Clarinda lived to a great age, as a Mrs. Maclehose, and only died a few years ago. Mrs. Howitt and myself were once introduced to her by our kind friend, Mr. Robert Chambers, at her house near the Calton Hill; and a very characteristic scene took place. The old lady, evidently charmed with our admiration of Burns, and warmed up by talking of past days, declared that we should drink out of the pair of glasses which Burns had presented to her in the days of their acquaintance. She brought these sacred relics out of the cupboard, and rang for the servant to bring in wine. An aged woman appeared, who, on hearing that we were to drink out of Burns's glasses, which stood ready on the table, gave a look as if sacrilege were going to be committed, took up the glasses without a word, replaced them in the cupboard, locking them up, and brought us three ordinary wine-glasses to take our wine out of. It was in vain for Mrs. Maclehose to remonstrate; the old and self-willed servant went away without deigning a reply, with the key in her pocket.
Disheartened and chagrined, treated with the utmost contempt by those who once flattered and lionized him beyond bounds, Burns now turned his back on Edinburgh, and went to seek that obscure country life which he saw well enough was his destiny. The man to whom that very city was to raise a splendid monument on the Calton Hill; the man who was to have monuments raised to his honor in various spots of his native land; the man to whose immortal memory jubilees were to be held, to which people of all ranks were to flock by eighty thousands at a time; the man who was to take the highest rank of all the poets of Scotland,
"Whose lines are mottoes of the heart,
Whose truths electrify the sage,"
in the eloquent words of Campbell, and whose genius was to be the dearest memory of his countrymen in regions of the earth whither their adventurous spirit leads them, now, with a sad and wounded heart, pursued his way homeward with an exciseman's appointment in his pocket, the highest and only gift of his country. Burns knew and felt that his genius had a just claim to a good and honorable post in his native land, and his remaining letters sufficiently testify that from this hour the arrow of blighted ambition rankled in his heart, which never ceased its irritation till it had pulled down his gallant strength, and sent him to an early grave. He married his Jean, and chose his farm on the banks of the Nith, as Allan Cunningham's father remarked to him at the time, not with a farmer's, but a poet's choice. But here, half farmer, half exciseman, poverty came rapidly upon him once more; in three years' time only he quitted it, a man ruined in substance and constitution, and went to depend on his excise salary of £70 a year in the town of Dumfries.
I visited this farm in August, 1845. The coach from Dumfries to Glasgow set me down at Ellisland, lying about seven miles from Dumfries. Here I found a road running at right angles from the highway at a field's distance, and saw the gray roof of the farm homestead and its white chimneys peeping over the surrounding trees. The road, without gate or fence, leads you across a piece of watery ground, one of those hollows left undrained for the growth of what they call bog-hay, that is, rushes and coarse grass, which they give to the cows in winter. This was quite gay with cotton-rush, bog-beans, orchises, and other bog flowers, and with its fragrant marginal fringe of meadow sweet. After about a hundred yards, the road becomes a lane, inclosed on one side by a rough stone wall, and on the other by a tall hedge, with a row of flourishing ashes, each fence standing on a bold bank well hung with broom. The barley stood green on the one hand, and the hay in cock in the field on the other, and all had a pleasant summer air and feeling about it.
Advancing up this lane, I soon stood on the ascent, and saw the farm-house shining out white from among its trees, and half a dozen young men and women busily hoeing turnips in the adjoining fields. The farm, in fact, is a very pleasant farm. It lies somewhat high, and its fields swell and fall in a very agreeable manner, though it is still low compared to the hills that rise around it at a distance, green and cultivated, but bare. It is distinguished from all the farms round it by being so completely planted with hedgerow trees, particularly ashes and larches. The land is light, yet tolerably fertile—is dry and healthy. Close below the house sweeps along that fine vale of the Nith, with all its rich meadows and woods, its stately old houses, and its river dark and swift, overhung with noble and verdurous trees. This seems the place where Burns might have been happy, had happiness and prosperity been easily secured by a temperament and circumstances such as his. He had a home fit for a poet, though humble. It was a home amid the goodliness and the godliness of nature. It was the home of a brave, a free, and an honest man—of a great man and great poet, whose name and fame were allowed and honored by the sound hearts and sound minds, if not by the baser and vainer ones of his country. Here he was a man and a farmer; and both man and farmer are gentlemen, if they choose to be so. He had no need to doff his bonnet, or to pull it in shame over his brow before any man, so that he cultivated his acres and the glorious soil of his intellect with the heart and hand of an enthusiast in his labor. He had built his own bower in the spot chosen by himself, in a spot beautiful and pure, and calm as a poet could desire; and had brought to it the woman of his love, and his children were springing up around him, making the green and woodland banks of the Nith ring with the rapture of their young sports. He had a stalwart frame, and a giant intellect, and a heart true in its feelings to the divinity of human nature, to the divinity within him, to the divinity of those aims, and objects, and truths for which man exists, and for whose advance and illustration the poet is, beyond all men, born and endowed. Ah! if he could but have guided with a safe hand those passions which are given to feed and kindle the glorious impulses of the glorious nature of the poet, the friend, and prophet, and counselor of mankind, what a great and what a happy man might he have lived and died here. If he had really
"Followed his plow along the mountain side,"
instead of the exciseman's horse over the hills and through the hamlets of the country round, to what a venerable age might he have lived among his children and his admiring countrymen. But the tact for business and the turn for prudence, how rarely can they exist with the fervid temperament which has to evolve the living meteors of poetry. The volcano will have its crater and its desolations, and not green and peaceful ridges of peace; particularly in this case, where the poet had been called out of the ranks of the poor, and had had at once to contend against the flatteries of exaltation unprepared by the discipline of education. Burns and Hogg may therefore be excused, where Byron could not stand; Ebenezer Elliott is almost the only instance of contrary success.
