The Edinburgh Edition having now been published, there was no reason for the poet to prolong his stay in the city. It was only after being disappointed of a second Kilmarnock Edition of his poems that he had come to try his fortunes in the capital; and now that his hopes of a fuller edition and a wider field had been realised, the purpose of his visit was accomplished, and there was no need to fritter his time away in idleness.

In a letter to Lord Buchan, Burns had doubted the prudence of a penniless poet faring forth to see the sights of his native land. But circumstances have changed. With the assured prospect of the financial success of his second venture, he felt himself in a position to gratify the dearest wish of his heart and to fire his muse at Scottish story and Scottish scenes. Moreover, as has been said, it would be some time before Creech could come to a final settlement of accounts with the poet, and he may have deemed that the interval would be profitably spent in travel. His travelling companion on his first tour was a Mr. Robert Ainslie, a young gentleman of good education and some natural ability, with whom he left Edinburgh on the 5th May, a fortnight after the publication of his poems. We are told that the poet, just before he mounted his horse, received a letter from Dr. Blair, which, having partly read, he crumpled up and angrily thrust into his pocket. A perusal of the letter will explain, if it does not go far to justify, the poet's irritation. It is a sleek, superior production, with the tone of a temperance tract, and the stilted diction of a dominie. The doctor is in it one of those well-meaning, meddlesome men, lavish of academic advice. Burns resented moral prescriptions at all times—more especially from one whose knowledge of men was severely scholastic; and we can well imagine that he quitted Edinburgh in no amiable mood.

From Edinburgh the two journeyed by the Lammermuirs to Berrywell, near Duns, where the Ainslie family lived. On the Sunday he attended church with the Ainslies, where the minister, Dr. Bowmaker, preached a sermon against obstinate sinners. 'I am found out,' the poet remarked, 'wherever I go.' From Duns they proceeded to Coldstream, where, having crossed the Tweed, Burns first set foot on English ground. Here it was that, with bared head, he knelt and prayed for a blessing on Scotland, reciting with the deepest devotion the two concluding verses of The Cotter's Saturday Night.

The next place visited was Kelso, where they admired the old abbey, and went to see Roxburgh Castle, thence to Jedburgh, where he met a Miss Hope and a Miss Lindsay, the latter of whom 'thawed his heart into melting pleasure after being so long frozen up in the Greenland Bay of indifference amid the noise and nonsense of Edinburgh.' When he left this romantic city his thoughts were not of the honour its citizens had done him, but of Jed's crystal stream and sylvan banks, and, above all, of Miss Lindsay, who brings him to the verge of verse. Thereafter he visited Kelso, Melrose, and Selkirk, and after spending about three weeks seeing all that was to be seen in this beautiful country-side, he set off with a Mr. Ker and a Mr. Hood on a visit to England. In this visit he went as far as Newcastle, returning by way of Hexham and Carlisle. After spending a day here he proceeded to Annan, and thence to Dumfries. Whilst in the Nithsdale district he took the opportunity of visiting Dalswinton and inspecting the unoccupied farms; but he did not immediately close with Mr. Miller's generous offer of a four-nineteen years' lease on his own terms. From Nithsdale he turned again to his native Ayrshire, arriving at Mossgiel in the beginning of June, after an absence from home of six eventful months.

We can hardly imagine what this home-coming would be like. The Burnses were typical Scots in their undemonstrative ways; but this was a great occasion, and tradition has it that his mother allowed her feeling so far to overcome her natural reticence that she met him at the threshold with the exclamation, 'O Robert!' He had left home almost unknown, and had returned with a name that was known and honoured from end to end of his native land. He had left in the direst poverty, and haunted with the terrors of a jail, now he came back with his fortune assured; if not actually rich, at least with more money due to him than the family had ever dreamed of possessing. The mother's excess of feeling on such an occasion as this may be easily understood and excused.

Of this Border tour Burns kept a scrappy journal, but he was more concerned in jotting down the names and characteristics of those with whom he forgathered than of letting himself out in snatches of song. He makes shrewd remarks by the way on farms and farming, on the washing and shearing of sheep, but the only verse he attempted was his Epistle to Creech. He who had longed to sit and muse on 'those once hard-contested fields' did not go out of his way to look on Ancrum Moor or Philiphaugh, nor do we read of him musing pensive in Yarrow.

