I have alluded to the poet-farmer Burns,—a capital ploughman, a poor manager, an intemperate lover, a sad reveller, a stilted letter-writer, a rare good-fellow, and a poet whose poems will live forever. It is no wonder he did not succeed as farmer; Moss-giel had an ugly, wet subsoil, and draining-tiles were as yet not in vogue; but from all the accounts I can gather, there was never a truer furrow laid than was laid by Robert Burns in his days of vigor, upon that same damp upland of Moss-giel; his "fearings" were all true, and his headlands as clear of draggled sod as if he had used the best "Ruggles, Nourse, and Mason" of our time. Alas for the daisies! he must have turned over perches of them in his day; and yet only one has caught the glory of his lamentation!
Ellisland, where he went later, and where he hoped to redeem his farm-promise, was not over-fertile; it had been hardly used by scurvy tenants before him, and was so stony that a rain-storm made a fresh-rolled field of sown barley look like a paved street. He tells us this; and we farmers know what it means. But it lay in Nithsdale; and the beauty of Nithsdale shed a regal splendor on his home. It was the poet that had chosen the farm, and not the grain-grower.
Then there were the "callants" coming from Edinburgh, from Dumfries, from London, from all the world, to have their "crack" with the peasant-poet, who had sung the "Lass of Ballochmyle." Can this man, whose tears drip (in verse) for a homeless field-mouse, keep by the plough, when a half-score of good-fellows are up from Dumfries to see him, and when John Barleycorn stands frothing in the cupboard?
Consider, again, that his means, notwithstanding the showy and short-lived generosity of his Edinburgh friends, enabled him only to avail himself of the old Scotch plough; his harrow, very likely, had wooden teeth; he could venture nothing for the clearing of gorse and broom; he could enter upon no system of drainage, even of the simple kind recommended by Lord Kames; he had hardly funds to buy the best quality of seed, and none at all for "liming," or for "wrack" from the shore. Even the gift of a pretty heifer he repays with a song.
Besides all this, he was exciseman; and he loved galloping over the hills in search of recreants, and cozy sittings in the tap of the "Jolly Beggars" of Mauchline, better than he loved a sight of the stunted barley of Ellisland.
No wonder that he left his farm; no wonder that he went to Dumfries,—shabby as the street might be where he was to live; no wonder, that, with his mad pride and his impulsive generosity, he died there, leaving wife and children almost beggars. But, in all charity, let us remember that it is not alone the poor exciseman who is dead, but the rare poet, who has intoned a prayer for ten thousand lips,—
"That He, who stills the raven's clamorous nest,
And decks the lily fair in flowery pride,
Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best,
For them and for their little ones provide,
But chiefly in their hearts with grace divine preside."
Let no one fancy that Burns was a poor farmer because he was a poet: he was a poor farmer simply because he gave only his hand to the business, and none of his brain. He had enough of good sense and of clear-sightedness to sweep away every agricultural obstacle in his path, and to make Ellisland "pay well"; but good-fellowship, and the "Jolly Beggars," and his excise-galloping among the hills by Nithsdale made an end of the farmer,—and, in due time, made an end of the man.
Robert Bloomfield was another poet-farmer of these times, but of a much humbler calibre. I could never give any very large portion of a wet day to his reading. There is truthfulness of description in him, and a certain grace of rhythm, but nothing to kindle any glow. The story of Giles, and of the milking, and of the spotted heifers, may be true enough; but every day, in my barn-
