It is a poor place, but very beautiful; it is in Nithsdale, and the murmur of the river through its wooded banks makes the poet forget the crop of pebbles which every ploughing turns to the top. He is presently in the Excise too (1789): so gets some added pence by the gauging of beer-barrels and looking after frauds upon the revenue; married too—having out of all the loose love-strings, which held him more or less weakly, at last knotted one, which ties the quiet, pretty, womanly, much injured Jean Armour to his hearth and home, forever. And he begins that Ellisland life bravely well; has prayers at night; teaches the "toddlin' wee things" their catechism; has hope and faith, and sings—and sings; and this, amongst other things, was what he sang—
"O, Willie brewed a peck o' maut,
And Bob and Allen cam to see;
Three blither hearts that lee-lang night
Ye wad na find in Christendie.
We are na fou, we're na that fou,
But just a drappie in our e'e;
The cock may craw, the day may daw,
And ay we'll taste the barley bree.
It is the moon, I ken her horn,
That's blinkin in the lift sae hie;
She shines sae bright, to wyle us hame;
But, by my sooth, she'll wait a wee.
The cock may craw, the day may daw,
And aye we'll taste the barley bree."
No wonder the pebbles began to show more and more in the plough-land; no wonder the jolly fellows of Dumfries came oftener and oftener; the long bouts too amongst the hills chilled him; the crops grew smaller and smaller; the "barley bree" better and better; he has no tact at bargaining; a stanza of Tam O'Shanter is worth more than ten plough-days, yet he makes gifts of his best songs. Household affairs go all awry, let poor Jeanie Armour struggle as she may; the cottage palings are down; debts accumulate; and so do those rollicking nights at the Globe, or in a shieling amongst the hills. Yet from out all the impending want, and the gloom, and the desperation, come such sweet notes as these, reaching the ear of humanity everywhere:—
"John Anderson, my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither;
And mony a canty day, John,
W've had wi' ane anither:
Now we maun totter down, John,
But hand in hand we'll go,
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo."
At last Ellisland must be given up—crops, beasties and all; and never more the wooded banks of Nithsdale shall feel his tread, or hear his chant mingling with the river murmurs. He, and they all—five souls now—just of an age to relish most the woods, the range, the fields, the daisies of Ellisland, must go to one of the foulest and least attractive streets of Dumfries, and to a home as little attractive as the street. Fifty years thereafter I went over that house and found it small, pinched, and pitifully meagre in all its appointments; twenty years later, Hawthorne speaks of both house and street as filthy. What could or should supply the place now—to the peasant poet—of the fields, the open sky, the gentle fret and murmurs of the streams of Nithsdale?
The foul fiends who taunted him in the woods now lay hold upon him in earnest; every day his fame is flying over straits and seas; every day his poems, old and new, are planting themselves in fresh hearts and brains; every day his wild passions are dealing him back-handed blows. Old neighbors have to pass him by; modest women look away; he has forfeited social position; and I suspect, welcomed in those days of July, 1796, the approaches of the disease which he knew was sapping his life:—
"Oh, Martinmas wind! when wilt thou blaw
And shake the dead leaves frae the tree?
Oh gentle death! when wilt thou come
And tak a life that wearies me?"
And it comes, in that dismal, miserable upper chamber that you can see when you go there;—his wife ill; his little children wandering aimlessly about; it comes sharply; he is on his back—"uneasy" the nurse said, and "chafing"; when suddenly by a great effort—as if at last he would shake off all the beleaguerments of sense, and the haunting phantoms swarming about him—he rallied all his powers—rose to his full height from the bed—tottered for a moment, then fell prone forward a dead man.
This was in the month of July, 1796; Burns being then only thirty-seven. Walter Scott, a young fellow of twenty-five, living in Edinboro', had just printed his translation of Leonora. Wordsworth—unknown save for a thin booklet of indifferent verse—was living down in Dorsetshire, enjoying the "winding wood-walks green," with that sister Dorothy, who "added sunshine to his daylight." These two had not as yet made the acquaintance of that coming man, S. T. Coleridge, who is living at Clevedon, over by Bristol Channel, with that newly married wife, who has decoyed him from his schemes of American migration; and the poet of the Ancient Mariner (as yet unwritten) has published his little booklet with Mr. Cottle, of Bristol, in which are some modest verses signed C. L. And Charles Lamb (for whom those initials stand) is just now in his twenty-first year, and is living in humble lodgings in Little Queen Street, London, from which he writes to Coleridge, saying that "Burns was a God of my idolatry." And in that very year (1796) the dismalest of tragedies is to overshadow those humble lodgings of Little Queen Street. Of this and of Coleridge and of Wordsworth, we shall have somewhat to say in the chapter we open upon next.