RIVERS OF AYRSHIRE.
From his earliest years, as he has told us, the ambition fired him to “gar our streams and burnies shine up wi’ the best.” He lamented that while—
“Yarrow and Tweed to mony a tune
Owre Scotland rings;
The Irwin, Lugar, Ayr, an’ Doon
Naebody sings.”
Gloriously has the wish been fulfilled and the want retrieved. The very names of these rivers have become instinct with the spirit of lyric poetry. To some he returned again and again, and docked them with the freshest and sweetest garlands of his verse. Who has not heard of “bonnie Doon,” of “winding Ayr,” of “crystal Afton,” and the “moors and mosses mony” of stately Lugar? Others, somewhat more removed from the centre of his enchantments, have been immortalised in a line or two of exquisite characterisation. Cessnock and Stinchar, “Girvan’s fairy-haunted stream”; where “well-fed Irwine stately thuds”; where the Greenock “winds his moorland course,” and “haunted Garpal draws his feeble source,” are all parts of “the dear, the native ground” of this master of the notes of rivers and of human hearts.
The AYR and the DOON, in particular, Burns has painted for us in all moods of the mind and of the weather. They murmur and rave with him in his despondency, and lilt gaily in sympathy with the brighter hours he spent beside them. He finds them fresh at dawn, when the dew is hanging clear on the scented birks, and they are “sweet in gloaming.” He traces them from their first rise on the heathery hillside, through hazelly shaw and hanging wood down to the sea—from “Glenbuck to the Ratton Quay.” He is familiar with their aspect in brown autumn and bleak winter, not less than when spring has set their choirs singing, or when summer is in prime. Often must he have stood and watched the effects of spate and storm in his beloved valleys, when, brown and turbid with the rains, or with “snowy wreathes upchoked,” “the burns came down and roared from bank to brae,” and “auld Ayr” itself became “one lengthened tumbling sea.” Nor, after seeing it through the poet’s eyes, can we forget the moonlight scene of frost and glamour in the “Twa Brigs,” wherein, by a marvellous blending of the real and the imaginary, the river spirits foot it featly over the thin platform of the ice as it “creeps, gently-crusting, o’er the glittering stream.”
The description in “Hallowe’en” of the burn where “three lairds’ lands met,” although Doon might claim it as applied especially to some spot not far from where “fairies light on Cassilis Downans dance,” might be drawn as well from scores of nooks by the Ayr and its feeders:—