Part 14
But to our tale:--Ae market-night, Tam had got planted unco right; Fast by an ingle,[60] bleezing finely, Wi' reaming swats,[61] that drank divinely; And at his elbow, Souter[62] Johnny, His ancient, trusty, drouthy crony: Tam lo'ed him like a vera brither; They had been fou for weeks thegither. The night drave on wi' sangs an' clatter, And aye the ale was growing better; The landlady and Tam grew gracious, Wi' favors, secret, sweet, and precious; The Souter tauld his queerest stories; The landlord's laugh was ready chorus; The storm without might rair[63] and rustle. Tam did na mind, the storm a whistle.
Care, mad to see a man sae happy, E'en drowned himself amang the nappy; As bees flee hame wi' lades o' treasure, The minutes winged their way wi' pleasure: Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious, O'er a' the ills o' life victorious!
But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flower, its bloom is shed! Or like the snowfall in the river, A moment white--then melts for ever; Or like the Borealis race, That flit ere you can point their place; Or like the rainbow's lovely form Evanishing amid the storm.
Nae man can tether time or tide; The hour approaches Tam maun ride: That hour, o' night's black arch the keystane, That dreary hour he mounts his beast in: And sic a night he tak's the road in, As ne'er poor sinner was abroad in. The wind blew as 'twad blawn its last; The rattlin' showers rose on the blast; The speedy gleams the darkness swallowed; Loud, deep, and lang the thunder bellowed: That night, a child might understand, The de'il had business on his hand.
Weel mounted on his gray mare Meg (A better never lifted leg), Tam skelpit[64] on through dub and mire, Despising wind, and rain, and fire; Whiles holding fast his guid blue bonnet, Whiles crooning o'er some auld Scots sonnet, Whiles glow'ring round wi' prudent cares, Lest bogles[65] catch him unawares; Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh, Whaur ghaists and houlets[66] nightly cry.
By this time he was 'cross the ford, Whaur in the snaw the chapman smoored;[67] And past the birks and meikle stane, Whaur drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane; And through the whins, and by the cairn, Whaur hunters fand the murdered bairn; And near the thorn, aboon the well, Whaur Mungo's mither hanged hersel'. Before him Doon pours all his floods; The doubling storm roars through the woods; The lightnings flash from pole to pole; Near and more near the thunders roll; When, glimmering through the groaning trees, Kirk-Alloway seemed in a bleeze; Through ilka bore[68] the beams were glancing; And loud resounded mirth and dancing.
Inspiring, bold John Barleycorn! What dangers thou canst mak' us scorn! Wi' tippenny[69] we fear nae evil; Wi' usquabae[70] we'll face the devil! The swats[71] sae reamed[72] in Tammie's noddle, Fair play, he cared na de'ils a boddle.[73] But Maggie stood right sair astonished, Till, by the heel and hand admonished She ventured forward on the light; And wow! Tam saw an unco sight! Warlocks and witches in a dance; Nae cotillion brent new frae France, But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels Put life and mettle in their heels. At winnock-bunker[74] in the east, There sat auld Nick, in shape o' beast;-- A towzie tyke,[75] black, grim, and large; To gi'e them music was his charge: He screwed the pipes and gart them skirl,[76] Till roof and rafters a' did dirl![77] Coffins stood round, like open presses, That shawed the dead in their last dresses; And by some devilish cantrip[78] slight, Each in its cauld hand held a light, By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table A murderer's banes in gibbet airns;[79] Twa span-lang, wee unchristened bairns; A thief new-cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gab[80] did gape; Five tomahawks, wi' bluid red-rusted; Five scimitars wi' murder crusted; A garter which a babe had strangled; A knife a father's throat had mangled, Whom his ain son o' life bereft-- The gray hairs yet stack to the heft: Wi' mair o' horrible and awfu', Which ev'n to name wad be unlawfu'.
