Come, autumn, sae pensive, in yellow and gray, CLARINDA Clarinda, mistress of my soul, So marks his latest sun. To what dark cave of frozen night We part-but by these precious drops No other light shall guide my steps She, the fair sun of all her sex, Has blest my glorious day; And shall a glimmering planet fix My worship to its ray? 4. Ellisland In the spring of 1788 when Burns married Jean Armour, he took two other steps of the first importance for his future career. The Edinburgh period had come and gone, and all that his intercourse with his influential friends had brought him was the four or five hundred pounds of profit from his poems and an opportunity to enter the excise service. With part of the money he relieved his brother Gilbert from pressing obligations at Mossgiel by the loan of one hundred and eighty pounds, and with the rest leased the farm of Ellisland on the bank of the Nith, five or six miles above Dumfries. But before taking up the farm he devoted six weeks or so to tuition in the duties of an exciseman, so that he had this occupation to fall back on in case of another farming failure. During the summer he superintended the building of the farm-house, and in December Jean joined her husband. His satisfaction in his domestic situation is characteristically expressed in a song composed about this time. I HAE A WIFE I hae a wife o' my ain, blows I hae a penny to spend, There-thanks to naebody; I hae naething to lend, I'll borrow frae naebody. I am naebody's lord, I'll be slave to naebody; I hae a guid braid sword, I'll be merry and free, I'll be sad for naebody; Naebody cares for me, I care for naebody. Early in his residence at Ellisland he formed a close relation with a neighboring proprietor, Colonel Robert Riddel. For him he copied into two volumes a large part of what he considered the best of his unpublished verse and prose, thus forming the well-known Glenriddel Manuscript. Had not one already become convinced of the fact from internal evidence, it would be clear enough from this prose volume that Burns's letters were often as much works of art to him as his poems. This is of supreme importance in weighing the epistolary evidence for his character and conduct. Even when his words seem to be the direct outpourings of his feelings of love, of friendship, of gratitude, of melancholy, of devotion, of scorn-a comparative examination will show that in prose as much as in verse we are dealing with the work of a conscious artist, enamored of telling expression, aware of his reader, and anything but the naif utterer of unsophisticated emotion. To recall this will save us from much perplexity in the interpretation of his words, and will clear up many an apparent contradiction in his evidence about himself. Burns was never very sanguine about success on the Ellisland farm. By the end of the summer of 1789 he concluded that he could not depend on it, determined to turn it into a dairy farm to be conducted mainly by his wife and sisters, and took up the work in the excise for which he had prepared himself. He had charge of a large district of ten parishes, and had to ride some two hundred miles a week in all weathers. With the work he still did on the farm one can see that he was more than fully employed, and need not wonder that there was little time for poetry. Yet these years at Ellisland were on the whole happy years for himself and his family; he found time for pleasant intercourse with some of his neighbors, for a good deal of letter-writing, for some interest in politics, and for the establishing, with Colonel Riddel, of a small neighborhood library. As an excise officer he seems to have been conscientious and efficient, though at times, in the case of poor offenders, he tempered justice with mercy. Ultimately, despairing of making the farm pay and hoping for promotion in the government service, he gave up his lease, sold his stock, and in the autumn of 1791 moved to Dumfries, where he was given a district which did not involve keeping a horse, and which paid him about seventy pounds a year. Thus ended the last of Burns's disastrous attempts to make a living from the soil. 5. Dumfries The house in which the Burnses with their three sons first lived in Dumfries was a threeroomed cottage in the Wee Vennel, now Banks Street. Though his income was small, it must be remembered that the cost of food was low. "Beef was 3d. to 5d. a lb.; mutton, 3d to 41⁄2d.; chickens, 7d. to 8d. a pair; butter (the lb. of 24 oz.), 7d. to 9d.; salmon, 6d. to 91⁄2d. a lb.; cod, 1d. and even 1⁄2d. a lb." Though hardly in easy circumstances, then, Burns's situation was such |