ELLISLAND. JUNE 1788-DECEMBER 1791. BURNS appears to have come to reside at his farm on the 13th of June. The old steading being worn out, and requiring renewal, he was not yet in a position to commence housekeeping with his wife and family. It was arranged that, until a new house should be built, Jean and her sole surviving babe should remain at Mauchline, Burns alone living at Ellisland, where for the meantime he had a mere hovel for his lodging. Obliged to settle, in these cheerless circumstances, in a place where he was entirely a stranger, and where a range of new and sordid cares awaited him, he seems to have been at first in a most uncomfortable state of mind. TO MRS DUNLOP, AT MR DUNLOP'S, HADDINGTON. ELLISLAND, 13th [14th ?] June 1788. Where'er I roam, whatever realms I see, My heart, untravelled, fondly turns to thee; Still to my friend it turns with ceaseless pain, And drags, at each remove, a lengthen'd chain.-GOLDSMITH. This is the second day, my honoured friend, that I have been on my farm. A solitary inmate of an old, smoky spence; far from every object I love, or by whom I am beloved; nor any acquaintance older than yesterday, except Jenny Geddes, the old mare I ride on; while uncouth cares and novel plans hourly insult my awkward ignorance and bashful inexperience. There is a foggy atmosphere native to my soul in the hour of care, consequently the dreary objects seem larger than the life. Extreme sensibility, irritated and prejudiced on the gloomy side by a series of misfortunes and disappointments, at that period of my existence when the soul is laying in her cargo of ideas for the voyage of life, is, I believe, the principal cause of this unhappy frame of mind. 'The valiant, in himself what can he suffer? Or what need he regard his single woes?' &c. Your surmise, madam, is just; I am, indeed, a husband. To jealousy or infidelity I am an equal stranger. My preservative from the first, is the most thorough consciousness of her sentiments of honour and her attachment to me: my antidote against the last, is my long and deep-rooted affection for her. In housewife matters, of aptness to learn and activity to execute, she is eminently mistress; and during my absence in Nithsdale, she is regularly and constantly apprentice to my mother and sisters in their dairy and other rural business. The Muses must not be offended when I tell them the concerns of my wife and family will, in my mind, always take the pas; but I assure them their ladyships will ever come next in place. You are right that a bachelor state would have insured me more friends; but, from a cause you will easily guess, conscious peace in the enjoyment of my own mind, and unmistrusting confidence in approaching my God, would seldom have been of the number. I found a once much-loved and still much-loved female, literally and truly cast out to the mercy of the naked elements; but I enabled her to purchase a shelter-there is no sporting with a fellow-creature's happiness or misery. The most placid good-nature and sweetness of disposition; a warm heart, gratefully devoted with all its powers to love me; vigorous health and sprightly cheerfulness, set off to the best advantage by more than commonly handsome figure: these, I think, in a woman may make a good wife, though she should never have read a page but the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, nor have danced in a brighter assembly than a penny pay wedding. R. B. TO MR ROBERT AINSLIE. ELLISLAND, June 14 [15?], 1788. This is now the third day, my dearest sir, that I have sojourned in these regions; and during these three days you have occupied more of my thoughts than in three weeks preceding: in Ayrshire, I have several variations of friendship's compass: here, it points invariably to the pole. My farm gives me a good many uncouth cares and anxieties, but I hate the language of complaint. Job, or some one of his friends, says well: Why should a living man complain?' I have lately been much mortified with contemplating an unlucky imperfection in the very framing and construction of my soul; namely, a blundering inaccuracy of her olfactory organs in hitting the scent of craft or design in my fellow-creatures. I do not mean any compliment to my ingenuousness, or to hint that the defect is in consequence of the unsuspicious simplicity of conscious truth and honour: I take it to be, in some way or other, an imperfection in the mental sight; or, metaphor apart, some modification of dulness. In two or three instances lately I have been most shamefully out. I have all along hitherto, in the warfare of life, been bred to arms among the light-horse-the picket-guards of fancy-a kind of hussars and Highlanders of the brain; but I am firmly resolved to sell out of these giddy battalions, who have no ideas of a battle but fighting the foe, or of a siege but storming the town. Cost what it will, I am