As Tammie glow'red,[81] amazed and curious, The mirth and fun grew fast and furious: The piper loud and louder blew; The dancers quick and quicker flew; They reeled, they set, they crossed, they cleekit,[82] Till ilka carlin[83] swat and reekit,[84] And coost[85] her duddies[86] to the wark, And linket[87] at it in her sark![88]
Now Tam, O Tam! had they been queans A' plump and strapping, in their teens; Their sarks, instead o' creeshie flannen,[89] Been snaw-white seventeen-hunder linen[90], Thir breeks[91] o' mine, my only pair, That ance were plush, o' guid blue hair, I wad hae gi'en them off my hurdies, For ane blink o' the bonnie burdies!
But withered beldams old and droll, Rigwoodie[92] hags wad spean[93] a foal, Lowping and flinging on a crummock,[94] I wonder didna turn thy stomach.
But Tam kenned what was what fu' brawlie: "There was ae winsome wench and walie,"[95] That night inlisted in the core (Lang after kenned on Carrick shore! For mony a beast to dead she shot, And perished mony a bonnie boat, And shook baith meikle corn and bear,[96] And kept the country-side in fear), Her cutty sark,[97] o' Paisley harn,[98] That while a lassie she had worn, In longitude though sorely scanty, It was her best, and she was vauntie.[99] Ah! little kenned thy reverend grannie, That sark she coft[100] for her wee Nannie, Wi' twa pund Scots ('twas a' her riches), Wad ever graced a dance of witches! But here my muse her wing maun cour[101]; Sic flights are far beyond her power: To sing how Nannie lap and flang (A souple jade she was and strang), And how Tam stood like ane bewitched, And thought his very een enriched; Even Satan glow'red and fidged fu' fain, And hotched and blew wi' might and main: Till first ae caper, syne anither, Tam tints[102] his reason a'thegither, And roars out, "Weel done, Cutty-sark!" And in an instant all was dark; And scarcely had he Maggie rallied, When out the hellish legion sallied.
As bees bizz out wi' angry fyke,[103] When plundering hords assail their byke[104]; As open pussie's mortal foes When, pop! she starts before their nose; As eager runs the market-crowd, When "Catch the thief!" resounds aloud; So Maggie runs, the witches follow, Wi' mony an eldritch[105] screech and hollow.
Ah, Tam! ah, Tam, thou'll get thy fairin'! In hell they'll roast thee like a herrin'! In vain thy Kate awaits thy comin'! Kate soon will be a woefu' woman! Now, do thy speedy utmost, Meg, And win the keystane of the brig; There at them thou thy tail may toss,-- A running stream they dare na cross. But ere the keystane she could make, The fient a tail she had to shake!
For Nannie, far before the rest, Hard upon noble Maggie prest, And flew at Tam wi' furious ettle; But little wist she Maggie's mettle-- Ae spring brought off her master hale, But left behind her ain grey tail: The carlin claught her by the rump, And left poor Maggie scarce a stump!
Now, wha this tale o' truth shall read, Ilk man and mother's son, take heed: Whene'er to drink you are inclined, Or cutty sarks run in your mind, Think, ye may buy the joys o'er dear-- Remember Tam o' Shanter's mare.
FOOTNOTES:
[48] Fellows.
[49] Thirsty.
[50] Road.
[51] Ale.
[52] Gates or openings through a hedge.
[53] Good-for-nothing fellow.
[54] Nonsensical.
[55] Chattering fellow.
[56] Grain sent to the mill to be ground; _i.e._, that every time he carried the corn to the mill he sat to drink with the miller.
[57] Nag that required shoeing.
[58] Jean Kennedy, a public-house keeper at Kirkoswald.
[59] Makes me weep.
[60] Fire.
[61] Foaming ale.
[62] Shoemaker.
[63] Roar.
[64] Rode carelessly.
[65] Ghosts, bogies.
[66] Owls.
[67] Was smothered.
[68] Crevice, or hole.
[69] Twopenny ale.
[70] Whisky.
[71] Drink.
[72] Frothed, mounted.
[73] A small old coin.
[74] Window-seat.