However, we are not to regard these days as altogether barren. The poet was gathering impressions which would come forth in song at some future time. 'Neither the fine scenery nor the lovely women,' Cunningham regrets, 'produced any serious effect on his muse.' This is a rash statement. Poets do not sow and reap at the same time—not even Burns. If his friends were disappointed at what they considered the sterility of his muse on this occasion, the fault did not lie with the poet, but with their absurd expectations. It may be as well to point out here that the greatest harm Edinburgh did to Burns was that it gathered round him a number of impatient and injudicious admirers who could not understand that poetry was not to be forced. The burst of poetry that practically filled the Kilmarnock Edition came after a seven years' growth of inspiration; but after his first visit to Edinburgh he was never allowed to rest. It was expected that he should write whenever a subject was suggested, or burst into verse at the first glimpse of a lovely landscape. Every friend was ready with advice as to how and what he should write, and quite as ready, the poet unfortunately knew, to criticise afterwards. The poetry of the Mossgiel period had come from him spontaneously. He had flung off impressions in verse fearlessly, without pausing to consider how his work would be appreciated by this one or denounced by that; and was true to himself. Now he knew that every verse he wrote would be read by many eyes, studied by many minds; some would scent heresy, others would spot Jacobitism, or worse, freedom; some would suspect his morality, others would deplore his Scots tongue; all would criticise favourably or adversely his poetic expression. It has to be kept in mind, too, that Burns at this time was in no mood for writing poetry. His mind was not at ease; and after his long spell of inspiration and the fatiguing distractions of Edinburgh, it was hardly to be wondered at that brain and body were alike in need of rest. The most natural rest would have been a return direct to the labours of the farm. That, however, was denied him, and the period of his journeyings was little else than a season of unsettlement and suspense.

Burns only stayed a few days at home, and then set off on a tour to the West Highlands, a tour of which we know little or nothing. Perhaps this was merely a pilgrimage to the grave of Highland Mary. We do not know, and need not curiously inquire. Burns, as has been already remarked, kept sacred his love for this generous-hearted maiden, hidden away in his own heart, and the whole story is a beautiful mystery. We do know that before he left he visited the Armours, and was disgusted with the changed attitude of the family towards himself. 'If anything had been wanting,' he wrote to Mr. James Smith, 'to disgust me completely at Armour's family, their mean, servile compliance would have done it.' To his friend, William Nicol, he wrote in the same strain. 'I never, my friend, thought mankind very capable of anything generous; but the stateliness of the patricians in Edinburgh, and the servility of my plebeian brethren (who perhaps formerly eyed me askance) since I returned home, have nearly put me out of conceit altogether with my species.'

This shows Burns in no very enviable frame of mind; but the cause is obvious. He is as yet unsettled in life, and now that he has met again his Bonnie Jean, and seen his children, he is more than ever dissatisfied with aimless roving. 'I have yet fixed on nothing with respect to the serious business of life. I am just as usual a rhyming, mason-making, raking, aimless, idle fellow. However, I shall somewhere have a farm soon. I was going to say a wife too, but that must never be my blessed lot.'

To his own folks he was nothing but kindness, ready to share with them his uttermost farthing, and to have them share in the glory that was his; but he was at enmity with himself, and at war with the world. Like Hamlet, who felt keenly, but was incapable of action, he saw that 'the times were out of joint'; circumstances were too strong for him. Almost the only record we have of this tour is a vicious epigram on what he considered the flunkeyism of Inveraray. Nor are we in the least astonished to hear that on the homeward route he spent a night in dancing and boisterous revel, ushering in the day with a kind of burlesque of pagan sun-worship. This was simply a reaction from his gloom and despondency; he sought to forget himself in reckless conviviality.

