too long, and some of which, the most difficult too to be effaced, had been even let fall from the fingers of a benevolent biographer who thought himself in duty bound to speak what he most mistakenly believed to be the truth. "Oh Robert!" was all his mother could say on his return to Mossgiel from Edinb' ¡gh. In her simple heart she was astonished at his fame, and could not understand it well, any more than she could her own happiness and her own pride. But his affection she understood better than he did, and far better still his generosity; and duly night and morning she asked a blessing on his head from Him who had given her such a son. "Between the men of rustic life," said Burns-so at least it is reported" and the polite world I observed little difference. 'n the former, though unpolished by fashion, and unenlightened by science, I have found much observation and much intelligence. But a refined and accomplished woman was a thing altogether new to me, and of which I had formed but a very inadequate idea." One of his biographer seems to have believed that his love for Jean Armour, the a ghter of Mauchline mason, must have died away under th more ade ate ideas of the sex along with their corresponding emotions; ai that he now married her with reluctance. Only think of Burns taking an Edinburgh Belle to wife! He flew, somewhat too fervently, "To love's willing fetters, the arms of his Jean' Her father had again to curse her for her infatuated ove of her husband-for such if not by the law of Scotland—which may be doubtful-Burns certainly was by the law of heaven-and like a good Christian had again turned his daughter out of doors. Had Burns deserted her he had merely been a heartless villain. In making her his lawful wedded wife he did no more than any other man, deserving the name of man, in the same circumstances would have done; and had he not, he would have walked in shame before men, and in fear and trembling before God. But he did so, not only because it was his most sacred duty, but because he loved her better than ever, and without her would have been miserable. Much had she suffered for his sake, and he for hers; but all that distraction and despair which had nearly driven him into a sugar plantation, were over and gone, forgotten utterly, or remembered but as a dismal dream endearing the placid day that for ever dispelled it. He writes about her to Mrs. Dunlop and others in terms of sobriety and good sense—“ The most placid good nature and sweetness of disposition; a warm heart, gratefully devoted with all its powers to love me; vigorous health and sprightly cheerfulness, set off to the best advantage by a more than commonly handsome figure" these he thought in a woman might, with a knowledge of the scriptures, make a good wife. During the few months he was getting his house ready for her at Ellisland he frequently trav elled, with all the fondness of a lover, the long wilderness of oors to Mauchline, where she was in the house of her austere father reconciled to her at last. And though he has told us that it was his custom, in song-writing, to keep the image of some fair maiden before the eye of his fancy, "some bright particular star," and that Hymen was not the divinity he then invoked, yet it was on one of these visits, between Ellisland and Mossgiel, that he penned under such homely inspiration as precious a loveoffering as genius in the passion of hope ever laid in a virgin's bosom. His wife sung it to him that same evening-and indeed he never knew whether or no he had succeeded in any one of his lyrics, till he heard his words and the air together from her voice. "Of a' the airts the wind can blaw, I dearly like the west, For there the bonnie lassie lives, The lassie I lo'e best: There wild woods grow, and rivers row, And mony a hill between ; But day and night my fancy's flight "I see her in the dewy flowers, I hear her in the tunefu' birds, There's not a bonny flower that springs, There's not a bonny bird that sings, "Oh blaw ye westlin winds, blaw saft Wi' balmy gale, frae hill and dale, That's aye sae neat and clean; "What sighs and vows among the knowes How fond to meet, how wae to part, That night she gaed awa! The powers aboon can only ken, As my sweet lovely Jean." And here we ask you who may be reading these pages, to pause for a little, and consider with yourselves, what up to this time Burns had done to justify the condemnatory judgments that have been passed on his character as a man by so many admirers of his genius as a poet! Compared with men of ordinary worth, who have deservedly passed through life with the world's esteem, in what was it lamentably wanting? Not in tenderness, warmth, strength of the natural affections; and they are good till turned to evil. Not in the duties for which they were given, and which they make delights. Of which of these duties was he habitually neglectful? To the holiest of them all next to piety to his Maker, he was faithful beyond most-few better kept the fourth commandment. His youth, though soon too impassioned, had been long pure. If he were temperate