Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays,
Wi' bickerin', dancin' dazzle;
Whyles cookit underneath the braes,
Below the spreading hazel
Unseen that night.
Born near the River Ayr, and having spent his boyhood and youth in its valley, Burns had ever a special affection for that stream, along whose banks he had composed some of his finest poems. When his enforced emigration to America was settled, and his trunk on its way to the ship, he wrote a parting song in the burden of which the banks of Ayr are made to stand for his native country as a whole:—
The bursting tears my heart declare,
Farewell, the bonnie banks of Ayr[1].
When the respite came, and he found himself famous and in Edinburgh, the Address which he wrote to the Scottish capital contrasted his reception there with what had gone before, and again his heart was by his beloved river:—
From marking wildly-scattered flowers,
As on the banks of Ayr I stray'd,
And singing, lone, the lingering hours,
I shelter in thy honoured shade.
And lastly, when the shadows were beginning to gather around him at Ellisland, his thoughts would go back to the same scene. In one of his latest and most pathetic songs we find once more a reminiscence of his associations with the river of his youth:—