[75] Shaggy dog.
[76] Made them scream.
[77] Shake.
[78] Spell.
[79] Irons.
[80] Mouth.
[81] Stared.
[82] Caught hold of each other.
[83] Old hag.
[84] Reeked with heat.
[85] Cast off.
[86] Clothes.
[87] Tripped.
[88] Chemise.
[89] Greasy flannel.
[90] Manufacturers' term for linen woven in a reed of 1700 divisions.
[91] Breeches.
[92] Gallows-worthy.
[93] Wean.
[94] A crutch--a stick with a crook.
[95] Quoted from Allan Ramsay.
[96] Barley.
[97] Short shift or shirt.
[98] Very coarse linen.
[99] Proud.
[100] Bought.
[101] Cower--sink.
[102] Loses.
[103] Fuss.
[104] Hive.
[105] Unearthly.
BRUCE TO HIS MEN AT BANNOCKBURN
Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled, Scots wham Bruce has aften led; Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victorie!
Now's the day, and now's the hour; See the front o' battle lour: See approach proud Edward's pow'r-- Chains and slaverie!
Wha will be a traitor-knave? Wha can fill a coward's grave? Wha sae base as be a slave? Let him turn and flee!
Wha for Scotland's king and law Freedom's sword will strongly draw, Freemen stand, or freemen fa', Let him follow me!
By oppression's woes and pains! By our sons in servile chains! We will drain our dearest veins, But they shall be free!
Lay the proud usurpers low! Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty's in every blow!-- Let us do or die!
HIGHLAND MARY
Ye banks and braes and streams around The castle o' Montgomery, Green be your woods, and fair your flowers, Your waters never drumlie! There Simmer first unfald her robes, And there the langest tarry; For there I took the last fareweel O' my sweet Highland Mary.
How sweetly bloomed the gay green birk, How rich the hawthorn's blossom! As underneath their fragrant shade, I clasped her to my bosom! The golden hours, on angel wings, Flew o'er me and my dearie; For dear to me as light and life Was my sweet Highland Mary.
Wi' mony a vow and locked embrace Our parting was fu' tender; And, pledging aft to meet again, We tore oursel's asunder; But oh! fell Death's untimely frost, That nipt my flower sae early! Now green's the sod and cauld's the clay That wraps my Highland Mary!
Oh pale, pale now those rosy lips, I aft hae kissed so fondly! And closed for aye the sparkling glance, That dwelt on me sae kindly; And moldering now in silent dust That heart that lo'ed me dearly! But still within my bosom's core Shall live my Highland Mary.
MY HEART'S IN THE HIGHLANDS
My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here; My heart's in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer; Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe-- My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go. Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North! The birthplace of valor, the country of worth; Wherever I wander, wherever I rove, The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.
Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow! Farewell to the straths and green valleys below! Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods! Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods! My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here, My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer; Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe-- My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.
THE BANKS O' DOON
Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon, How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair? How can ye chant, ye little birds, And I sae weary fu' o' care? Thou'll break my heart, thou warbling bird, That wantons through the flowering thorn; Thou minds me o' departed joys, Departed--never to return!
Oft ha'e I roved by bonnie Doon, To see the rose and woodbine twine; And ilka bird sang o' its luve, And fondly sae did I o' mine. Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose, Fu' sweet upon its thorny tree; And my fause lover stole my rose, But ah! he left the thorn wi' me.
[Illustration: "_THE BANKS AND BRAES O' BONNIE DOON._"
Oft hae I roved by bonnie Doon, To see the rose and woodbine twine; And ilka bird sang o' his luve. And fondly sae did I o' mine.
Etching from a Photograph.]
JOHN BURROUGHS
(1837-)
John Burroughs was born in Roxbury, New York, April 3d, 1837, and like many other American youths who later in life became distinguished, he went to school winters and worked on the farm in summer. He grew up among people who neither read books nor cared for them, and he considers this circumstance best suited to his development. Early intercourse with literary men would, he believes, have dwarfed his original faculty.
