These he met with in Mason's English Collection, one of his school-books. He next read the Life of Hannibal, which taught him to strut after the recruiting drum and bagpipe; and the Life of Wallace, which made "his veins boil with a Scottish prejudice." From fourteen to sixteen he lived after a most wretched fashion—toiling at the plough, and oppressed by poverty.
At sixteen he fell in love, and his own description of the affair is so characteristic that I will quote it. "In my sixteenth autumn, my partner (in the harvest field) was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. She was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me into that delicious passion, which in spite of acid disappointments, gin-horn prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be first of human joys—our dearest blessing here below. How she caught the contagion I cannot tell. Yet medical people talk much of infection from breathing the same air, the touch, &c.; but I never expressly said I loved her. Indeed, I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her when returning in the evening from our labors; why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an Æolian harp; and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious ratan, when I looked and fingered over her little hand, to pick out the cruel nettle stings and thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly—and it was her favorite reel which I attempted giving an imbodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous 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 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—for excepting he could shear sheep and cast peats, his father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than myself. Thus with me began love and poetry, which at times have been my only, and till within the last twelve months my highest enjoyment."
His nineteenth summer was spent on a smuggling coast, where he learned "mensuration, surveying, dialling," &c. and improved in his knowledge of love and whiskey-drinking. "Yet early ingrained piety and virtue kept him for several years afterward rather within the line of innocence," notwithstanding that Vive l'Amour et Vive la Bagatelle was his sole principle of action.
Harassed at length by pecuniary difficulties, and driven to the border of despair, Burns determined on running off to Jamaica to avoid "the horrors of a jail." Before putting this resolve into execution, he published a small edition of his poems by subscription. He cleared by this 20l. and gained some reputation. This sum came very seasonably, as without it he would have been compelled to indent himself for want of money to pay his passage. He had taken his place in a ship about to sail from the Clyde, when a letter from Dr. Blacklock, by "opening new prospects to his poetic ambition," overthrew his runaway schemes, and led him to Edinburgh. There the Earl of Glencairn became his patron. His after life is well known.
Burns died in July 1796, and was buried with much state in the southern church yard of Dumfries.
The great misfortune of our poet's life was to want an aim. Without this, with a strong appetite for sociability, as well from native hilarity as from a pride of observation and remark, a constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm made him shun solitude. Add to these incentives to social life, a reputation for bookish knowledge, (comparatively) a certain wild logical talent, and a strength of thought something like the rudiments of good sense, and it will seem no great wonder that "he was ever one in each companie where jollity and pleasaunce were held in esteeme."
Burns was full of a seeming independence of spirit. He breaks out into the most fiery expressions of contempt for the rich and the great. But we recognize in these rather the man of genius than the man of real independence. If in his real feelings he had been independent of the rich and the great, they might have gone their way and he would have gone his, we should have heard nothing of his scorn and disdain. These were dictated, not as they professed to be, by a spirit of independence, but by that which, wherever it exists, comes in abatement of independence—by pride.3
3 "A keen desire of aggrandizement in the eyes of others, a sensitive apprehension of humiliation in their eyes are the constituents of pride."
Scotland has had an Allan Ramsay to revive the pastoral visions of Colin Clout—an earlier Drummond to transmit to posterity the fresh philosophy of the olden time—a Leyden to haunt the "far east countries" with the pleasant traditions of Teviotdale—an Allan Cunningham to embody the spirit of the ancient Scottish romaunt in the sturdiest language of our own day—a Hogg to fill the Ettrick valleys with the echoes of his "trueful song"—a Scott to restore to the hills of Moffat and to the banks of the Annan the lance and the eye-haunting plume—a Scott to restore knight and monk, to castle and abbey, from the Skye to Melrose—a Scott to tell of old-time woes by Gallawater and by Yarrow—but Robert Burns has no master among these. The "Robin of Ayr had the richest song of them all."