About the end of July we find him back again in Mauchline, and on the 25th May he set out on a Highland tour along with his friend William Nicol, one of the masters of the High School. Of this man Dr. Currie remarks that he rose by the strength of his talents, and fell by the strength of his passions. Burns was perfectly well aware of the passionate and quarrelsome nature of the man. He compared himself with such a companion to one travelling with a loaded blunderbuss at full-cock; and in his epigrammatic way he said of him to Mr. Walker, 'His mind is like his body; he has a confounded, strong, in-kneed sort of a soul.' The man, however, had some good qualities. He had a warm heart; never forgot the friends of his early years, and he hated vehemently low jealousy and cunning. These were qualities that would appeal strongly to Burns, and on account of which much would be forgiven. Still we cannot think that the poet was happy in his companion; nor was he yet happy in himself. Otherwise the Highland tour might have been more interesting, certainly much more profitable to the poet in its results, than it actually proved.

In his diary of this tour, as in his diary of the Border tour, there is much more of shrewd remark on men and things than of poetical jottings. The fact is, poetry is not to be collected in jottings, nor is inspiration to be culled in catalogue cuttings; and if many of his friends were again disappointed in the immediate poetical results of this holiday, it only shows how little they understood the comings and goings of inspiration. Those, however, who read his notes and reflections carefully and intelligently are bound to notice how much more than a mere verse-maker Burns was. This was the journal of a man of strong, sound sense and keen observation. It has also to be recognised that Burns was at his weakest when he attempted to describe scenery for mere scenery's sake. His gift did not lie that way. His landscapes, rich in colour and deftly drawn though they be, are always the mere backgrounds of his pictures. They are impressionistic sketches, the setting and the complement of something of human interest in incident or feeling.

The poet and his companion set out in a postchaise, journeying by Linlithgow and Falkirk to Stirling. They visited 'a dirty, ugly place called Borrowstounness,' where he turned from the town to look across the Forth to Dunfermline and the fertile coast of Fife; Carron Iron Works, and the field of Bannockburn. They were shown the hole where Bruce set his standard, and the sight fired the patriotic ardour of the poet till he saw in imagination the two armies again in the thick of battle. After visiting the castle at Stirling, he left Nicol for a day, and paid a visit to Mrs. Chalmers of Harvieston. 'Go to see Caudron Linn and Rumbling Brig and Deil's Mill.' That is all he has to say of the scenery; but in a letter to Gavin Hamilton he has much more to tell of Grace Chalmers and Charlotte, 'who is not only beautiful but lovely.'

From Stirling the tourists proceeded northwards by Crieff and Glenalmond to Taymouth; thence, keeping by the banks of the river, to Aberfeldy, whose birks he immortalised in song. Here he had the good fortune to meet Niel Gow and to hear him playing. 'A short, stout-built, honest, Highland figure,' the poet describes him, 'with his greyish hair shed on his honest, social brow—an interesting face, marking strong sense, kind open-heartedness mixed with unmistaking simplicity.'

By the Tummel they rode to Blair, going by Fascally and visiting—both those sentimental Jacobites—'the gallant Lord Dundee's stone,' in the Pass of Killiecrankie. At Blair he met his friend Mr. Walker, who has left an account of the poet's visit; while the two days which Burns spent here, he has declared, were among the happiest days of his life.

'My curiosity,' Walker wrote, 'was great to see how he would conduct himself in company so different from what he had been accustomed to. His manner was unembarrassed, plain, and firm. He appeared to have complete reliance on his own native good sense for directing his behaviour. He seemed at once to perceive and appreciate what was due to the company and to himself, and never to forget a proper respect for the separate species of dignity belonging to each. He did not arrogate conversation, but when led into it he spoke with ease, propriety, and manliness. He tried to exert his abilities, because he knew it was ability alone gave him a title to be there.'

Burns certainly enjoyed his stay, and would, at the family's earnest solicitation, have stayed longer, had the irascible and unreasonable Nicol allowed it. Here it was he met Mr. Graham of Fintry, and if he had stayed a day or two longer he would have met Dundas, a man whose patronage might have done much to help the future fortunes of the poet. After leaving Blair, he visited, at the Duke's advice, the Falls of Bruar, and a few days afterwards he wrote from Inverness to Mr. Walker enclosing his verses, The Humble Petition of Bruar Water to the Noble Duke of Athole.

