No More Learning

He was aided in these labours, first, by the
schoolmaster of Alloway-mill, near the Doon; secondly, by John
Murdoch, student of divinity, who undertook to teach arithmetic,
grammar, French, and Latin, to the boys of Lochlea, and the sons of
five neighboring farmers. Murdoch, who was an enthusiast in learning,
much of a pedant, and such a judge of genius that he thought wit
should always be laughing, and poetry wear an eternal smile, performed
his task well: he found Robert to be quick in apprehension, and not
afraid to study when knowledge was the reward. He taught him to turn
verse into its natural prose order; to supply all the ellipses, and
not to desist till the sense was clear and plain: he also, in their
walks, told him the names of different objects both in Latin and
French; and though his knowledge of these languages never amounted to
much, he approached the grammar of the English tongue, through the
former, which was of material use to him, in his poetic compositions.
Burns was, even in those early days, a sort of enthusiast in all that
concerned the glory of Scotland; he used to fancy himself a soldier of
the days of the Wallace and the Bruce: loved to strut after the
bag-pipe and the drum, and read of the bloody struggles of his country
for freedom and existence, till "a Scottish prejudice," he says, "was
poured into my veins, which will boil there till the flood-gates of
life are shut in eternal rest. "

In this mood of mind Burns was unconsciously approaching the land of
poesie. In addition to the histories of the Wallace and the Bruce, he
found, on the shelves of his neighbours, not only whole bodies of
divinity, and sermons without limit, but the works of some of the best
English, as well as Scottish poets, together with songs and ballads
innumerable. On these he loved to pore whenever a moment of leisure
came; nor was verse his sole favourite; he desired to drink knowledge
at any fountain, and Guthrie's Grammar, Dickson on Agriculture,
Addison's Spectator, Locke on the Human Understanding, and Taylor's
Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, were as welcome to his heart as
Shakspeare, Milton, Pope, Thomson, and Young. There is a mystery in
the workings of genius: with these poets in his head and hand, we see
not that he has advanced one step in the way in which he was soon to
walk, "Highland Mary" and "Tam O' Shanter" sprang from other
inspirations.

Burns lifts up the veil himself, from the studies which made him a
poet. "In my boyish days," he says to Moore, "I owed much to an old
woman (Jenny Wilson) who resided in the family, remarkable for her
credulity and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection
in the country of tales and songs, concerning devils, ghosts, fairies,
brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles,
dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted
towers, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds
of poesie; but had so strong an effect upon my imagination that to
this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a look-out on
suspicious places. " Here we have the young poet taking lessons in the
classic lore of his native land: in the school of Janet Wilson he
profited largely; her tales gave a hue, all their own, to many noble
effusions. But her teaching was at the hearth-stone: when he was in
the fields, either driving a cart or walking to labour, he had ever in
his hand a collection of songs, such as any stall in the land could
supply him with; and over these he pored, ballad by ballad, and verse
by verse, noting the true, tender, and the natural sublime from
affectation and fustian. "To this," he said, "I am convinced that I
owe much of my critic craft, such as it is.
" His mother, too,
unconsciously led him in the ways of the muse: she loved to recite or
sing to him a strange, but clever ballad, called "the Life and Age of
Man:" this strain of piety and imagination was in his mind when he
wrote "Man was made to Mourn. "

He found other teachers--of a tenderer nature and softer influence.
"You know," he says to Moore, "our country custom of coupling a man
and woman together as partners in the labours of harvest. In my
fifteenth autumn my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger
than myself: she was in truth a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass, and
unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which,
in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and bookworm
philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys. How she caught the
contagion I cannot tell; I never expressly said I loved her: indeed I
did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her,
when returning in the evenings from our labours; why the tones of her
voice made my heart strings thrill like an AEolian harp, and
particularly why my pulse beat such a furious ratan, when I looked and
fingered over her little hand, to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and
thistles. Among other love-inspiring qualities, she sang sweetly, and
it was her favourite reel to which I attempted to give an embodied
vehicle in rhyme; thus with me began love and verse. " This intercourse
with the fair part of the creation, was to his slumbering emotions, a
voice from heaven to call them into life and poetry.

From the school of traditionary lore and love, Burns now went to a
rougher academy. Lochlea, though not producing fine crops of corn, was
considered excellent for flax; and while the cultivation of this
commodity was committed to his father and his brother Gilbert, he was
sent to Irvine at Midsummer, 1781, to learn the trade of a
flax-dresser, under one Peacock, kinsman to his mother. Some time
before, he had spent a portion of a summer at a school in Kirkoswald,
learning mensuration and land-surveying, where he had mingled in
scenes of sociality with smugglers, and enjoyed the pleasure of a
silent walk, under the moon, with the young and the beautiful. At
Irvine he laboured by day to acquire a knowledge of his business, and
at night he associated with the gay and the thoughtless, with whom he
learnt to empty his glass, and indulge in free discourse on topics
forbidden at Lochlea. He had one small room for a lodging, for which
he gave a shilling a week: meat he seldom tasted, and his food
consisted chiefly of oatmeal and potatoes sent from his father's
house. In a letter to his father, written with great purity and
simplicity of style, he thus gives a picture of himself, mental and
bodily: "Honoured Sir, I have purposely delayed writing, in the hope
that I should have the pleasure of seeing you on new years' day, but
work comes so hard upon us that I do not choose to be absent on that
account. My health is nearly the same as when you were here, only my
sleep is a little sounder, and on the whole, I am rather better than
otherwise, though I mend by very slow degrees: the weakness of my
nerves had so debilitated my mind that I dare neither review past
wants nor look forward into futurity, for the least anxiety or
perturbation in my breast produces most unhappy effects on my whole
frame. Sometimes indeed, when for an hour or two my spirits are a
little lightened, I _glimmer_ a little into futurity; but my principal
and indeed my only pleasurable employment is looking backwards and
forwards in a moral and religious way. I am quite transported at the
thought that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall bid an eternal adieu
to all the pains and uneasinesses, and disquietudes of this weary
life.