determined to buy in among the grave squadrons of heavy-armed Thought, or the artillery corps of plodding Contrivance. What books are you reading, or what is the subject of your thoughts, besides the great studies of your profession? You said something about religion in your last. I don't exactly remember what it was, as the letter is in Ayrshire; but I thought it not only prettily said, but nobly thought. You will make a noble fellow, if once you were married. I make no reservation of your being well married: you have so much sense and knowledge of human nature, that though you may not realise perhaps the ideas of romance, yet you will never be ill married. Were it not for the terrors of my ticklish situation respecting provision for a family of children, I am decidedly of opinion that the step I have taken is vastly for my happiness. As it is, I look to the Excise scheme as a certainty of maintenance. A maintenance ! -luxury to what either Mrs Burns or I was born to. Adieu! R. B. The thoughts of Burns at this crisis are further revealed by an extract which Dr Currie gives from his Commonplace-book. ELLISLAND, Sunday 14th [15th ?] June 1788.1 This is now the third day that I have been in this country. 'Lord! what is man?' What a bustling little bundle of passions, appetites, ideas, and fancies! And what a capricious kind of existence he has here! . . . There is, indeed, an elsewhere, where, as Thomson says, virtue sole survives. -'Tell us, ye dead; Will none of you in pity disclose the secret, Will make us wise as you are, and as close.' I am such a coward in life, so tired of the service, that I would almost at any time, with Milton's Adam, 'gladly lay me in my mother's lap, and be at peace.' But a wife and children bind me to struggle with the stream, till some sudden squall shall overset the silly vessel, or, in the listless return of years, its own craziness reduce it to a wreck. Farewell now to those giddy follies, those varnished vices, which, though half sanctified by the bewitching levity of wit and humour, are at best but thriftless idling with the precious current of existence; nay, often poisoning the whole, that, like the plains of Jericho, the 1 The 14th of June 1788 having been a Saturday, it may be surmised that Burns wrote several dates at this time a day too early. water is naught and the ground barren, and nothing short of a supernaturally-gifted Elisha can ever after heal the evils. Wedlock-the circumstance that buckles me hardest to care, if virtue and religion were to be anything with me but names-was what in a few seasons I must have resolved on: in my present situation, it was absolutely necessary. Humanity, generosity, honest pride of character, justice to my own happiness for after-life, so far as it could depend (which it surely will a great deal) on internal peace; all these joined their warmest suffrages, their most powerful solicitations, with a rooted attachment, to urge the step I have taken. Nor have I any reason on her part to repent it. I can fancy how, but have never seen where, I could have made a better choice. Come, then, let me act up to my favourite motto, that glorious passage in Young 'On reason build resolve, That column of true majesty in man!' It is very evident in these letters that Burns contemplated his situation and prospects, not with the levity usually expected from a son of the Muses, but with the consideration and forethought which beseem a prudent man of the world, anxious to fulfil all social and domestic duties. There is something very pleasing in his expressions of self-satisfaction on his final union with Jean. It was certainly disadvantageous for him to be thus hurried into the cares and expenses of matrimony; he might have got a bride of superior education, more fitted to exercise a salutary control over his mind. It was to be regretted that the antecedents' of Mrs Burns threw her, and consequently her husband, a little out of harmony with the better society which it might have been of importance to him to cultivate. And yet every living and future admirer of Burns must rejoice that the chains of his Jean did after all bind down this extravagant and erring spirit, as far as that was possible. In a different strain Burns addressed his early friend Mr Hugh Parker of Kilmarnock on the present style and circumstances of his life: EPISTLE TO HUGH PARKER. In this strange land, this uncouth clime, 1 Hackles-an instrument for dressing flax. Oh, had I power like inclination, I'd heeze thee up a constellation, But till we meet and weet our whistle, raise ROBERT BURNS. Wandering a solitary being on the banks of the Nith, his heart reverted to the damsel on the banks of the Ayr, whom he had lately taken by the hand as his wife, and who would have now 1 Ellisland is near the borders of the stewartry of Kirkcudbright, a portion of the district popularly called Galloway. 2 His mare. |