Robert Burns by Principal Shairp (reading rainbow books txt) 📕

word used by shepherds when they bid their collies drive away strange sheep. Who the strangers were in this case may be guessed from her known Jacobite sentiments.

On his way from Clackmannan to Edinburgh he turned aside to see Loch Leven and its island castle, which had been the prison of the hapless Mary Stuart; and thence passing to the Norman Abbey Church of Dunfermline, with deep emotion he looked on the grave of Robert Bruce. At that time the choir of the old church, which had contained the grave, had been long demolished, and the new structure which now covers it, had not yet been thought of. The sacred spot was only marked by two broad flagstones, on which Burns knelt and kissed them, reproaching the while the barbarity that had so dishonoured the resting-place of Scotland's hero king. Then, with that sudden change of mood, so characteristic of him, he passed within the ancient church, and mounting the pulpit, addressed to his companion, who had, at his desire, mounted the cutty stool, or seat of repentance, a parody of the rebuke, which he himself had undergone some time before at Mauchline.


CHAPTER IV. (p. 079)

SECOND WINTER IN EDINBURGH.


These summer and autumn wanderings ended, Burns returned to Edinburgh, and spent there the next five months from the latter part of October, 1787, till the end of March, 1788, in a way which to any man, much more to such an one as he, could give small satisfaction. The ostensible cause of his lingering in Edinburgh was to obtain a settlement with his procrastinating publisher, Creech, because till this was effected, he had no money with which to enter on the contemplated farm, or on any other regular way of life. Probably in thus wasting his time, Burns may have been influenced more than he himself was aware, by a secret hope that something might yet be done for him - that all the smiles lavished on him by the great and powerful could not possibly mean nothing, and that he should be left to drudge on in poverty and obscurity as before.

During this winter Burns changed his quarters from Richmond's lodging in High Street, where he had lived during the former winter, to a house then marked 2, now 30, St. James's Square in the New Town. There he lived with a Mr. Cruikshank, a colleague of his friend Nicol in the High School, and there he continued to reside till he left Edinburgh. More than once he paid brief visits to Nithsdale, and examined (p. 080) again and yet again the farm on the Dalswinton property, on which he had long had his eye. This was his only piece of serious business during those months. The rest of his time was spent more or less in the society of his jovial companions. We hear no more during this second winter of his meetings with literary professors, able advocates and judges, or fashionable ladies. His associates seem to have been rather confined to men of the Ainslie and Nicol stamp. He would seem also to have amused himself with flirtations with several young heroines, whose acquaintance he had made during the previous summer. The chief of these were two young ladies, Miss Margaret Chalmers and Miss Charlotte Hamilton, cousins of each other, and relatives of his Mauchline friend, Gavin Hamilton. These he had met during the two visits which he paid to Harvieston, on the river Devon, where they were living for a time. On his return to Edinburgh he continued to correspond with them both, and to address songs of affection, if not of love, now to one, now to another. To Charlotte Hamilton he addressed the song beginning, -

How pleasant the banks of the clear winding Devon;

To Miss Chalmers, one with the opening lines, -

Where, braving angry winter's storms,
The lofty Ochils rise;

And another beginning thus, -

My Peggy's face, my Peggy's form.

Which of these young ladies was foremost in Burns's affection, it is not easy now to say, nor does it much signify. To both he wrote some of his best letters, and some of not his best verses. Allan (p. 081) Cunningham thinks that he had serious affection for Miss Hamilton. The latest editor of his works asserts that his heart was set on Miss Chalmers, and that she, long afterwards in her widowhood, told Thomas Campbell the poet, that Burns had made a proposal of marriage to her. However this may be, it is certain that while both admitted him to friendship, neither encouraged his advances. They were better "advised than to do so." Probably they knew too much of his past history and his character to think of him as a husband. Both were soon after this time married to men more likely to make them happy than the erratic poet. When they turned a deaf ear to his addresses, he wrote: "My rhetoric seems to have lost all its effect on the lovely half of mankind; I have seen the day, but that is a tale of other years. In my conscience, I believe, that my heart has been so often on fire that it has been vitrified!" Well perhaps for him if it had been so, such small power had he to guide it. Just about the time when he found himself rejected, notwithstanding all his fine letters and his verses, by the two young ladies on Devon banks, he met with an accident through the upsetting of a hackney coach by a drunken driver. The fall left him with a bruised limb, which confined him to his room from the 7th of December till the middle of February (1787).

