The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

"Until I am complete master of a tune in my own singing, such as it is, I can never compose for it. My way is this. I consider the poetic sentiment correspondent to my idea of the musical expression--then choose my theme--compose one stanza. When that is composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in Nature round me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom, humming every now and then the air, with the verses I have framed. When I feel my muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effusions to paper; swinging at intervals on the hind legs of my elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my pen goes. Seriously this, at home, is almost invariably my way."

But to return. During his second winter in Edinburgh, Burns met with a hackney coach accident which kept him to the house for six weeks. While in this state he learned from Mauchline that his intimacy with Jean Armour had again exposed her to the reproaches of her family. The father sternly turned her out of doors, and Burns had to arrange about a shelter for her and his children in a friend's house. In the meantime, through the influence of some sympathisers, he had been appointed an officer of excise. "I have chosen this," he wrote, "after mature deliberation. It is immediate bread, and, though poor in comparison of the last eighteen months of my existence, 'tis luxury in comparison of all my preceding life." However, when he settled finally with Creech about his poems, he found himself with between £500 and £600; and he retained his excise commission as a dernier ressort, to be used only if a reverse of fortune rendered it necessary.

He decided now to exchange Mossgiel for Ellisland farm, about six miles from Dumfries. As soon as he was able to leave Edinburgh, he had hurried to Mossgiel and gone through a justice-of-peace marriage with Jean Armour. Burns, with all his faults, was an honest and a high-spirited man, and he loved the mother of his children. Had he hesitated to make her his wife, he must have sunk into the callousness of a ruffian, or that misery of miseries, the remorse of a poet.

Some months later he writes that his marriage "was not, perhaps, in consequence of the attachment of romance, but I have no cause to repent it. If I have not got polite tattle, modish manners, and fashionable dress, I am not sickened and disgusted with the multiform curse of boarding-school affectation; and I have got the handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the kindest heart in the country." It was during the honeymoon, as he calls it, that he wrote the beautiful "O a' the airts the wind can blaw." He used to say that the happiest period of his life was the first winter at Ellisland, with wife and children around him. It was then that he wrote, among other songs, "John Anderson, my Jo," "Tarn Glen," "My heart's in the Highlands," "Go fetch to me a pint of wine," and "Willie brewed a peck o' maut."

But the "golden days" of Ellisland were short. Burns's farming speculations once more failed, and he had to take up his excise commission. "I am now," says he, "a poor rascally gauger, condemned to gallop two hundred miles every week to inspect dirty ponds and yeasty barrels." Both in prose and verse he has recorded the feelings with which he first followed his new vocation, and his jests on the subject are uniformly bitter. It was a vocation which exposed him to temptations of the kind he was least likely to resist. His extraordinary conversational powers led him into peril wherever he went. If he entered an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the news of his arrival circulated from the cellar to the garret; and ere ten minutes had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were assembled round the ingle; the largest punch-bowl was produced; and "Be ours this night--who knows what comes to-morrow?" was the language of every eye in the circle that welcomed him.

At home, too, lion-gazers from all quarters beset him; they ate and drank at his cost, and often went away to criticise him and his fare, as if they had done Burns and his black bowl great honour in condescending to be entertained for a single evening with such company. Among others who called on him was Captain Grose, the antiquary, and it is to this acquaintance that we owe "Tam o' Shanter," which Burns believed to be the best of all his productions.