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tion of Burns's melancholy the last time he saw him. termined to write a sonnet in the cottage: I did, but it

I cannot venture it here."

I was dewas so bad

SONNET.

This mortal body of a thousand days

Now fills, O Burns, a space in thine own room,
Where thou didst dream alone on budded bays,
Happy and thoughtless of thy day of doom!
My pulse is warm with thine old Barley-bree,
My head is light with pledging a great soul,
My eyes are wandering, and I cannot see,
Fancy is dead and drunken at its goal;
Yet can I stamp my foot upon thy floor,
Yet can I ope thy window-sash to find
The meadow thou hast tramped o'er and o'er-
Yet can I think of thee till thought is blind,—
Yet can I gulp a bumper to thy name,-

O smile among the shades, for this is fame!

The pedestrians passed by Solway Frith through that delightful part of Kircudbrightshire, the scene of "Guy Mannering." Keats had never read the novel, but was much struck with the character of Meg Merrilies as delineated to him by Brown. He seemed at once to realize the creation of the novelist, and, suddenly stopping in the pathway, at a point where a profusion of honeysuckles, wild rose, and fox-glove, mingled with the bramble and broom that filled up the spaces between the shattered rocks, he cried out, "Without a shadow of doubt on that spot has old Meg Merrilies often boiled her kettle."

MY DEAR TOM,

AUCHTERCAIRN, 3d July, [1818.]

Kir

We are now in Meg Merrilies' country, and have, this morning, passed through some parts exactly suited to her. cudbright County is very beautiful, very wild, with craggy hills, somewhat in the Westmoreland fashion. from Dumfries to the sea-coast part of it. you will have from Dilke, but perhaps here :

We have come down The following song you would like

it

Old Meg she was a gipsy,

And lived upon the moors;

Her bed it was the brown heath turf,
And her house was out of doors.
Her apples were swart blackberries,
Her currants, pods o' broom;

Her wine was dew of the wild white rose,
Her book a church-yard tomb.

Her brothers were the craggy hills,

Her sisters larchen trees;
Alone with her great family

She lived as she did please.

No breakfast had she many a morn,

No dinner many a noon,

And, 'stead of supper, she would stare
Full hard against the moon.

But every morn, of woodbine fresh
She made her garlanding,

And, every night, the dark glen yew
She wove, and she would sing.
And with her fingers, old and brown,

She plaited mats of rushes,

And gave them to the cottagers
She met among the bushes.

Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen,
And tall as Amazon,

An old red blanket cloak she wore,

A ship-hat had she on:

God rest her aged bones somewhere!
She died full long agone!

Yesterday was passed at Kircudbright; the country is very rich, very fine, and with a little of Devon. I am now writing at Newton Stewart, six miles from Wigton. Our landlady of yesterday said, "very few Southerners passed hereaways." The children jabber away, as if in a foreign language; the bare-footed girls look very much in keeping,—I mean with the scenery about them. Brown praises their cleanliness and appearance of comfort, the neatness of their cottages, &c. It may be. They are very squat among trees and fern, and heath and broom, on levels, slopes and heights; but I wish they were as snug as those up the

Devonshire valleys. We are lodged and entertained in great varieties. We dined, yesterday, on dirty bacon, dirtier eggs, and dirtiest potatoes, with a slice of salmon; we breakfast, this morning, in a nice carpeted room, with sofa, hair-bottomed chairs, and green-baized mahogany. A spring by the road-side is always welcome we drink water for dinner, diluted with a gill of whisky.

July 6th.-Yesterday morning we set out for Glenluce, going some distance round to see some rivers: they were scarcely worth the while. We went on to Stranraer, in a burning sun, and had gone about six miles when the mail overtook us: we got up, were at Port Patrick in a jiffey, and I am writing now in little Ireland. The dialects on the neighboring shores of Scotland and Ireland are much the same, yet I can perceive a great difference in the nations, from the chamber-maid at this nate Toone kept by Mr. Kelly. She is fair, kind, and ready to laugh, because she is out of the horrible dominion of the Scotch Kirk. These Kirk-men have done Scotland good. They have made men, women, old men, young men, old women, young women, boys, girls, and all infants, careful; so that they are formed into regular phalanges of savers and gainers. Such a thrifty army cannot fail to enrich their country, and give it a greater appearance of comfort than that of their poor rash neighborhood. These Kirk-men have done Scotland harm;-they have banished puns, love, and laughing. To remind you of the fate of Burns:-poor, unfortunate fellow! his disposition was southern! How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged, in self-defence, to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable, that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not! No man, in such matters, will be content with the experience of others. It is true that out of suffering there is no dignity, no greatness, that in the most abstracted pleasure there is no lasting happiness. Yet, who would not like to discover, over again, that Cleopatra was a gipsy, Helen a rogue, and Ruth a deep one? I have not sufficient reasoning faculty to settle the doctrine of thrift, as it is consistent with the dignity of human society-with the happiness of cottagers: all I can do is by plump contrasts were the fingers made to squeeze a guinea or a white hand? were the lips made to hold a pen or a kiss? And yet, in

