Robert Burns | Page 4

from our labours;
why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an Æolian
harp; and especially 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 her love-inspiring qualities, she sung
sweetly; and it was her favourite reel to which I attempted giving an
embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to imagine
that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who read
Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be
composed by a country laird's son, on one of his father's maids with
whom he was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as
well as he; for, excepting that he could shear sheep, and cast peats, his
father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than
myself. Thus with me began love and poetry."
The song he then composed is entitled "Handsome Nell," and is the
(p. 009) first he ever wrote. He himself speaks of it as very puerile and
silly--a verdict which Chambers endorses, but in which I cannot agree.
Simple and artless it no doubt is, but with a touch of that grace which
bespeaks the true poet. Here is one verse which, for directness of
feeling and felicity of language, he hardly ever surpassed:--
She dresses aye sae clean and neat, Baith decent and genteel, And then
there's something in her gait Gars ony dress look weel.
"I composed it," says Burns, "in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to
this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, my blood sallies at the
remembrance."
LOCHLEA.--Escaped from the fangs of the factor, with some remnant
of means, William Burness removed from Mount Oliphant to Lochlea

in the parish of Tarbolton (1777), an upland undulating farm, on the
north bank of the River Ayr, with a wide outlook, southward over the
hills of Carrick, westward toward the Isle of Arran, Ailsa Craig, and
down the Firth of Clyde, toward the Western Sea. This was the home of
Burns and his family from his eighteenth till his twenty-fifth year. For a
time the family life here was more comfortable than before, probably
because several of the children were now able to assist their parents in
farm labour. "These seven years," says Gilbert Burns, "brought small
literary improvement to Robert," but I can hardly believe this when we
remember that Lochlea saw the composition of The Death and Dying
Words of Poor Mailie, and of My Nannie, O, and one or two more of
his most popular songs. It was during those days that Robert, (p. 010)
then growing into manhood, first ventured to step beyond the range of
his father's control, and to trust the promptings of his own social
instincts and headlong passions. The first step in this direction was to
go to a dancing school, in a neighbouring village, that he might there
meet companions of either sex, and give his rustic manners "a brush,"
as he phrases it. The next step was taken when Burns resolved to spend
his nineteenth summer in Kirkoswald, to learn mensuration and
surveying from the schoolmaster there, who was famous as a teacher of
these things. Griswold, on the Carrick coast, was a village full of
smugglers and adventurers, in whose society Burns was introduced to
scenes of what he calls "swaggering riot and roaring dissipation." It
may readily be believed that with his strong love of sociality and
excitement he was an apt pupil in that school. Still the mensuration
went on till one day, when in the kail-yard behind the teachers house,
Burns met a young lass, who set his heart on fire, and put an end to
mensuration. This incident is celebrated in the song beginning--
Now westlin winds and slaughtering guns Bring Autumn's pleasant
weather,--
"the ebullition," he calls it, "of that passion which ended the school
business at Kirkoswald."
From this time on for several years, love making was his chief
amusement, or rather his most serious business. His brother tells us that

he was in the secret of half the love affairs of the parish of Tarbolton,
and was never without at least one of his own. There was not a comely
girl in Tarbolton on whom he did not compose a song, and then he
made one which included them all. When he was thus inly (p. 011)
moved, "the agitations of his mind and body," says Gilbert, "exceeded
anything of the kind I ever knew in real life. He had always a particular
jealousy of people who were richer than himself, or had more
consequence. His love therefore rarely settled on persons of