'Twill please me mair to see thee heir it,
Than stockit mailins. farms
An' if thou be what I wad hae thee, would have
An' tak the counsel I shall gie thee,
I'll never rue my trouble wi' thee—
The cost nor shame o't—
But be a loving father to thee,
And brag the name o't.
At Mossgiel the Burns family was no more successful than in either of its previous farms. Bad seed and bad weather gave two poor harvests, and by the summer of 1786 the poet's financial condition was again approaching desperation. His situation was made still more embarrassing by the consequences of another of his amours. Shortly after moving to the parish of Mauchline he had fallen in love with Jean Armour, the daughter of a mason in the village. What was for Burns a prolonged courtship ensued, and in the spring of 1786 he learned that Jean's condition was such that he gave her a paper acknowledging her as his wife. To his surprise and mortification the girl's father, who is said to have had a personal dislike to him and who well may have thought a man with his reputation and prospects was no promising son-in-law, opposed the marriage, forced Jean to give up the paper, and sent her off to another town. Burns chose to regard Jean's submission to her father as inexcusable faithlessness, and proceeded to indulge in the ecstatic misery of the lover betrayed. There is no doubt that he suffered keenly from the affair: he writes to his friends that he could “have no nearer idea of the place of eternal punishment” than what he had felt in his “own breast on her account. I have tried often to forget her: I have run into all kinds of dissipation and riot ... to drive her out of my head, but all in vain.” This is in a later letter than that in which he has “sunk into a lurid calm,” and “subsided into the time-settled sorrow of the sable widower.”
Yet other evidence shows that at this crisis also Burns's emotional experience was far from simple. It was probably during the summer of the same year that there occurred the passages with the mysterious Highland Mary, a girl whose identity, after voluminous controversy, remains vague, but who inspired some of his loftiest love poetry. Though Burns's feeling for her seems to have been a kind of interlude in reaction from the “cruelty” of Jean, he idealized it beyond his wont, and the subject of it has been exalted to the place among his heroines which is surely due to the long-suffering woman who became his wife.