120 About the weary moors continually, Wandering about alone and silently. While I these thoughts within myself pursued, He, having made a pause, the same discourse renewed. And soon with this he other matter blended, "God," said I, "be my help and stay secure; 240 I'll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!" ROBERT BURNS. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. "FOR my own affairs, I am in a fair way of becoming as eminent as Thomas à Kempis or John Bunyan; and you may expect henceforth to see my birthday inserted among the wonderful events, in the Poor Robin's and Aberdeen Almanacks, along with the Black Monday and the Battle of Bothwell Bridge." So Burns wrote to a friend in the brief heyday of his prosperity at Edinburgh. When his last illness came upon him, and his life seemed a shipwreck, he told his wife: "Don't be afraid: I'll be more respected a hundred years after I am dead than I am at present." Both of these prophecies, the jocose and the serious, have been completely verified, for the 25th of January, 1759, Robert Burns's birthday, is a date to be found in many a list of the world's memorable events; and now that he has been dead a century, his fame lives secure with that of the great poets. His father, William Burns, at the time of the poet's birth was a gardener and farm-overseer at Alloway in Ayrshire in Scotland, and was always a poor man. Like many others of his class in Scotland, he prized highly every mental accomplishment, and gave his children, of whom the second son Gilbert was always the most closely identified with his elder brother Robert, every advantage within his limited reach. Through him an excellent teacher was brought to the village. An autobiographical letter from Burns to a friend acknowledges his early debt to this man for sound instructions, and, no less generously, to an igno rant old woman who plied him as a child with all the local fairy-stories and superstitions which filled her credulous brain. Thus, he says, were "the latent seeds of poetry" cultivated. They were further developed by the reading of such books of verse, Scottish and English, as the schoolmaster put into the eager boy's hands. By the time he was twenty-two, he spoke of Poesy, as he might have done long before, "as a darling walk for my mind." Many things had befallen him, however, through his youth. At fifteen he had had his first experience of lovemaking, and to the end of his life he could truly say in the words of his own song: "The sweetest hours that e'er I spend His bitterest hours, too, were often the direct result of these pleasures, for there was more of impulse than of wisdom in his constant dealings with "the lasses." One writer has said of him: "In almost all the foul weather which Burns encountered, a woman may be discovered flitting through it like a stormy petrel." In the period of youth, also, he formed his habits of conviviality. Full of wit and glad to escape from a naturally melancholy self, it is no wonder that when, at seventeen, he went to study trigonometry and mensuration at a village on the Ayrshire coast much frequented by smugglers, their free ways appealed to him strongly. Many men before and since Burns have had to pay heavily for the very qualities which have made them attractive to others: the pity of it is that, as in the case of Burns, the tavern too often becomes the theatre of actions which finally subdue the real good in a man to the evil about him. Except for another absence from home, in a fruitless attempt to learn the trade of a flax-dresser, Burns lived with his own people, earning like his brother Gilbert £7 a year for his work on the farm, until the father died insolvent in 1784, when Robert was twenty-five years old. |