Burns’s cottage

Maybole, 11 July [1818].

MY DEAR REYNOLDS,

...  I am approaching Burns’s cottage very fast.  We have made continual inquiries from the time we saw his tomb at Dumfries.  His name, of course, is known all about:  his great reputation among the plodding people is, ‘that he wrote a good mony sensible things’.  One of the pleasantest means of annulling self is approaching such a shrine as the Cottage of Burns:  we need not think of his misery—­that is all gone, bad luck to it!  I shall look upon it hereafter with unmixed pleasure, as I do my Stratford-on-Avon day with Bailey.  I shall fill this sheet for you in the Bardie’s country, going no further than this, till I get to the town of Ayr, which will be a nine miles’ walk to tea.

We were talking on different and indifferent things, when, on a sudden, we turned a corner upon the immediate country of Ayr.  The sight was as rich as possible.  I had no conception that the native place of Burns was so beautiful; the idea I had was more desolate:  his ‘Rigs of Barley’ seemed always to me but a few strips of green on a cold hill—­Oh, prejudice!—­It was as rich as Devon.  I endeavoured to drink in the prospect, that I might spin it out to you, as the silkworm makes silk from mulberry leaves.  I cannot recollect it.  Besides all the beauty, there were the mountains of Arran Isle, black and huge over the sea.  We came down upon everything suddenly; there were in our way the ‘bonny Doon’, with the brig that Tam o’ Shanter crossed, Kirk Alloway, Burns’s Cottage, and then the Brigs of Ayr.  First we stood upon the Bridge across the Doon, surrounded by every phantasy of green in tree, meadow, and hill:  the stream of the Doon, as a farmer told us, is covered with trees ‘from head to foot’.  You know those beautiful heaths, so fresh against the weather of a summer’s evening; there was one stretching along behind the trees.

I wish I knew always the humour my friends would be in at opening a letter of mine, to suit it to them as nearly as possible.  I could always find an egg-shell for melancholy, and, as for merriment, a witty humour will turn anything to account.  My head is sometimes in such a whirl in considering the million likings and antipathies of our moments, that I can get into no settled strain in my letters.  My wig!  Burns and sentimentality coming across you and Frank Floodgate in the office.  Oh, Scenery, that thou shouldst be crushed between two puns!  As for them, I venture the rascalliest in the Scotch region.  I hope Brown does not put them in his journal:  if he does, I must sit on the cutty-stool all next winter.  We went to Kirk Alloway.  ’A prophet is no prophet in his own country.’  We went to the Cottage and took some whisky.  I wrote a sonnet for the mere sake of writing some lines under the roof:  they are so bad I cannot transcribe them.  The man at the cottage was a great bore with his anecdotes.  I hate the rascal.