fe. To his surprise and mortification the
girl's father, who is said to have had a personal dislike to him and
who well may have thought a man with his reputation and prospects was
no promising son-in-law, opposed the marriage, forced Jean to give up
the paper, and sent her off to another town. Burns chose to regard
Jean's submission to her father as inexcusable faithlessness, and
proceeded to indulge in the ecstatic misery of the lover betrayed.
There is no doubt that he suffered keenly from the affair: he writes
to his friends that he could "have no nearer idea of the place of
eternal punishment" than what he had felt in his "own breast on her
account. I have tried often to forget her: I have run into all kinds
of dissipation and riot ... to drive her out of my head, but all in
vain." This is in a later letter than that in which he has "sunk into
a lurid calm," and "subsided into the time-settled sorrow of the sable
widower."

Yet other evidence shows that at this crisis also Burns's emotional
experience was far from simple. It was probably during the summer of
the same year that there occurred the passages with the mysterious
Highland Mary, a girl whose identity, after voluminous controversy,
remains vague, but who inspired some of his loftiest love poetry.
Though Burns's feeling for her seems to have been a kind of interlude
in reaction from the "cruelty" of Jean, he idealized it beyond his
wont, and the subject of it has been exalted to the place among his
heroines which is surely due to the long-suffering woman who became
his wife.

In this same summer Burns formed the project of emigrating. He
proposed to go to the West Indies, and return for Jean when he had
made provision to support her. This offer was refused by James Armour,
but Burns persevered with the plan, obtained a position in Jamaica,
and in the autumn engaged passage in a ship sailing from Greenock. The
song, _Will Ye Go to the Indies; My Mary_, seems to imply that
Highland Mary was invited to accompany him, but substantial evidence
of this, as of most things concerning his relations with Mary
Campbell, is lacking. _From Thee, Eliza, I Must Go_, supposed to be
addressed to Elizabeth Miller, also belongs to this summer, and is
taken to refer to another of the "under-plots in his drama of love."

Meantime, at the suggestion of his friend and patron, Gavin Hamilton,
Burns had begun to arrange for a subscription edition of his poems. It
seems to have