sionate ardour, to meet the impressions of love and friendship. With several of the young peasantry, who were his fellows in labour, he contracted an affectionate intimacy of acquaintance. He eagerly sought admission into the brotherhood of free masons, which is recommended to the young men of this country, by nothing so much as by its seeming to extend the sphere of agreeable acquaintance, and to knit closer the bonds of friendly endearment In some mason lodges in his neighbourhood, Burns had soon the fortune, whether good or bad, to gain the notice of several gentlemen, better able to estimate the true value of such a mind as his, than were his fellow peasants, with whom alone he had hitherto associated. One or two of them might be men of convivial dispositions, and of religious notions rather licentious than narrow; who encouraged his talents, by occasionally inviting him to be the companion of their looser hours; and who were at times not ill pleased to direct the force of his wit and humour, against those sacred things which they affected outwardly to despise as mere bugbears, while they could not help inwardly trembling before them, as realities. For a while, the native rectitude of his understanding, and the excellent principles in which his infancy had been educated, withstood every temptation to intemperance or impiety. Alas! it was not always so.―When his heart was first struck by the charms of village beauty, the love he felt was pure, tender, simple, and sincere, as that of the youth and maiden in his Cottar's Saturday Night If the ardour of his passion hurried him afterwards to triumph over the chastity of the maid he loved; the tenderness of his heart, the manly honesty of his soul, soon made him offer, with eager solicitude, to repair the injury by marriage.[1]
About this time, in the progress of his life and character, did he first begin to be distinguished as a poet A masonic song, a satirical epigram, a rhyming epistle to a friend, attempted with success, taught him to know his own powers, and gave him confidence to try tasks more arduous, and which should command Btill higher bursts of applause. The annual celebration of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, in the rural parishes of Scotland, has much in it of those old
- ↑ Burns was early distinguished for his admiration of the fair sex. One of his first and purest attachments was to a girl named Mary Campbell,―who the truth must be told―was neither more nor less than the byres-woman or dairy-maid at Colonel Montgomery's house of Coilsfield. He intended to marry this person, but she died at Greenock on her return from a visit to her relations in Argyleshire. It is a strange instance of the power of Burns' imagination and passion, that he has celebrated this poor peasant girl in strains of affection and lamentation, such as might have embalmed the memory of the proudest dame that ever poet worshipped. In his poem, beginning―
"Ye banks, and braes, and streams around
The castle of Montgomerie,"He describes in the most beautiful language their tender and final parting on the banks of the Ayr. At a later period of life, on the anniversary of that hallowed day, he devoted a night to a poetic vigil in the open air, and produced his deeply pathetic elegy to her memory, commencing
"Thou lingering star, with lessening ray."
And all this beautiful poetry was written by a Scottish peasant in reference to a byres-woman!
The attachment alluded to in the text was to Miss Jean Armour, the daughter of a mason in Mauchline. Burns proposed at first that their guilt should be palliated by a matrimonial union; but, as his circumstances were desperate, his character not admired by the more sober and calculating villagers, and as he proposed to seek an establishment for his wife in a distant land, the father of his unfortunate partner preferred the alternative of keeping her single and degraded, to permitting her to attach herself to the fortunes of her lover, even though a certain degree of respectability was to be secured by that course. It was not till after the poet had acquired fortune and fame by his writings, and, we blush to say, after a second transgression, that he was regularly married. On both of these occasions the lady produced twins―See Lockhart's Life of Hums.
man, at the time when his book brought him into notice; though it must be acknowledged lie took his full share of farm labour of all kinds. Some of his best poems were written as he was driving the plough over the leas of Mossgeil.