Leaving Blair, they continued their journey northwards towards Inverness, viewing on the way the Falls of Foyers,—soon to be lost to Scotland,—which the poet celebrated in a fragment of verse. Of course two such Jacobites had to see Culloden Moor; then they came through Nairn and Elgin, crossed the Spey at Fochabers, and Burns dined at Gordon Castle, the seat of the lively Duchess of Gordon, whom he had met in Edinburgh. Here again he was received with marked respect, and treated with the same Highland hospitality that had so charmed him at Blair; and here also the pleasure of the whole party was spoilt by the ill-natured jealousy of Nicol. That fiery dominie, imagining that he was slighted by Burns, who seemed to prefer the fine society of the Duchess and her friends to his amiable companionship, ordered the horses to be put to the carriage, and determined to set off alone. As the spiteful fellow would listen to no reason, Burns had e'en to accompany him, though much against his will. He sent his apologies to Her Grace in a song in praise of Castle Gordon.

From Fochabers they drove to Banff, and thence to Aberdeen. In this city he was introduced to the Rev. John Skinner, a son of the author of Tullochgorum, and was exceedingly disappointed when he learned that on his journey he had been quite near to the father's parsonage, and had not called on the old man. Mr. Skinner himself regretted this, when he learned the fact from his son, as keenly as Burns did; but the incident led to a correspondence between the two poets. From Aberdeen he came south by Stonehaven, where he 'met his relations,' and Montrose to Dundee. Hence the journey was continued through Perth, Kinross, and Queensferry, and so back to Edinburgh, 16th September 1787.

His letter to his brother from Edinburgh is more meagre even than his journal, being simply a catalogue of the places visited. 'Warm as I was from Ossian's country,' he remarks, 'what cared I for fishing towns or fertile carses?' Yet although the journal reads now and again like a railway time-table, we come across references which give proof of the poet's abounding interest in the locality of Scottish Song; and it was probably the case, as Professor Blackie writes, that 'such a lover of the pure Scottish Muse could not fail when wandering from glen to glen to pick up fragments of traditional song, which, without his sympathetic touch, would probably have been lost.'

Burns's wanderings were not yet, however, at an end. Probably he had expected on his return to Edinburgh some settlement with Creech, and was disappointed. Perhaps he was eager to revisit some places or people—Peggy Chalmers, no doubt—without being hampered in his movements by such a companion as Nicol. Anyhow, we find him setting out again on a tour through Clackmannan and Perthshire with his friend Dr. Adair, a warm but somewhat injudicious admirer of the poet's genius. It was probably about the beginning of October that the two left Edinburgh, going round by Stirling to Harvieston, where they remained about ten days, and made excursions to the various parts of the surrounding scenery. The Caldron Linn and Rumbling Bridge were revisited, and they went to see Castle Campbell, the ancient seat of the family of Argyle. 'I am surprised,' the doctor ingenuously remarks, 'that none of these scenes should have called forth an exertion of Burns's muse. But I doubt if he had much taste for the picturesque.' One wonders whether Dr. Adair had actually read the published poems. What a picture it must have been to see the party dragging Burns about, pointing out the best views, and then breathlessly waiting for a torrent of verse. The verses came afterwards, but they were addressed, not to the Ochils or the Devon, but to Peggy Chalmers.

From Harvieston he went to Ochtertyre on the Teith to visit Mr. Ramsay, a reputed lover of Scottish literature; and thence he proceeded to Ochtertyre in Strathearn, in order to visit Sir William Murray.

In a letter to Dr. Currie, Mr. Ramsay speaks thus of Burns on this visit: 'I have been in the company of many men of genius, some of them poets, but never witnessed such flashes of intellectual brightness, the impulse of the moment, sparks of celestial fire! I never was more delighted, therefore, than with his company for two days' tÊte-À-tÊte.' Of his residence with Sir William Murray he has left two poetical souvenirs, one On Scaring some Water Fowl in Loch Turit, and the other, a love song, Blithe, Blithe, and Merry was She, in honour of Miss Euphemia Murray, the flower of Strathearn.