[Illustration: JOHN BURROUGHS]
He began to write essays at the age of fourteen, but these early literary efforts give little hint of his later work, of that faculty for seeing, and commenting on all that he saw in nature, which became his chief characteristic. He was especially fond of essays; one of his first purchases with his own money was a full set of Dr. Johnson, and for a whole year he lived on 'The Idler' and 'The Rambler' and tried to imitate their ponderous prose. His first contributions to literature, modeled on these essays, were promptly returned. By chance he picked up a volume of Emerson, the master who was to revolutionize his whole manner of thinking; and as he had fed on Dr. Johnson he fed on the 'Essays and Miscellanies,' until a paper he wrote at nineteen on 'Expressions' was accepted by the editor of the Atlantic, with a lurking doubt whether it had not come to him on false pretenses, as it was very much like an early essay of Emerson.
Mr. Burroughs ascribes to Emerson, who stimulated his religious nature, his improved literary expression; while Whitman was to him a great humanizing power, and Matthew Arnold taught him clear thinking and clean writing. He had passed through these different influences by the time he was twenty-one or twenty-two; had taught for a while; and from 1863 to 1873 was vault-keeper and afterwards chief of the organization division of the Bureau of National Banks, in the Treasury Department. For several years afterward he was a special national bank examiner.
The literary quality of his writings from the first captivates the reader. He has the interpretive power which makes us see what he sees and invites us to share his enjoyment in his strange adventures. The stories of the wary trout and the pastoral bee, the ways of sylvan folk, their quarrels and their love-making, are so many character sketches on paper, showing a most intimate acquaintance with nature.
He is a born naturalist. He tells us that from childhood he was familiar with the homely facts of the barn, the cattle and the horses, the sugar-making and the work of the corn-field, the hay-field, the threshing, the planting, the burning of fallows. He "loved nature in those material examples and subtle expressions, with a love passing all the books in the world." But he also loved and knew books, and this other love gives to his works their literary charm.
His account of a bird, a flower, or an open-air incident, however painstaking and minute the record, teems with literary memories. The sight of the Scotch hills recalls Shakespeare's line,
"The tufty mountains where lie the nibbling sheep."
The plane-tree vocal with birds' voices recalls Tennyson,--"The pillared dusk of sounding sycamores"; he hears the English chaffinch, and remembers with keen delight that Drayton calls it "the throstle with sharp thrills," and Ben Jonson "the lusty throstle." After much wondering, he finds out why Shakespeare wrote
"The murmuring surge That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes,"
his own experience being that sea-shores are sandy; but the pebbled cliffs of Folkestone, with not a grain of sand on the chalk foundation, justified the poet.
This lover of nature loves not only the beautiful things he sees, but he loves what they suggest, what they remind him of, what they bid him aspire to. Like Wordsworth, he "looks on the hills with tenderness, and makes deep friendship with the streams and groves." He notes what he divines by observation. And what an observer he is! He discovers that the bobolink goes south in the night. He scraped an acquaintance with a yellow rumpled warbler who, taking the reflection of the clouds and blue sky in a pond for a short cut to the tropics, tried to cross it; with the result of his clinging for a day and night to a twig that hung down in the water.
Burroughs has found that whatever bait you use in a trout stream,--grasshopper, grub, or fly,--there is one thing you must always put on your hook; namely, your heart. It is a morsel they love above everything else. He tells us that man has sharper eyes than a dog, a fox, or any of the wild creatures except the birds, but not so sharp an ear or a nose; he says that a certain quality of youth is indispensable in the angler, a certain unworldliness and readiness to invest in an enterprise that does not pay in current coin. He says that nature loves to enter a door another hand has opened: a mountain view never looks better than when one has been warmed up by the capture of a big trout. Like certain wary game, she is best taken by seeming to pass her by, intent on other matters. What he does not find out for himself, people tell him. From a hedge-cutter he learns that some of the birds take an earth-bath and some a water-bath, while a few take both; a farmer boy confided to him that the reason we never see any small turtles is because for two or three years the young turtles bury themselves in the ground and keep hidden from observation. From a Maine farmer he heard that both male and female hawks take part in incubation. A barefooted New Jersey boy told him that "lampers" die as soon as they have built their nests and laid their eggs. How apt he is in similes! The pastoral fields of Scotland are "stall-fed," and the hill-sides "wrinkled and dimpled, like the forms of fatted sheep."
