"Of birth and blood we do not boast,
No gentry does our club afford,
But plowmen and mechanics we
In nature's simple dress record;"
but they were men after Burns's own heart. He judged of men as his father had taught him:
"My father was a farmer upon the Camek Border,
And carefully he bred me up in decency and order;
He bade me act a manly part, though I had ne'er a farthing,
For without an honest, manly heart, no man was worth regarding."
It was during his abode here that he wrote John Barleycorn; Corn Riggs are Bonnie; Winter, a Dirge; the Death of Poor Mailie; Mailie's Elegy; and Now Whistling Winds, &c. But the love affairs he was now continually getting into, and the dissipations that he became acquainted with at Kirkoswald and Irvine, at which places he spent some months, rendered his poetical growth far less than it otherwise might have been there. One incident in his life, and one of his most beautiful poems consequent on it, however, arose out of an attachment, which, though said to be formed at Mauchline, was certainly cultivated here. Just below Tarbolton lies Montgomerie Castle, beautifully situated amid its woods on the banks of the Faile, where he fell in love with Mary Campbell. Here was the house at which, according to his own beautiful poem, they used to meet, and here it was that he finally took leave of her. She was dairy-maid in the house then belonging to Colonel Hugh Montgomerie, afterward Earl of Eglinton, and grandfather of the present earl.
"Ye banks, and braes, and streams around
The castle of Montgomerie,
Green be your woods and fair your flowers,
Your waters never drumlie.
There summer first unfaulds her robes,
And there they longest tarry,
For there I took my last farewell
Of my sweet Highland Mary."
There is a story mentioned in the Life of Burns of this parting being on the banks of Ayr, and Cromek repeats it, adding that "the lovers stood on each side of a small purling brook; they laved their hands in the limpid stream, and, holding a Bible between them, pronounced their vows to be faithful to each other."
All this may be true, for they took a day to this final solitary enjoyment of each other's society in the woods before parting. They might wander by the Ayr, and so on up to the Faile, and at some small rivulet on the way perform this simple and affecting ceremony. Mary was going to the Western Highlands to see her friends before she married Robert Burns, but she died on her way back, and they never met again. This Bible, as we have seen, has been recovered, and is deposited in the monument at Alloway Wherever this ceremony, however, took place, the parting assuredly took place here. Burns says, not only that "there I took my last farewell," but also
"How sweetly bloomed the gay green birk,
How rich the hawthorn's blossom,
As, underneath the fragrant shade,
I clasped her to my bosom."
There still stands the thorn, called by all the country "Highland Mary's Thorn."
The house and park are sold or leased by the Earl of Eglinton to a solicitor in Ayr. My driver appeared afraid of going into the park, saying "the writer," that is, the solicitor, was a queer fellow, and would not let any body go to the thorn, and certainly a large board at each park gate, warning all persons to avoid those hallowed precincts, appeared to confirm the man's opinion; but, having come so far, I did not mean to pass without a glance at the parting scene of Burns and Highland Mary. I bade him drive down to the house, where I was speedily assured by the servants about that I was quite at liberty to go to the tree. "How shall I know it?" "Oh! a child may know it: it is all hacked, and the twigs broken, by people who carry away some of it to keep." By these signs I readily recognized the tree. It is not far from the house, close to the carriage drive, and on the top of the slope that descends to the Faile, which murmurs on beneath its sweet woodland shade.[30]