Returning to Harvieston, he went back with Dr. Adair to Edinburgh, by Kinross and Queensferry. At Dunfermline he visited the ruined abbey, where, kneeling, he kissed the stone above Bruce's grave.

It was on this tour, too, that he visited at Clackmannan an old Scottish lady, who claimed to be a lineal descendant of the family of Robert the Bruce. She conferred knighthood on the poet with the great double-handed sword of that monarch, and is said to have delighted him with the toast she gave after dinner, 'Hooi Uncos,' which means literally, 'Away Strangers,' and politically much more.

The year 1787 was now drawing to a close, and Burns was still waiting for a settlement with Creech. He could not understand why he was kept hanging on from month to month. This was a way of doing business quite new to him, and after being put off again and again he at last began to suspect that there was something wrong. He doubted Creech's solvency; doubted even his honesty. More than ever was he eager to be settled in life, and he fretted under commercial delays he could not understand. On the first day of his return to Edinburgh he had written to Mr. Miller of Dalswinton, telling him of his ambitions, and making an offer to rent one of his farms. We know that he visited Dalswinton once or twice, but returned to Edinburgh. His only comfort at this time was the work he had begun in collecting Scottish songs for Johnson's Museum; touching up old ones and writing new ones to old airs. This with Burns was altogether a labour of love. The idea of writing a song with a view to money-making was abhorrent to him. 'He entered into the views of Johnson,' writes Chambers, 'with an industry and earnestness which despised all money considerations, and which money could not have purchased'; while Allan Cunningham marvels at the number of songs Burns was able to write at a time when a sort of civil war was going on between him and Creech. Another reason for staying through the winter in Edinburgh Burns may have had in the hope that through the influence of his aristocratic friends some office of profit, and not unworthy his genius, might have been found for him. Places of profit and honour were at the disposal of many who might have helped him had they so wished. But Burns was not now the favourite he had been when he first came to Edinburgh. The ploughman-poet was no longer a novelty; and, moreover, Burns had the pride of his class, and clung to his early friends. It is not possible for a man to be the boon-companion of peasants and the associate of peers. Had he dissociated himself altogether from his past life, the doors of the nobility might have been still held open to him; and no doubt the cushioned ease of a sinecure's office would have been had for the asking. But in that case he would have lost his manhood, and we should have lost a poet. Burns would not have turned his back on his fellows for the most lucrative office in the kingdom; that, he would have considered as selling his soul to the devil. Yet, on the other hand, what could any of these men do for a poet who was 'owre blate to seek, owre proud to snool'? Burns waited on in the expectation that those who had the power would take it upon themselves to do something for him. Perhaps he credited them with a sense and a generosity they could not lay claim to; though had one of them taken the initiative in this matter, he would have honoured himself in honouring Burns, and endeared his name to the hearts of his countrymen for all time. But such offices are created and kept open for political sycophants, who can importune with years of prostituted service. They are for those who advocate the opinions of others; certainly not for the man who dares to speak fearlessly his own mind, and to assert the privileges and prerogatives of his manhood. The children's bread is not to be thrown to the dogs. Burns asked for nothing, and got nothing. The Excise commission which he applied for, and graduated for, was granted. The work was laborious, the remuneration small, and gauger was a name of contempt.

But whilst waiting on in the hope of something 'turning up,' he was still working busily for Johnson's Museum, and still trying to bring Creech to make a settlement. At last, however, out of all patience with his publisher, and recognising the futility of his hopes of preferment, he had resolved early in December to leave Edinburgh, when he was compelled to stay against his will. A double accident befell him; he was introduced to a Mrs. Maclehose, and three days afterwards, through the carelessness of a drunken coachman, he was thrown from a carriage, and had his knee severely bruised. The latter was an accident that kept him confined to his room for a time, and from which he quickly recovered; but the meeting with Mrs. Maclehose was a serious matter, and for both, most unfortunate in its results.

