whom it is said, that "the infant ice scarce bent beneath their feet,") and amidst whom we discover

Sweet Female Beauty, hand in hand with Spring."

What a partnership! And struck off with such congenial

sweetness and freshness!

Inquiring (at Ayr) our way to the Monument for we declined, though it rained, the officious and loquacious Omnibus —of a man we met in the street, hale and ruddy, though fargone in years, he answered us in a manner that encouraged further inquiries. We asked if he knew any one in the place who remembered Burns? "Remember Burns?" he replied, "why I remember him very well." He had known him, it seems, familiarly, that is, as a lad knows a man. We asked if he remembered any of his conversation. "He could not say he did." What sort of a man was he? 66 Oh, he was a very quiet-like sort of man, just like any farm-servant." We were glad to have met with an individual who had seen him, though the knowledge did not add much to our own. We wonder how an Ionian Peasant would have described Homer. Possibly as a blind pauper, who sung a good battle-song, and to whom he himself had once been tempted to give a crust, a cup, or a coin !

We came to the Cottage in which Burns was born. An impertinent board stares the fact into us. We would rather have inquired it out for ourselves. But there it is-and we enter the neat, over-neat, abode. It is the show-place, and not the farm. Nothing is there, that ever belonged to the family, except a portrait of the Poet, as hard as if it had been meant for a sign-board. We did not ask who perpetrated it—but they told us—and we (as in duty bound, being artist-born) dismissed it at once into oblivion propense. Let it pass away. We will strive to get at something that has more of Burns. Even his birth-place is not quite the thing. We nothing doubt that he was a fine man-child-but we have nothing to do with his cradle. We have children of our own ;— but there is no Robert Burns, we take it for granted, among them. God forbid there should be! We hope often to nurse the lark for the sky; but, never-oh never !—the eagle for the thunder.

At the stile, leading into Alloway kirk-yard-Tam o' Shanter's Alloway-we found a man sitting, who, though a beggar now, had also known the poet after his own fashion. He had once walked six miles with him, during which Burns neither spoke to him, nor he to Burns! Being on the road to Ayr

one day, some one told him that the poet was before him. He walked on, overtook, and joined him-the result being as just stated. We asked him what kind of a person Burns was. “Oh, he was a dull-like kind of a man, walking along with his stick under his arm in this way" (suiting the action to the word, as well as his infirmities allowed him). We said we supposed the poet was engaged in some thoughts of his own-to which he solemnly assented. There was quite sufficient appearance of wounded vanity in the man's manner, to convince us that the thing had really happened. To us, too, it appears characteristic—especially in connection with the date assigned it by the old man-about a year, namely, before the poet's death. Alloway Kirk is smaller-and perhaps less imposing than we had imagined it. There seemed scarcely room for Satan and his Court. But it is the veritable thing, with William Burns's grave in front of it, near a fine thorn, as old as the poet's cradle. The original grave-stone (with Burns's epitaph upon it) has been carried away, bit by bit, by those dilapidating lapidaries, the pilgrims; but the same epitaph has been re-cut upon another stone-and that seems to stand a greater chance of perpetuity.

And are we now upon the Auld Brig o' Doon? And is this "bonnie Doon" itself that flows beneath us? It is that is, if it can be. We are not dreaming. We hear, we see, we feel, that it is the beautiful River. Look on its plentiful waters, winding down from the woody dell above to the lofty old bridge on which you stand, and thence on again to the New Brig below, allowing such a beautiful vista of it to be seen further on through its ample and stately arch. Look at those noble trees, the tops of which are on a level with you as you stand on the old key-stone, (that key-stone-the world has none so famous!) gazing thus solemnly down upon their own fine fragmentary shadows. Have they no consciousness, those glorious trees? They look like the very Poets of the Wood-tuning their mystic thoughts to the harpings of the River. Away-away! we will intrude upon their lofty musings no longer. Beautiful Visionaries, fare ye well!-When you publish, we subscribe-all we have, for one copy.

-

We have not noticed the Monument. Fervently did we wish it away. We thought it quite a disfigurement of the scene. A Grecian sepulchral temple has, in our view of things, no keeping (as a painter would say) with the Scottish Cottage and the ruined Kirk, and the venerable old Bridge. Just as little has the coquettish Fountain, which caught our eye afterwards, splashing up with intrusive levity, in the gardens under the New Bridge,

A spruce jet of water alongside of the sparkling and darkling Doon! Truly Taste has strange anomalies. Time, we hope, will avenge the wrong done to Nature; and the River and the Auld Brig will survive the Monument and the Fountain.

All

"Where is Mount Oliphant Farm?" we asked of a farmer, in his cart. He stopped it, and pointed to the white walls. We were soon nearer to them.—And here it was that the boy-poet grew and glowed into the man! The joys and the sorrows of those days, who shall tell? He is gone, who alone could have told them. He had chorded his harp with his heart-strings; and when his heart broke, his harp was silenced for ever. that we know of Genius must come from its own self-revealings; for there are none to interpret its dreams, but those who are overshadowed by its power. Beautiful-but more beautiful than romantic-is the scenery of this, the second home of the Ploughman-Minstrel of Scotland. We would willingly learn this scene, also, by heart. We are glad that we struck out of the beaten track to visit it ;—but we must return again (with a linger over every brook by the way), to say another farewell to the banks and braes of bonnie Doon-to snatch another wistful look at the waving and whispering trees -another silent communing with the sweeping and murmuring river. It is said-it is taken-it is over!

