Yet, in spite of untoward circumstances, ceaseless drudgery, and insufficient diet, the family of Mount Oliphant was not utterly lost to happiness. With such a shrewd mother and such a father as William Burness—a man of whom Scotland may be justly proud—no home could be altogether unhappy. In Burns's picture of the family circle in The Cotter's Saturday Night there is nothing of bitterness or gloom or melancholy.
'With joy unfeign'd brothers and sisters meet,
An' each for other's welfare kindly spiers:
The social hours, swift-wing'd, unnotic'd fleet;
Each tells the uncos that he sees or hears.
The parents, partial, eye their hopeful years;
Anticipation forward points the view:
The mother, wi' her needle an' her shears,
Gars auld claes look amaist as weel's the new;
The father mixes a' wi' admonition due.'
In the work of the farm, too, hard as it was, there was pleasure, and the poet's first song, with the picture he gives of the partners in the harvest field, breaks forth from this life of cheerless gloom and unceasing moil like a blink of sunshine through a lowering sky. Burns's description of how the song came to be made is worthy of quotation, because it gives us a very clear and well-defined likeness of himself at the time, a lad in years, but already counting himself among men. 'You know our country custom of coupling a man and a woman together in the labours of harvest. In my fifteenth autumn my partner was a bewitching creature who just counted an autumn less. In short, she, unwittingly to herself, initiated me into a certain delicious passion, which ... I hold to be the first of human joys.... I did not well know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind her when returning in the evening from our labours; why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an Æolian harp; and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious rantann when I looked and fingered over her hand to pick out the nettle-stings and thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualifications she sang sweetly; and 'twas her favourite Scotch reel that I attempted to give an embodied vehicle to in rhyme. I was not so presumptive as to imagine I could make verses like printed ones composed by men who had Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a small 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.'
He had already measured himself with this moorland poet, and admits no inferiority; and what a laird's son has done he too may do. Writing of this song afterwards, Burns, who was always a keen critic, admits that it is 'very puerile and silly.' Still, we think there is something of beauty, and much of promise, in this early effusion. It has at least one of the merits, and, in a sense, the peculiar characteristic of all Burns's songs. It is sincere and natural; and that is the beginning of all good writing.
'Thus with me,' he says, 'began love and poetry, which at times have been my only and ... my highest enjoyment.' This was the first-fruit of his poetic genius, and we doubt not that in the composition, and after the composition, life at Mount Oliphant was neither so cheerless nor so hard as it had been. A new life was opened up to him with a thousand nameless hopes and aspirations, though probably as yet he kept all these things to himself, and pondered them in his heart.
CHAPTER II
LOCHLEA AND MOSSGIEL
The farm at Mount Oliphant proved a ruinous failure, and after weathering their last two years on it under the tyranny of the scoundrel factor, it was with feelings of relief, we may be sure, that the family removed to Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton. This was a farm of 130 acres of land rising from the right bank of the river Ayr. The farm appeared to them more promising than the one they had left. The prospect from its uplands was extensive and beautiful. It commanded a view of the Carrick Hills, and the Firth of Clyde beyond; but where there are extensive views to be had the land is necessarily exposed. The farm itself was bleak and bare, and twenty shillings an acre was a high rent for fields so situated.
The younger members of the family, however, were now old enough to be of some assistance in the house or in the fields, and for a few years life was brighter than it had been before; not that labour was lighter to them here, but simply because they had escaped the meshes and machinations of a petty tyrant, and worked more cheerfully, looking to the future with confidence. Father, mother, and children all worked as hard as they were able, and none more ungrudgingly than the poet.
We know little about those first few years of life at Lochlea, which should be matter for special thanksgiving. Better we should know nothing at all than that we should learn of misfortunes coming upon them, and see the family again in tears and forced to thole a factor's snash; better silence than the later unsavoury episodes, which have not yet been allowed decent burial. Probably life went evenly and beautifully in those days. The brothers accompanied their father to the fields; Agnes milked the cows, reciting the while to her younger sisters, Annabella and Isabella, snatches of song or psalm; and in the evening the whole family would again gather round the ingle to raise their voices in Dundee or Martyrs or Elgin, and then to hear the priest-like father read the sacred page.