And a' that thou hast done for me!"

What Glencairn had done was nothing but kindness, a warm reception which
not even the poet's susceptibility could think condescending: but he is
repaid with an exuberant, extravagant gratitude. Such was the man; ever
afraid to compromise his dignity, but with no measure for the
overflowings of his heart. Petrarch, so much more assured in his
eminence and superiority to all living poets, was driven from his palace
on the Riva and all his delights by the impertinent gibes of some
foolish young men. But Burns was flattered and caressed to the top of
his bent, and--forgotten, or at least dropped, and no more thought of.
He returned to Edinburgh only to find that, the gloss of novelty having
worn off, his friends were no longer ready to move heaven and earth in
order to bring him to their parties, though probably had he chosen he
might have worked himself back "into society" in a slower but more
permanent fashion. This, however, he did not choose, but fell back among
the convivial middle class, the undistinguished and over merry, where
nobody thought it too great humility to refer to Allan Ramsay and
Fergusson as his models. It must be recollected, however, that his
second visit to Edinburgh, and what seems in the telling a foolish and
almost vulgar flirtation, produced one of the most impassioned and
exquisite songs of love and despair which has ever been written in any
language.

"Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;
Ae farewell, alas! for ever!"

There is a stillness of exhausted feeling in this wonderful utterance
which is the very soul of despair.

There has been no more remarkable moment in the experience of the town
which has known so many strange and striking scenes, though its interest
has little to do with history or even with national feeling. It is pure
humanity in an unusual development, an episode in the life of the poet
such as has many less important parallels, but scarcely any so fully
representative and typical. It discloses to us suddenly, as by a flash
of light striking into the darkness, the persons, the entertainments,
the sentiments of a hundred years ago. We make improvements daily in
external matters, but society--we had almost said humanity--rarely
learns. There is not the smallest hope that in Edinburgh or elsewhere a
young man of genius in Burns's position would now be either more wisely
noticed or more truly benefited by such a period of close c