ad 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,