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With the small sum allowed them, they buried their father, took another farm, Mossgiel, in Mauchline, and began again the long struggle with poverty. Such, in outline, is Burns's own story of his early life, taken mostly from his letters. Here we see the boy at school; for like most Scotch peasants, the father gave his boys the best education he possibly could.
And that surely is an important essential of perfect biography. But otherwise the story of Burns's life has been told with such minuteness of detail, that the internal evidence of his poetry would seem only to be called in to verify or correct the verdict of tradition and the garbled gossip of those wise after the fact of his fame.
What would Robert Burns's letters have been had he never seen a Complete Letter-Writer, and never read 'those models by some of the first writers in our language'? Easier and more natural, we are of opinion; and he might have written fewer. Those in the Complete Letter-Writer style we could easily have spared. His teacher, Mr.
Will you be pleased to accept the copy of 'Burns's Life and Poems, sent with this, and when you are reading with delight the effusions of your brother bard, occasionally think of one who is, with sincere regard and affection, your friend, H. Davy. March 9th, 1801." In a letter of Sir H. Davy, addressed to his friend Mr. Poole, 1803, he thus writes of S. T. C.
I must ask the reader to follow all these references to his future wife; they are essential to the comprehension of Burns's character and fate. In June we find him back at Mauchline, a famous man. There, the Armour family greeted him with a "mean, servile compliance," which increased his former disgust.
But indeed, Hope, Mirth, of the sort like Burns's, are they not the outcome properly of warm generous affection, such as is the beginning of all to every man? You would think it strange if I called Burns the most gifted British soul we had in all that century of his: and yet I believe the day is coming when there will be little danger in saying so.
There is a sad falling off in Burns's ordinary correspondence in the last three years of his life. The amount of it scarcely touches twenty letters per year. Even the correspondence with Thomson, though on a subject so dear to the heart of Burns, rousing at once both his patriotism and his poetry, sinks to about ten letters per year, and is irregular at that.
Lockhart says: "I observe, as the sheet is passing through the press, the death of the Rev. George Thomson the happy 'Dominie Thomson' of the happy days of Abbotsford: he died at Edinburgh on the 8th of January 1838." Burns's "O poortith cauld and restless love."
I was not reprimanded for leaving my bed; people had something else to think about; no explanation was afforded then to my many questions; but a day or two afterwards I learned that Miss Temple, on returning to her own room at dawn, had found me laid in the little crib; my face against Helen Burns's shoulder, my arms round her neck. I was asleep, and Helen was dead.
I alighted, and plucked a whole handful of these "wee, modest, crimson-tipped flowers," which will be precious to many friends in our own country as coming from Burns's farm, and being of the same race and lineage as that daisy which he turned into an amaranthine flower while seeming to destroy it.
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