cities, man is shut out from his fellows if he is poor; the cottager must be very dirty, and very wretched, if she be not thrifty-the present state of society demands this, and this convinces me that the world is very young, and in a very ignorant state. We live in a barbarous age. I would sooner be a wild deer, than a girl under the dominion of the Kirk; and I would sooner be a wild hog, than be the occasion of a poor creature's penance before those execrable elders.

It is not so far to the Giant's Causeway as we supposed: we thought it seventy, and we hear it is only forty-eight miles ;-so we shall leave one of our knapsacks here at Donaghadee, take our immediate wants, and be back in a week, when we shall proceed to the county of Ayr. In the packet, yesterday, we heard some ballads from two old men. One was a romance, which seemed very poor; then there was "The Battle of the Boyne," then "Robin Huid," as they call him-"Before the king you shall go, go, go; before the king you shall go."

July 9th.—We stopped very little in Ireland; and that you may not have leisure to marvel at our speedy return to Port Patrick, I will tell you it is as dear living in Ireland as at the Hummums—thrice the expense of Scotland-it would have cost us £15 before our return; moreover we found those forty-eight miles to be Irish ones, which reach to seventy English; so having walked to Belfast one day, and back to Donaghadee the next, we left Ireland with a fair breeze. We slept last night at Port Patrick, when I was gratified by a letter from you. On our walk in Ireland, we had too much opportunity to see the worse than nakedness, the rags, the dirt, and misery, of the poor common Irish. A Scotch cottage, though in that sometimes the smoke has no exit but at the door, is a palace to an Irish one. We had the pleasure of finding our way through a peat-bog, three miles long at leastdreary, flat, dank, black, and spongy-here and there were poor dirty creatures, and a few strong men cutting or carting peat. We heard, on passing into Belfast, through a most wretched suburb, that most disgusting of all noises, worse than the bag-pipes, the laugh of a monkey, the chatter of women, the scream of macaw-I mean the sound of the shuttle. What a tremendous difficulty is the improvement of such people. I cannot conceive how

a mind "with child" of philanthropy could grasp at its possibility-with me it is absolute despair. At a miserable house of entertainment, half-way between Donaghadee and Belfast, were two men sitting at whisky-one a laborer, and the other I took to be a drunken weaver: the laborer took me to be a Frenchman, and the other hinted at bounty-money, saying he was ready to take it. On calling for the letters at Port Patrick, the man snapped out, "What regiment?" On our return from Belfast we met a sedan -the Duchess of Dunghill. It is no laughing matter though. Imagine the worst dog-kennel you ever saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. In such a wretched thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved from a scarcity of biscuit in its passage from Madagascar to the Cape, with a pipe in her mouth, and looking out with a round-eyed, skinny-lidded inanity, with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her head: squat and lean she sat, and puffed out the smoke, while two ragged, tattered girls carried her along. What a thing would be a history of her life and sensations; I shall endeavor, when I have thought a little more, to give you my idea of the difference between the Scotch and Irish. The two Irishmen I mentioned were speaking of their treatment in England, when the weaver said— "Ah! you were a civil man, but I was a drinker." Till further notice, you must direct to Inverness. Your most affectionate brother,

JOHN.

Returning from Ireland, the travelers proceeded northwards by the coast, Ailsa Rock constantly in their view. That fine object appeared to them, in the full sunlight, like a transparent tortoise asleep on the calm water, then, as they advanced, displaying its lofty shoulders, and, as they still went on, losing its distinctness in the mountains of Arran and the extent of Cantire that rose behind. At the inn at Girvan Keats wrote this

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