52

The Chain of Princes Street

"I'd wear it on a purple gown,
With fur of twilight gray,
And set it swaying, shimmering,
At closing of the day.

"And as I went my way serene,
The people would bow down,

And say, 'There goes the bonny Queen
Of Edinburgh Town!"

ELIZABETH S. FLEMING.

ROBERT BURNS

Just as Stratford-on-Avon and Shakespeare form one idea, so Ayr and Burns are enshrined together in the hearts of the English-speaking people. The land over which the spirit of the poet still hovers is well called the Burns Country. Within the compass of a summer day's journey lie Dumfries, Mount Oliphant, Lochlea and the charming village of Kirkoswald, where many eventful years of his life were passed.

The visitor to Ayr rides but a short distance from the Burns monument in the public square to the cottage,—the “auld clay biggin" of two rooms. It requires little effort of the imagination to call up a picture of the humble solitary cottage of a century and a half ago, in which the poet was born. Here the peasant father devoted the evening hours, after a day of toil in the nearby fields, to teaching the future poet the elements of an education. This devotion deserves the tribute of later generations.

I see amid the fields of Ayr

A ploughman, who in foul and fair,
Sings at his task

So clear, we know not if it is

The laverock's song we hear, or his,

Nor care to ask.

For him the ploughing of those fields
A more ethereal harvest yields
Than sheaves of grain;

Songs flush with purple bloom the rye,
The plover's call, the curlew's cry,
Sing in his brain.

Touched by his hand, the wayside weed
Becomes a flower; the lowliest reed
Beside the stream

Is clothed with beauty; gorse and grass
And heather, where his footsteps pass,
The brighter seem.

54

Robert Burns

He sings of love, whose flame illumes
The darkness of lone cottage rooms;
He feels the force,

The treacherous undertow and stress
Of wayward passions, and no less
The keen remorse.

At moments, wrestling with his fate,
His voice is harsh, but not with hate;
The brushwood, hung

Above the tavern door, lets fall
Its bitter leaf, its drop of gall
Upon his tongue.

But still the music of his song
Rises o'er all, elate and strong;
Its master-chords

Are Manhood, Freedom, Brotherhood,
Its discords but an interlude
Between the words.

And then to die so young and leave
Unfinished what he might achieve!
Yet better sure

Is this, than wandering up and down
An old man in a country town,
Infirm and poor.

For now he haunts his native land
As an immortal youth; his hand
Guides every plough;

He sits beside each ingle-nook,

His voice is in each rushing brook,
Each rustling bough.

Robert Burns

His presence haunts this room to-night,
A form of mingled mist and light

From that far coast.

Welcome beneath this roof of mine!
Welcome! this vacant chair is thine,
Dear guest and ghost!

55

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.

EDINBURGH

"Where the huge castle holds its state
And all the steep slopes down,
Whose ridgy back heaves to the sky
Piles deep and massy, close and high,
Mine own romantic town."

The origin of Edinburgh or Edwinsburgh is lost in a hoary antiquity. The most striking and dominant feature of the landscape is the great frowning fortress-castle which offered shelter and protection long before the town came into existence. Many a romance and legend enwraps "the city that claims the Heart of Midlothian." From Calton Hill, if perchance you are one of the favored, you may see just at the "Cat Nick" the profile of Arthur's head against the rocks of Salisbury Crags,—a profile not unlike the Arthur of Gustave Doré.

Edinburgh, "a city of song," has seen many poets born and bred within her gates and has in turn inspired many others. Scott, Hume, Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson are a few of those who have helped to invest the grand old city with a deeper and more lasting interest. As the years pass, there are many who grieve to see how the "Edinborough of the past" is becoming but a memory to haunt the dreams of those who love her as she deserves.

City of mist and rain and blown grey spaces,

Dashed with wild wet colour and gleam of tears, Dreaming in Holyrood halls of the passionate faces Lifted to one Queen's face that has conquered

the years,

Are not the halls of thy memory haunted places? Cometh there not as a moon (where the blood

rust sears

Floors a-flutter of old with silks and laces), Gliding, a ghostly Queen, thro' a mist of tears?