I cannot conclude without telling you that I am more and more pleased with the step I took respecting “my Jean.” Two things, from my happy experience, I set down as apothegms in life. A wife’s head is immaterial, compared with her heart; and—“Virtue’s (for wisdom what poet pretends to it?) ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.”
Adieu!
R. B.
[Here follow “The Mother’s Lament for the Loss of her Son,” and the song beginning “The lazy mist hangs from the brow of the hill.”]
CXLII.
TO MRS. DUNLOP.
[The “Auld lang syne,” which Burns here introduces to Mrs. Dunlop as a strain of the olden time, is as surely his own as Tam-o-Shanter.]
Ellisland, 17th December, 1788.
My dear honoured Friend,