It is difficult to divide the poet's relics among so many claimant places, but here and in the museum are many mementoes of the poet. For this as well as Kirk Alloway is a national monument, or something like.
There was a century during which this was merely a clay biggan, and a public house, and that offended no one, least of all the friends of the poet. Except Keats. He came hither in 1818. The host was drunk most of the time, and garrulous. Keats complained that it affected his "sublimity." And, for once, Keats turned severe self-critic. "The flat dog made me write a flat sonnet."
It was while living at Mount Oliphant, two miles east of Ayr, when Burns was fifteen, that he began that long, long list of lasses whom he loved and whom he made immortal with a verse. He might have said with James V,—and much he resembled that Gudeman o' Ballangeich—"it came wi' ane lass and it will gae wi' ane lass." The first was Nelly Kilpatrick, daughter of the miller of Perclewan—
"O, ance I lov'd a bonnie lass,
Ay, and I love her still."
The last was Jessie Lewars, who ministered to him in those last days in the Millhole brae in Dumfries—
"O wert thou in the cauld blast
On yonder lea, on yonder lea,
My plaidie to the angry airt,
I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee."
To Kilmarnock one goes for its name. But "the streets and neuks o' Killie" are changed since that Burns' day. It is a sprawling, thriving factory town, a town of weavers—and a town of poets. There is something in the whirr of wheels, to those who are within it, which establishes rhythm in the ear, and often leads to well-measured poetry! Surely a weaver is equal to a plowman, and I fancy that many a workingman and working lass with lines running through the head walk this Waterloo street, pass Tam o' Shanter's arms, and looks above the Loan Office at the attic where that precious first edition was printed in 1786. Poems and pawn broking—Waterloo Street is a suggestive Grub street.
From Kilmarnock to Dumfries by train is a Burns pilgrimage, even though it be taken without break, and in seventy-seven minutes! And interspersed are other memories. It is entirely what Burnsland should be, nothing set down in high tragedy, but all lyrical, with gentle hills, whispering rivers, and meadows and woodlands all the way.
Mauchline, where the burst of song was like that of a skylark, the very outpouring of the man's soul; here lies the field where he turned up the daisy and found an immortal lyric.
Auchinleek, where Boswell and Dr. Johnson paused on their journey and where to the hot-flung query of the Doctor, "Pray, what good did Cromwell ever do the country?" the judicial and wrathful father of our Boswell flung the hotter retort—"He gart kings ken they had a lith in their necks." The Scottish tongue is the tongue of rebellions. Should we stay in this corner of the world longer we might turn covenanting and Cromwellian!