No More Learning

The catastrophe which happened ere this
letter was well in his father's hand, accords ill with quotations from
the Bible, and hopes fixed in heaven:--"As we gave," he says, "a
welcome carousal to the new year, the shop took fire, and burnt to
ashes, and I was left, like a true poet, not worth a sixpence. "

This disaster was followed by one more grievous: his father was well
in years when he was married, and age and a constitution injured by
toil and disappointment, began to press him down, ere his sons had
grown up to man's estate. On all sides the clouds began to darken: the
farm was unprosperous: the speculations in flax failed; and the
landlord of Lochlea, raising a question upon the meaning of the lease,
concerning rotation of crop, pushed the matter to a lawsuit, alike
ruinous to a poor man either in its success or its failure. "After
three years tossing and whirling," says Burns, "in the vortex of
litigation, my father was just saved from the horrors of a jail by a
consumption, which, after two years' promises, kindly slept in and
carried him away to where the 'wicked cease from troubling and the
weary are at rest. ' His all went among the hell-hounds that prowl in
the kennel of justice. The finishing evil which brought up the rear of
this infernal file, was my constitutional melancholy being increased
to such a degree, that for three months I was in a state of mind
scarcely to be envied by the hopeless wretches who have got their
mittimus, 'Depart from me, ye cursed. '"

Robert Burns was now the head of his father's house. He gathered
together the little that law and misfortune had spared, and took the
farm of Mossgiel, near Mauchline, containing one hundred and eighteen
acres, at a rent of ninety pounds a year: his mother and sisters took
the domestic superintendence of home, barn, and byre; and he
associated his brother Gilbert in the labours of the land. It was made
a joint affair: the poet was young, willing, and vigorous, and
excelled in ploughing, sowing, reaping, mowing, and thrashing. His
wages were fixed at seven pounds per annum, and such for a time was
his care and frugality, that he never exceeded this small allowance.
He purchased books on farming, held conversations with the old and the
knowing; and said unto himself, "I shall be prudent and wise, and my
shadow shall increase in the land. " But it was not decreed that these
resolutions were to endure, and that he was to become a mighty
agriculturist in the west. Farmer Attention, as the proverb says, is a
good farmer, all the world over, and Burns was such by fits and by
starts. But he who writes an ode on the sheep he is about to shear, a
poem on the flower that he covers with the furrow, who sees visions on
his way to market, who makes rhymes on the horse he is about to yoke,
and a song on the girl who shows the whitest hands among his reapers,
has small chance of leading a market, or of being laird of the fields
he rents. The dreams of Burns were of the muses, and not of rising
markets, of golden locks rather than of yellow corn: he had other
faults.
It is not known that William Burns was aware before his death
that his eldest son had sinned in rhyme; but we have Gilbert's
assurance, that his father went to the grave in ignorance of his son's
errors of a less venial kind--unwitting that he was soon to give a
two-fold proof of both in "Rob the Rhymer's Address to his Bastard
Child"--a poem less decorous than witty.

The dress and condition of Burns when he became a poet were not at all
poetical, in the minstrel meaning of the word. His clothes, coarse and
homely, were made from home-grown wool, shorn off his own sheeps'
backs, carded and spun at his own fireside, woven by the village
weaver, and, when not of natural hodden-gray, dyed a half-blue in the
village vat. They were shaped and sewed by the district tailor, who
usually wrought at the rate of a groat a day and his food; and as the
wool was coarse, so also was the workmanship. The linen which he wore
was home-grown, home-hackled, home-spun, home-woven, and
home-bleached, and, unless designed for Sunday use, was of coarse,
strong harn, to suit the tear and wear of barn and field. His shoes
came from rustic tanpits, for most farmers then prepared their own
leather; were armed, sole and heel, with heavy, broad-headed nails, to
endure the clod and the road: as hats were then little in use, save
among small lairds or country gentry, westland heads were commonly
covered with a coarse, broad, blue bonnet, with a stopple on its flat
crown, made in thousands at Kilmarnock, and known in all lands by the
name of scone bonnets. His plaid was a handsome red and white
check--for pride in poets, he said, was no sin--prepared of fine wool
with more than common care by the hands of his mother and sisters, and
woven with more skill than the village weaver was usually required to
exert. His dwelling was in keeping with his dress, a low, thatched
house, with a kitchen, a bedroom and closet, with floors of kneaded
clay, and ceilings of moorland turf: a few books on a shelf, thumbed
by many a thumb; a few hams drying above head in the smoke, which was
in no haste to get out at the roof--a wooden settle, some oak chairs,
chaff beds well covered with blankets, with a fire of peat and wood
burning at a distance from the gable wall, on the middle of the floor.
His food was as homely as his habitation, and consisted chiefly of
oatmeal-porridge, barley-broth, and potatoes, and milk. How the muse
happened to visit him in this clay biggin, take a fancy to a clouterly
peasant, and teach him strains of consummate beauty and elegance, must
ever be a matter of wonder to all those, and they are not few, who
hold that noble sentiments and heroic deeds are the exclusive portion
of the gently nursed and the far descended.

Of the earlier verses of Burns few are preserved: when composed, he
put them on paper, but the kept them to himself: though a poet at
sixteen, he seems not to have made even his brother his confidante
till he became a man, and his judgment had ripened. He, however, made
a little clasped paper book his treasurer, and under the head of
"Observations, Hints, Songs, and Scraps of Poetry," we find many a
wayward and impassioned verse, songs rising little above the humblest
country strain, or bursting into an elegance and a beauty worthy of
the highest of minstrels. The first words noted down are the stanzas
which he composed on his fair companion of the harvest-field, out of
whose hands he loved to remove the nettle-stings and the thistles: the
prettier song, beginning "Now westlin win's and slaughtering guns,"
written on the lass of Kirkoswald, with whom, instead of learning
mensuration, he chose to wander under the light of the moon: a strain
better still, inspired by the charms of a neighbouring maiden, of the
name of Annie Ronald; another, of equal merit, arising out of his
nocturnal adventures among the lasses of the west; and, finally, that
crowning glory of all his lyric compositions, "Green grow the rashes. "
This little clasped book, however, seems not to have been made his
confidante till his twenty-third or twenty-fourth year: he probably
admitted to its pages only the strains which he loved most, or such as
had taken a place in his memory: at whatever age it was commenced, he
had then begun to estimate his own character, and intimate his
fortunes, for he calls himself in its pages "a man who had little art
in making money, and still less in keeping it. "

We have not been told how welcome the incense of his songs rendered
him to the rustic maidens of Kyle: women are not apt to be won by the
charms of verse; they have little sympathy with dreamers on Parnassus,
and allow themselves to be influenced by something more substantial
than the roses and lilies of the muse. Burns had other claims to their
regard then those arising from poetic skill: he was tall, young,
good-looking, with dark, bright eyes, and words and wit at will: he
had a sarcastic sally for all lads who presumed to cross his path, and
a soft, persuasive word for all lasses on whom he fixed his fancy: nor
was this all--he was adventurous and bold in love trystes and love
excursions: long, rough roads, stormy nights, flooded rivers, and
lonesome places, were no letts to him; and when the dangers or labours
of the way were braved, he was alike skilful in eluding vigilant
aunts, wakerife mothers, and envious or suspicions sisters: for rivals
he had a blow as ready us he had a word, and was familiar with snug
stack-yards, broomy glens, and nooks of hawthorn and honeysuckle,
where maidens love to be wooed.