It was while he was 'on the rack of his present agony' that the Sylvander-Clarinda correspondence was begun and continued. That much may be said in excuse for Burns. A man, especially one with the passion and sensitiveness of a poet, cannot be expected to write in all sanity when he is racked by the pain of an injured limb. Certainly the poet does not show up in a pleasant light in this absurd interchange of gasping epistles; nor does Mrs. Maclehose. 'I like the idea of Arcadian names in a commerce of this kind,' he unguardedly admits. The most obvious comment that occurs to the mind of the reader is that they ought never to have been written. It is a pity they were written; more than a pity they were ever published. It seems a terrible thing that, merely to gratify the morbid curiosity of the world, the very love-letters of a man of genius should be made public. Is there nothing sacred in the lives of our great men? 'Did I imagine,' Burns remarked to Mrs. Basil Montagu in Dumfries, 'that one half of the letters which I have written would be published when I die, I would this moment recall them and burn them without redemption.'

After all, what was gained by publishing this correspondence? It adds literally nothing to our knowledge of the poet. He could have, and has, given more of himself in a verse than he gives in the whole series of letters signed Sylvander. Occasionally he is natural in them, but rarely. 'I shall certainly be ashamed of scrawling whole sheets of incoherence.' We trust he was. The letters are false in sentiment, stilted in diction, artificial in morality. We have a picture of the poet all through trying to batter himself into a passion he does not feel, into love of an accomplished and intellectual woman; while in his heart's core is registered the image of Jean Armour, the mother of his children. He shows his paces before Clarinda and tears passion to tatters in inflated prose; he poses as a stylist, a moralist, a religious enthusiast, a poet, a man of the world, and now and again accidentally he assumes the face and figure of Robert Burns. We read and wonder if this be really the same man who wrote in his journal, 'The whining cant of love, except in real passion and by a masterly hand, is to me as insufferable as the preaching cant of old father Smeaton, Whig minister at Kilmaurs. Darts, flames, cupids, love graces and all that farrago are just ... a senseless rabble.'

Clarinda comes out of the correspondence better than Sylvander. Her letters are more natural and vastly more clever. She grieves to hear of his accident, and sympathises with him in his suffering; were she his sister she would call and see him. He is too romantic in his style of address, and must remember she is a married woman. Would he wait like Jacob seven years for a wife? And perhaps be disappointed! She is not unhappy: religion has been her balm for every woe. She had read his autobiography as Desdemona listened to the narration of Othello, but she was pained because of his hatred of Calvinism; he must study it seriously. She could well believe him when he said that no woman could love as ardently as himself. The only woman for him would be one qualified for the companion, the friend, and the mistress. The last might gain Sylvander, but the others alone could keep him. She admires him for his continued fondness for Jean, who perhaps does not possess his tenderest, faithfulest friendship. How could that bonnie lassie refuse him after such proofs of love? But he must not rave; he must limit himself to friendship. The evening of their third meeting was one of the most exquisite she had ever experienced. Only he must now know she has faults. She means well, but is liable to become the victim of her sensibility. She too now prefers the religion of the bosom. She cannot deny his power over her: would he pay another evening visit on Saturday?

When the poet is leaving Edinburgh, Clarinda is heartbroken. 'Oh, let the scenes of nature remind you of Clarinda! In winter, remember the dark shades of her fate; in summer, the warmth of her friendship; in autumn, her glowing wishes to bestow plenty on all; and let spring animate you with hopes that your friend may yet surmount the wintry blasts of life, and revive to taste a spring-time of happiness. At all events, Sylvander, the storms of life will quickly pass, and one unbounded spring encircle all. Love, there, is not a crime. I charge you to meet me there, O God! I must lay down my pen.'

Poor Clarinda! Well for her peace of mind that the poet was leaving her; well for Burns, also, that he was leaving Clarinda and Edinburgh. Only one thing remained for both to do, and it had been wise, to burn their letters. Would that Clarinda had been as much alive to her own good name, and the poet's fair fame, as Peggy Chalmers, who did not preserve her letters from Burns!

It was February 1788 before Burns could settle with Creech; and, after discharging all expenses, he found a balance in his favour of about five hundred pounds. To Gilbert, who was in sore need of the money, he advanced one hundred and eighty pounds, as his contribution to the support of their mother. With what remained of the money he leased from Mr. Miller of Dalswinton the farm of Ellisland, on which he entered at Whitsunday 1788.