There was much similarity between the most vital educational development of Burns and of Mrs Browning. In Aurora Leigh, the record of her own growth, she describes her true education, although not her actual life’s history. Aurora loses her mother in her fifth year, and lives with her father for nine great years near Florence; she says:
So nine full years our days were hid with God
Among His mountains. I was just thirteen,
Still growing like a plant from unseen roots
In tongue-tied springs; and suddenly awoke
To full life, and life’s needs and agonies,
With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside
A stone-dead father. Life struck sharp on death
Makes awful lightning.
Her years till thirteen are spent mainly in her father’s fine library reading what she most loved of the treasuries of the world. Her own statement of her father’s educational guidance is:
My father taught me what he had learnt the best
Before he died, and left me—grief and love;
And seeing we had books among the hills,
Strong words of counselling souls, confederate
With vocal pines and waters, out of books
He taught me all the ignorance of men,
And how God laughs in heaven when any man
Says, ‘Here I’m learned; this I understand;
In that I’m never caught at fault or doubt.’
Like Burns she reads good books with joyous interest; like Burns she has a father deeply interested in her education who teaches her vital things; and like Burns she loves to learn from the ‘vocal pines and waters,’ and finds her richest revelations for her mind ‘with God among His mountains.’
The hills of Ayrshire, the rivers, and the river-glens, whose sides are covered with beautiful trees, were to Burns kindlers of high ideals, and revealers of God.