One can not, however, see this Arcadian scene, this sort of Sabine farm, so well calculated for the "otium cum dignitate" of the poet, without feeling one's heart wrung at the idea that it was a vain gift—a haven of peace only offered to a struggling and doomed swimmer; and that the foul exciseman craft, and the degrading dipstick, and the whisky-firkin were in the rear. The very next neighbors of Burns were Mr. Miller, of Dalswinton, and Mr. Riddell, of Friars' Carse. There he went to meet, and dine, and revel with distinguished guests. Heavens! why should he not have been able to go there as the honest British farmer, and not as the exciseman? Could he feel that he was a poet, and fit society for the wealthy, the refined, and the learned, and that he was not degraded? He was glorious—and an exciseman. Here he wrote Mary in Heaven, and mounted his jaded steed and trotted off to the hell of whisky distilleries and whisky dram-shops. He wrote here, in one day, Tam O'Shanter, in a fever of laughter and excitement, and perhaps the next day would repeat the lines to the rude and fuddled rabble of a "public," where he was in the way of his business and his ruin. There is something so anomalous in the genius and the grade, in the magnificent endowments and the bare necessities of Robert Burns, that one can not now conceive how they could have been permitted to occur by his fellow-men, or tolerated by himself. To think of him here, in his own white farm-house, like a dove's nest, amid its green and overshadowing leaves, and hung over the pure lapsing waters; and then of him in that little dirty house in Dumfries, in that street of tramps and beggars, living degraded, despised, and persecuted, and dying the poorest exciseman and greatest poet of his country! In the hour of his death the soul of his country awoke with one great throb to the consciousness of who and what he was; what a pity that the revelation did not come a little sooner! And this I say not to taunt his country with it. The sense of the national treatment of Robert Burns has been expressed with such manly eloquence by his countrymen, Lockhart, Wilson, and Allan Cunningham, that it needs not us English to cast a single stone, who have the memory of Chatterton among us. All great nations have similar sins to answer for. Scotland does not stand alone; but there is something so peculiarly strange in the fate of Burns, and that comes over one as we tread the ground that he had chosen for his home, and the floor of the house that he built, that it has forced me involuntarily to follow my own feelings instead of my descriptions.
The farm, as I have said, is a very pleasant one. Burns is supposed to have chosen the particular situation of his house not only for its fine situation on the banks of the river, and overlooking the vale and country round, but on account of a beautiful spring which gushes from the slope just below the house. The ground-plan of his house is very much like that of most Scotch farms. The buildings form three sides of a quadrangle. The house and buildings are only one story high, white, and altogether a genuine Scotch steading. The house is on the lower side, next to the river. Burns's bed-room has yet two beds in it, of that sort of cupboard fashion, with check curtains, which are so often seen in Scotch farm-houses. The humble rooms are much as they were in his time. Near the house, and running parallel with the river, is a good large garden which he planted. The side of the farm-yard opposite to the house is pleasantly planted off with trees. The farm is just as it was, about one hundred acres. By places it exhibits that stony soil which made Burns call it "the riddlings of creation," and say that when a plowed field was rolled it looked like a paved street; but still it carries good crops. Burns had it for £50 a year, or ten shillings an acre. I suppose the present tenant pays three times the sum, and is proud of his bargain. He observed it was an ill wind that blew nobody any profit. "Mr. Burns," said he, "had the farm on lease for ninety years, and had he not thrown it up, I should not have been here now." The farmer seemed a very sensible man, and though he was just mounting his gig to go on business to Dumfries, he stopped, and would go over the farm and house, and point out every thing to me. He said what Lockhart and Cunningham say, that Burns had so many servants that they ate and drank all that came off the farm. "The maids baked new bread, and the men ate it hot with ale." But it is said, too, on the spot, that most of these servants were relatives, and that presents of whisky and other good things were sent from far and near to Burns, and that, while he was absent on his excise rounds, they sat in the house and drank, and ate to it, instead of being at work. Burns once observed to his neighbor, the next farmer, that he wondered how it was that the farm left no surplus for rent; and the farmer said, "Why, Mr. Burns, it would be a wonder if it did, for your servants can not eat it and leave it for rent too." It is said, also, that being once invited to dinner at Dalswinton House, and not coming, the guests asked how he was getting on. Mr. Miller said he hoped very well, "for," added he, "I think I have set him up." This being repeated to Burns, is said to have hurt his proud feelings extremely, and to have induced him to remark that he did not like to live on the estate of a man who thought he had set him up. Long he did not live there—more's the pity. The good-will of his haughty landlord had gone before.