rhinoceros as of a
poet. " "This is an undiscovered clime," he at another period exclaims,
"it is unknown to poetry, and prose never looked on it save in drink.
I sit by the fire, and listen to the hum of the spinning-wheel: I
hear, but cannot see it, for it is hidden in the smoke which eddies
round and round me before it seeks to escape by window and door. I
have no converse but with the ignorance which encloses me: No kenned
face but that of my old mare, Jenny Geddes--my life is dwindled down
to mere existence. "

When the poet's new house was built and plenished, and the atmosphere
of his mind began to clear, he found the land to be fruitful, and its
people intelligent and wise. In Riddel, of Friar's Carse, he found a
scholar and antiquarian; in Miller, of Dalswinton, a man conversant
with science as well as with the world; in M'Murdo, of Drumlanrig, a
generous and accomplished gentleman; and in John Syme, of Ryedale, a
man much after his own heart, and a lover of the wit and socialities
of polished life. Of these gentlemen Riddel, who was his neighbour,
was the favourite: a door was made in the march-fence which separated
Ellisland from Friar's Carse, that the poet might indulge in the
retirement of the Carse hermitage, a little lodge in the wood, as
romantic as it was beautiful, while a pathway was cut through the
dwarf oaks and birches which fringed the river bank, to enable the
poet to saunter and muse without lot or interruption. This attention
was rewarded by an inscription for the hermitage, written with
elegance as well as feeling, and which was the first fruits of his
fancy in this unpoetic land. In a happier strain he remembered Matthew
Henderson: this is one of the sweetest as well as happiest of his
poetic compositions. He heard of his friend's death, and called on
nature animate and inanimate, to lament the loss of one who held the
patent of his honours from God alone, and who loved all that was pure
and lovely and good. "The Whistle" is another of his Ellisland
compositions: the contest which he has recorded with such spirit and
humour took place almost at his door: the heroes were Fergusson, of
Craigdarroch, Sir Robert Laurie, of Maxwelltown, and Riddel, of the
Friar's Carse: the poet was present, and drank bottle and bottle about
with the best, and when all was done he seemed much disposed, as an
old servant at Friar's Carse remembered, to take up the victor.

Burns had become fully reconciled to Nithsdale, and was on the most
intimate terms with the muse when he produced Tam O' Shanter, the
crowning glory of all his poems.
For this marvellous tale we are
indebted to something like accident: Francis Grose, the antiquary,
happened to visit Friar's Carse, and as he loved wine and wit, the
total want of imagination was no hinderance to his friendly
intercourse with the poet: "Alloway's auld haunted kirk" was
mentioned, and Grose said he would include it in his illustrations of
the antiquities of Scotland, if the bard of the Doon would write a
poem to accompany it. Burns consented, and before he left the table,
the various traditions which belonged to the ruin were passing through
his mind. One of these was of a farmer, who, on a night wild with
wind and rain, on passing the old kirk was startled by a light
glimmering inside the walls; on drawing near he saw a caldron hung
over a fire, in which the heads and limbs of children were simmering:
there was neither witch nor fiend to guard it, so he unhooked the
caldron, turned out the contents, and carried it home as a trophy. A
second tradition was of a man of Kyle, who, having been on a market
night detained late in Ayr, on crossing the old bridge of Doon, on his
way home, saw a light streaming through the gothic window of Alloway
kirk, and on riding near, beheld a batch of the district witches
dancing merrily round their master, the devil, who kept them "louping
and flinging" to the sound of a bagpipe. He knew several of the old
crones, and smiled at their gambols, for they were dancing in their
smocks: but one of them, and she happened to be young and rosy, had on
a smock shorter than those of her companions by two spans at least,
which so moved the farmer that he exclaimed, "Weel luppan, Maggie wi'
the short sark! " Satan stopped his music, the light was extinguished,
and out rushed the hags after the farmer, who made at the gallop for
the bridge of Doon, knowing that they could not cross a stream: he
escaped; but Maggie, who was foremost, seized his horse's tail at the
middle of the bridge, and pulled it off in her efforts to stay him.

This poem was the work of a single day: Burns walked out to his
favourite musing path, which runs towards the old tower of the Isle,
along Nithside, and was observed to walk hastily and mutter as he
went. His wife knew by these signs that he was engaged in composition,
and watched him from the window; at last wearying, and moreover
wondering at the unusual length of his meditations, she took her
children with her and went to meet him; but as he seemed not to see
her, she stept aside among the broom to allow him to pass, which he
did with a flushed brow and dropping eyes, reciting these lines
aloud:--

"Now Tam! O, Tum! had thae been queans,
A' plump and strapping in their teens,
Their sacks, instead o' creeshie flannen,
Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linen!
Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair,
That ance were plush, o' gude blue hair,
I wad hae gien them off my hurdies,
For ae blink o' the bonnie burdies! "

He embellished this wild tradition from fact as well as from fancy:
along the road which Tam came on that eventful night his memory
supplied circumstances which prepared him for the strange sight at the
kirk of Alloway. A poor chapman had perished, some winters before, in
the snow; a murdered child had been found by some early hunters; a
tippling farmer had fallen from his horse at the expense of his neck,
beside a "meikle stane"; and a melancholy old woman had hanged herself
at the bush aboon the well, as the poem relates: all these matters the
poet pressed into the service of the muse, and used them with a skill
which adorns rather than oppresses the legend. A pert lawyer from
Dumfries objected to the language as obscure: "Obscure, sir! " said
Burns; "you know not the language of that great master of your own
art--the devil. If you had a witch for your client you would not be
able to manage her defence!