Having paid an evening visit-which, before we returned, became a gloaming one-to" the bonnie banks of Ayr," bordered by trees that might have grown by the Dart or the Tamar-yet far inferior, in romantic beauty and interest, to the banks of the same river, as we saw them afterwards, in returning from Mauchline, we set out, on the following morning, in the midst of mist and rain, to make obeisance to MossGIEL itself-the local habitation of the Daisy that cannot fade, and the Mouse that cannot die. We inquired, at sundry of the scattered farms, as we plodded along through some of the miriest roads in the land, the way to Mossgiel, and whether this or that was Mossgiel ;-but when we came to the real thing, we had no doubt about the matter. We felt that it was before us. This was probably owing to the unconscious impression of some print or drawing, which we had seen and forgotten. We stood some time in the lane, "till Contemplation had her fill." The hedges of the lane from which the farm diverges, were thickly sprinkled with numbers of those elegant blue bell flowers, which are so common in the fields by our now adopted Mersey. It was a link with home, and we felt it not needing it. There, with its screen of graceful and sheltering trees, stood the humble roof, which Genius had

consecrated by its glories and by its woes. We saw the Field in which the Daisy was cut down, and that in which the Mouse-nest was destroyed. We sat-we wrote-in the very sitting-room of Burns, "ben in the spence." A fire was lighted for us by the farmer's wife; and we looked at all, as willing to lose nothing. A bed was there, which they said must have been there in the Poet's time, because it was built into the wall. We were most willing to believe it. On quitting the house-casting many a look of admiring love upon the beautiful trees, of which they said (and we heard it nothing doubting,) Burns himself had been proud,-we looked, with more composed attention, on the view which the spot commanded. It was far, and wide, and lovely. Well do we remember the peaks of Arran in the distance. It seems to have been a determination of Burns, never to go out of sight of them-if he could help it. At Alloway-at Mount Õliphant at Mossgiel-they were always the most striking eyemark in the view.

It is pleasing to us to recall to what an extent the knowledge, thus cursorily obtained, of the scenery among which a great part of the writings of Burns was produced, has thrown light upon them. We are not now speaking of the clearing-up of obscurities. Few such exist in these healthy and unsophisticated poems. We now refer to the brightening influence of this knowledge, in giving new imagery to words, to which the mind had before affixed vague picturings of its own, cherishing them in the place of reality, where reality was not to be obtained. The first effect of personal acquaintance is to displace all such, not by expelling them rudely and irrevocably from the mind, but by throwing them completely into a secondary and shadowy existence. From that time, they become like abdicated kings, who keep their life but forfeit their power. Such pictures we had painted to ourselves of many passages of the poetry of Burns. Some of these remain; for we have not seen the localities which originally drew them forth, or to which they owed more or less of their colouring. Of others, though we have not seen the actual localities, yet the character of the surrounding scenery, or some unconscious combination of the impressions received from it, has obscurely wrought upon them, and modified them, so as to take them, in a manner, a degree or two out of the world of fancy, and nearer to the world of truth. Upon other idealisms of this kind, the change has been absolute and definitive. Dreams-though cherished for years have given place to the true forms and hues of Nature. We draw upon Memory, instead of Fancy. We

had a Kirk Alloway-and a Brig o' Doon-and a Daisy-Field -and a Mossgiel Farm-of our own ;-but where are they now? They have gone where dreams go, at the first touch of the morning. And we have lost nothing by the exchange. We have cashed our paper, and turned it into gold. The truth, the living truth, has visited our eyes; and we feel that it displaces no shadows so beautiful, but that we are free to bid them a thankful farewell.

Innumerable are the cases in which this slight acquaintance with the fatherland of Burns's poetry has thrown correcting and realizing light upon that—which had, in truth, no lack of brightness before. This has been done indirectly, as we have already hinted, by the general influence of the scenery upon the Song without any specific reference of particular spots to particular compositions-upon the poetry, taken as a mass and altogether. Lord Byron somewhere observes, in one of his brief but striking notes, that it is one thing to read the Iliad in the Troad, and another thing to trim your taper over it in a library. We should be the last to question it. We have felt the same thing with respect to the works of the great and true Poet, of whom we are speaking-a genuine Brother of Homer in vigour, nature, humanity and immortality. And the cases are strictly correspondent. Lord Byron's impression of the local faithfulness of Homer's poetry did not arise from his attempting to ascertain the exact locality of this or that event -where stood the tent of Achilles, where rose the palace of Priam, where the turf was reddened with the life-blood of Hector. It arose from the general effect of the scenery, intuitively compared with the general character of the poetry. And this is what we feel with respect to the scenery of the Burns-land, now that we have visited it with his poems in our hand and in our heart. Even without associating particular spots with particular incidents or effusions, we feel that the collective impression of the local scenery is not only confirmatory of the faithfulness of the poetry, but illustrative and, as it were, accumulative of its beauty. The general character of the whole District seems to have-and has given additional light, as well as additional interest, to the poetry which it suggested, taken indistinctively and in the mass. The poetry of Burns (without reference to individual poems) has gained fresh beauty for us, from this cursory acquaintance with the Burns-land.

But what value and character has this acquaintance bestowed upon individual passages, our previous conceptions of which have now been supplanted by the light and truth of Nature!