Part 67 (1/2)

*A very little wrong.

”Who made the heart, 'tis He alone Decidedly can try us: He knows each chord, its various tone, Each spring its various bias: Then at the balance let's be mute, We never can adjust it; What's done we partly may compute, But know not what's resisted.”

Bad fortune, too, followed Burns. The shop in which he was engaged was set on fire, and he was left ”like a true poet, not worth a sixpence.”

So leaving the troubles and temptations of Irvine behind, he carried home a smirched name to his father's house.

Here, too, troubles were gathering. Bad harvests were followed by money difficulties, and, weighed down with all his cares, William Burns died. The brothers had already taken another farm named Mossgiel. Soon after the father's death the whole family went to live there.

Robert meant to settle down and be a regular farmer. ”Come, go to, I will be wise,” he said. He read farming books and bought a little diary in which he meant to write down farming notes. But the farming notes often turned out to be sc.r.a.ps of poetry.

The next four years of Burns's life were eventful years, for though he worked hard as he guided the plow or swung the scythe, he wove songs in his head. And as he followed his trade year in year out, from summer to winter, from winter to summer, he learned all the secrets of the earth and sky, of the hedgerow and the field.

How everything that was beautiful and tender and helpless in nature appealed to him we know from his poems. There is the field mouse--the ”wee sleekit,* cow'rin', tim'rous beastie,”

whose nest he turned up and destroyed in his November plowing.

”Poor little mouse, I would not hurt you,” he says--

*Smooth.

”Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin; Its silly wa's the win's are strewin'!”

And thou poor mousie art turned out into the cold, bleak, winter weather!--

”But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane, In providing foresight may be vain; Gang aft agley,*

An' lea'e us nought but grief and pain For promised joy.”

*Go often wrong.

It goes to his heart to destroy the early daisies with the plow--

”Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow'r, Thou's met me in an evil hour; For I maun crush amang the stoure Thy slender stem.

To spare thee now is past my pow'r, Thou bonnie gem.

”Alas! it's no thy neebor sweet, The bonnie lark, companion meet, Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet, Wi' spreckl'd breast, When upward springing, blythe, to greet The purpling east.

”Cauld blew the bitter-biting North Upon thy early, humble birth; Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth Amid the storm, Scarce rear'd above the parent earth Thy tender form.

”The flaunting flow'rs our gardens yield, High shelt'ring woods and wa's maun s.h.i.+eld; But thou, beneath the random bield*

O' clod or stane, Adorns the histie stibble-field,**

Unseen, alane.

”There, in thy scanty mantle cauld, Thy snawie bosom sunward spread, Thou lifts thy una.s.suming head In humble guise; But now the share uptears thy bed, And low thou lies!”

*Shelter.

**Bare stubble field.

Burns wrote love songs too, for he was constantly in love--often to his discredit, and at length he married Jean Armour, Scots fas.h.i.+on, by writing a paper saying that they were man and wife and giving it to her. This was enough in those days to make a marriage. But Burns had no money; the brothers' farm had not prospered, and Jean's father, a stern old Scotsman, would have nothing to say to Robert, who was in his opinion a bad man, and a wild, unstable, penniless rimester. He made his daughter burn her ”lines,” thus in his idea putting an end to the marriage.