During these weeks he suffered much from low spirits, and the letters which he then wrote under the influence of that hypochondria and despondency contain some of the gloomiest bursts of discontent with himself and with the world, which he ever gave vent to either in prose or verse. He describes himself as the "sport, the miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypochondriac imagination, agonizing sensibility, and Bedlam passions. I wish I were dead, but I'm no like to (p. 082) die.... I fear I am something like undone; but I hope for the best. Come, stubborn Pride and unshrinking Resolution; accompany me through this to me miserable world! I have a hundred times wished that one could resign life, as an officer resigns a commission; for I would not take in any poor wretch by selling out. Lately I was a sixpenny private, and, God knows, a miserable soldier enough; now I march to the campaign, a starving cadet - a little more conspicuously wretched."

But his late want of success on the banks of Devon, and his consequent despondency, were alike dispelled from his thoughts by a new excitement. Just at the time when he met with his accident, he had made the acquaintance of a certain Mrs. M'Lehose, and acquaintance all at once became a violent attachment on both sides. This lady had been deserted by her husband, who had gone to the West Indies, leaving her in poverty and obscurity to bring up two young boys as best she might. We are told that she was "of a somewhat voluptuous style of beauty, of lively and easy manners, of a poetical fabric of mind, with some wit, and not too high a degree of refinement or delicacy - exactly the kind of woman to fascinate Burns." Fascinated he certainly was. On the 30th December he writes; "Almighty love still reigns and revels in my bosom, and I am at this moment ready to hang myself for a young Edinburgh widow, who has wit and wisdom more murderously fatal than the assassinating stiletto of the Sicilian bandit, or the poisoned arrow of the savage African." For several months his visits to her house were frequent, his letters unremitting. The sentimental correspondence which they began, in which Burns addresses her as Clarinda, assuming to himself the name of Sylvander, has been (p. 083) published separately, and become notorious. Though this correspondence may contain, as Lockhart says, "passages of deep and noble feeling, which no one but Burns could have penned," it cannot be denied that it contains many more of such fustian, such extravagant bombast, as Burns or any man beyond twenty might well have been ashamed to write. One could wish that for the poet's sake this correspondence had never been preserved. It is so humiliating to read this torrent of falsetto sentiment now, and to think that a man gifted like Burns should have poured it forth. How far his feelings towards Clarinda were sincere, or how far they were wrought up to amuse his vacancy by playing at love-making, it is hard to say. Blended with a profusion of forced compliments and unreal raptures, there are expressions in Burns's letters which one cannot but believe that he meant in earnest, at the moment when he wrote them. Clarinda, it would seem, must have regarded Burns as a man wholly disengaged, and have looked forward to the possible removal of Mr. M'Lehose, and with him of the obstacle to a union with Burns. How far he may have really shared the same hopes it is impossible to say. We only know that he used again and again language of deepest devotion, vowing to "love Clarinda to death, through death, and for ever."

While this correspondence between Sylvander and Clarinda was in its highest flight of rapture, Burns received, in January or February, 1788, news from Mauchline which greatly agitated him. His renewed intercourse with Jean Armour had resulted in consequences which again stirred her father's indignation; this time so powerfully, that he turned his daughter to the door. Burns provided a shelter for her under the roof of a friend; but for a time he does not seem to (p. 084) have thought of doing more than this. Whether he regarded the original private marriage as entirely dissolved, and looked on himself as an unmarried man, does not quite appear. Anyhow, he and Clarinda, who knew all that had passed with regard to Jean Armour, seem to have then thought that enough had been done for the seemingly discarded Mauchline damsel, and to have carried on their correspondence as rapturously as ever for fully another six weeks, until the 21st of March (1788). On that day Sylvander wrote to Clarinda a final letter, pledging himself to everlasting love, and following it by a copy of verses beginning, -

Fair empress of the poet's soul,

presenting her at the same time with a pair of wineglasses as a parting gift.

On the 24th of March, he turned his back on Edinburgh, and never returned to it for more than a day's visit.

Before leaving town, however, he had arranged three pieces of business, all bearing closely on his future life. First, he had secured for himself an appointment in the Excise