'Now in her green mantle blythe Nature arrays,
And listens the lambkins that bleat o'er the braes,
While birds warble welcome in ilka green show,
But to me it's delightless—my Nannie's awa'.
The snaw-drap and primrose our woodlands adorn,
And violets bathe in the weet o' the morn;
They pain my sad bosom, sae sweetly they blow,
They mind me o' Nannie—and Nannie's awa'.
Thou lav'rock that springs frae the dews o' the lawn,
The shepherd to warn o' the grey-breaking dawn;
And thou mellow mavis that hails the night-fa'
Give over for pity—my Nannie's awa'.'
And also of this curious farewell were born those lines in which is reached, perhaps, the very topmost summit of the lyrical genius of Burns—those lines which are the epitome of all love-tragedy—of all hopeless passion—of all parting woe. And these shall the painstaking reader, who toils to the end of this history, read on the last page for his reward.
Sylvander and Clarinda continued to correspond with considerable desultoriness during the few years of life that remained to the Rhymer, and sad to state, in these communications there is to be traced a very decided recriminative tartness, which is a blow to the ingenuous and sentimental reader. So sputtered out, in rather fiery sparks—as, indeed, is the too common wont of such—one of the most curious of the world's classic flirtations.
Mrs. Maclehose lived to a great age, becoming a most espiègle and charming old lady—the centre of a large and admiring acquaintance. Years after the poet's death, when all danger was over, and passion, too, dead, it was her chief boast, her 'meed of fame,' to figure as Burns's 'Clarinda.' She kept, and would exhibit, many little souvenirs of the Bard, and on all matters pertaining to the history of his Edinburgh visits, she was for many years the greatest living authority. She publicly and impartially would maintain till the last that the poet's marriage with a peasant was the greatest mistake of his life, dragging him down to a low level, intellectually as well as socially; whereas with higher companionship he might have risen to heights incalculably nobler, both of prosperity and of fame. To her dying day she expressed a pious wish that she might meet in heaven the Bard whose soul she felt that she alone had understood as it deserved in the imperfect communionship of earth. All things considered, the hope of meeting in quite another quarter might have seemed more justifiable. But so—exit our charming Nancy from these veracious pages.
To Herries, meanwhile, in his house in George Street, these years brought solitary success and lonely gain. He set himself to his work with an iron determination to forget the past, and it seemed that he succeeded. To him Alison Graham was dead, as truly dead as though she lay in yonder graveyard under the shadow of the Castle rock, with a great stone to weight her down until the Judgment Day. He never thought of her at all. He never pictured his room now as a drawing-room, with gracious feminine appurtenances; it was the office, pure and simple. In Creighton's room below worked his new partner, a young and stirring man. The business extended itself in all directions and flourished like a miracle. Some of the most resounding names in Scotland figured on the green tin boxes, in their yearly increasing phalanx, in Herries's room. He had the name of a hard man, and was, no doubt, rather feared than loved. But so he willed it—for he had had enough of love. Round him, in these busy years, grew wider and yet wider the gallant New Town of Edinburgh—curving into crescents, and widening into squares and handsome residential streets. More and more, the genteel world gravitated to this quarter, and left the Old Town to the squalor of decay. Herries, for one, never visited the old streets and closes—giving in, no doubt, to the new fashion. The High Street was his limit; the devious and narrow ways which led to the Potterrow knew him no more.
And meanwhile, down in the rich south country, in the little white farmhouse among the broom, on the bonny banks of Nith, Robert Burns pursued the downward tenor of his way. Poet and exciseman, farmer and bard: the kindly husband and father, the incorrigible rake: the eager host, the far too frequent—and far, far too uproariously welcomed—guest: the copious correspondent, the ill-balanced politician: the reckless, eager, revolutionary spirit, the remorse-stricken, disappointed, penitent man; at once affectionate and quarrelsome—losing friend after friend, and tiring out the patience of men and women who would fain have befriended him to the last; quixotically generous in money matters, refusing money for his songs, and then forced to accept, in grinding bitterness of spirit, the eleemosynary five-pound note under pressure of inexorable necessity—so he stands out, a tragic figure for all time, the presiding genius, the Rhymer of the North. Too soon the fair page—or that which had promised so fair—of the life at Elliesland had to be turned down, the stock and plenishing of the little farm scattered and sold, and the patient Jean and her little flock of helpless bairns made to flit sadly to Dumfries. Here the temptations of the country town and its taverns soon finished what the too trying and demoralising routine of the Excise had begun; and in the squalor of excess—in sadness, illness, disillusionment and pain—the shining light of genius grew dim, and flickered to extinction.
CHAPTER XLIII.
As time went on, and his fortune accumulated, there came to Archibald Herries that impulse which generally visits the laborious and land-loving Scot at some period of his career—the impulse to possess himself of territorial acres—the ancestral ones if possible. The family from which Herries sprang had owned land in the Galloway region, or near about Kirkcudbright. It occurred to him suddenly, in the summer of '96, when town was empty, and the grass growing up between the cobbles of the Edinburgh streets, after its rural wont, that he would take a tour in the South and re-visit the country of his sires. He set out with a couple of good nags—one ridden by his servant, with a pack-saddle.
It was a successful expedition (all worldly matters prospered with Herries in these days), and in more ways than in mere pleasure. Not only did he see the country to advantage in the fine summer weather, but he discovered that a small property, with its excellent mansion house, which had once been the ancient possession of a younger branch of his family, was for sale. There seemed no reason—certainly not want of funds—why he should not become the purchaser. It might have occurred to him to ask himself why he, unmarried and childless, should burden himself with acres never to become an inheritance. But no such consideration gave him pause. He was inwardly determined that, at the first moment he thought fit to do so, he should marry—ay, and beget sons to carry on his name and fame. True, that moment had never come; but it was not for love's sake that it tarried—or so he was convinced.
It was on his return journey that he stayed for a few nights at Dumfries. With his pleasure-trip he had combined a certain modicum of business, and the affairs of an important client detained him in the country-town longer than he meant. In the long, summer evenings he would stroll about the streets, losing himself in its little vennels and closes, and stopping every now and then to stare about him, as a man will in a place that is strange to him. That Dumfries was becoming famous as the last home of the man who had practically ruined his life, Herries may have known, but only vaguely. The fashionable world had dropped the poet Burns. The town roared over 'Tam o' Shanter' when it appeared, but forgot to pension the unlucky bard struggling with his poverty on the banks of Nith.