by necessity and not nature, yet he was so as contentedly as if it had been by choice. He had lived on meal and water with some milk, because the family were too poor for better fare; and yet he rose to labor as the lark rises to sing. In the corruption of our fallen nature he sinned, ana, it has been said, became a libertine. Was he ever guilty of deliber ate seduction? It is not so recorded; and we believe his whore soul would have recoiled from such wickedness: but let us not affect ignorance of what we all know. Among no people on the face of the earth is the moral code so rigid, with regard to the intercourse of the sexes, as to stamp with ineffaceable disgrace every lapse from virtue; and certainly not among the Scottish peasantry, austere as the spirit of religion has always been, and terrible ecclesiastical censure. Hateful in all eyes is the reprobate the hoary sinner loathsome; but many a grey head is now deservedly reverenced that would not be so, were the memory of all that has been repented by the Elder, and pardoned unto him, to rise up against him among the congregation as he entered the House of God. There has been many a rueful tragedy in houses that in after times "seemed asleep." How many good and happy fathers of families, who, were all their past lives to be pictured in ghastly revelation to the eyes of their wives and children, could never again dare to look them in the face! It pleased God to give them a long life; and they have escaped, not by their own strength, far away from the shadows of their misdeeds that are not now suffered to pursue them, but are chained down in the past, no more to be let loose. That such things were, is a secret none now live to divulge; and though once known, they were never emblazoned. But Burns and men like Burns showed the whole world their dark spots by the very light of their genius; and having died in what may almost be called their youth, there the dark spots still are, and men point to them with their fingers, to whose eyes there may seem but small glory in all that effulgence. Burns now took possession at Whitsuntide (1788) of the farm of Ellisland, while his wife remained at Mossgiel, completing her education in the dairy, till brought home next term to their new house, which the poet set a-building with alacrity, on a plan of his own, which was as simple a one as could be devised: kitchen and dining room in one, a double-bedded room with a bed-closet, and a garret. The site was pleasant, on the edge of a high bank of the Nith, commanding a wide and beautiful prospect,―holms, plains, woods, and hills, and a long reach of the sweeping river. While the house and offices were growing, he inhabited a hovel close at hand, and though occasionally giv ing vent to some splenetic humors in letters indited in his sooty cabin, and now and then yielding to fits of despondency about the "ticklish situation of a family of children," he says to his friend Ainslie, "I am decidedly of opinion that the step I have taken is vastly for my happiness." He had to qualify himself for holding his excise commission by six weeks' attendance on the business of that profession at Ayr—and we have seen that he made several visits to Mossgiel. Currie cannot let him thus pass the summer without moralizing on his mode of life. "Pleased with surveying the grounds he was about to cultivate, and with the rearing of a building that should give shelter to his wife and children, and, as he fondly hoped, to his own grey hairs, sentiments of independence buoyed up his mind, pictures of domestic comfort and peace rose on his imagination; and a few days passed away, as he himself informs us, the most tranquil, if not the happiest, which he had ever experienced." Let us believe that such days were not few, but many, and that we need not join with the good Doctor in grieving to think that Burns led all the summer a wandering and unsettled life. It could not be stationary; but there is no reason to think that his occasional absence was injurious to his affairs on the farm. Currie writes as if he thought him incapable of self-guidance, and says, "It is to be lamented that at this critical period of his life, our poet was without the society of his wife and children. A great change had taken place in his situation; his old habits were broken; and the new circumstances in which ho was placed, were calculated to give a new direction to his thoughts and conduct. But his application to the cares and la bors of his farm was interrupted by several visits to his family in Ayrshire; and as the distance was too great for a single day's journey, he generally slept a night at an inn on the road. On such occasions he sometimes fell into company, and forgot the resolutions he had formed. In a little while temptation assailed him nearer home." This is treating Burns like a child, a person of so facile a disposition as not to be trusted without a keeper on the king's high.way. If he was not fit to ride by himself into Ayrshire, and there was no safety for him at Sanquhar, his case was hopeless out of an asylum. A trustwor |