And what other bird-lover has such charming fancies about birds, in whom he finds a hundred human significances? "The song of the bobolink," he says, "expresses hilarity; the sparrow sings faith, the bluebird love, the catbirds pride, the white-eyed fly-catchers self-consciousness, that of the hermit thrush spiritual serenity, while there is something military in the call of the robin." Mr. Burroughs has been compared with Thoreau, but he seems closer to White of Selborne, whom he has commemorated in one of his most charming essays. Like White, he is a literary man who is a born naturalist in close intimacy with his brute neighbors and "rural nature's varied shows." In both, the moral element is back of nature and the source of her value and charm. Never nature for her own sake, but for the sake of the soul that is above all and over all. Like White, too, though by nature solitary, Burroughs is on cordial terms with his kind. He is an accurate observer, and he takes Bryant to task for giving an odor to the yellow violet, and Coleridge for making a lark perch on the stalk of a foxglove. He gloats over a felicitous expression, like Arnold's "blond meadow-sweet" and Tennyson's "little speedwell's darling blue"; though in commenting on another poet he waives the question of accuracy, and says "his happy literary talent makes up for the poverty of his observation."
And again as with White, he walks through life slowly and in a ruminating fashion, as though he had leisure to linger with the impression of the moment. Incident he uses with reserve, but with picturesque effects; figures do not dominate his landscape but humanize it.
As a critic Mr. Burroughs most fully reveals his personality. In his sketches of nature we see what he sees; in his critiques, what he feels and thinks. The cry of discovery he made when 'Leaves of Grass' fell into his hands found response in England and was re-echoed in this country till Burroughs's strange delight in Whitman seemed no longer strange, but an accepted fact in the history of poetry. The essay on Emerson, his master, shows the same discriminating mind. But as a revelation of both author and subject there are few more delightful papers than Burroughs's essay on Thoreau. In manner it is as pungent and as racy as Thoreau's writings, and as epigrammatic as Emerson's; and his defense of Thoreau against the English reviewer who dubbed him a "skulker" has the sound of the trumpet and the martial tread of soldiers marching to battle.
SHARP EYES
From 'Locusts and Wild Honey'
Noting how one eye seconds and reinforces the other, I have often amused myself by wondering what the effect would be if one could go on opening eye after eye, to the number, say, of a dozen or more. What would he see? Perhaps not the invisible--not the odors of flowers or the fever germs in the air--not the infinitely small of the microscope or the infinitely distant of the telescope. This would require not so much more eyes as an eye constructed with more and different lenses; but would he not see with augmented power within the natural limits of vision? At any rate, some persons seem to have opened more eyes than others, they see with such force and distinctness; their vision penetrates the tangle and obscurity where that of others fails, like a spent or impotent bullet. How many eyes did Gilbert White open? how many did Henry Thoreau? how many did Audubon? how many does the hunter, matching his sight against the keen and alert senses of a deer, or a moose, or a fox, or a wolf? Not outward eyes, but inward. We open another eye whenever we see beyond the first general features or outlines of things--whenever we grasp the special details and characteristic markings that this mask covers. Science confers new powers of vision. Whenever you have learned to discriminate the birds, or the plants, or the geological features of a country, it is as if new and keener eyes were added.
Of course one must not only see sharply, but read aright what he sees. The facts in the life of nature that are transpiring about us are like written words that the observer is to arrange into sentences. Or, the writing is a cipher and he must furnish the key. A female oriole was one day observed very much preoccupied under a shed where the refuse from the horse stable was thrown. She hopped about among the barn fowls, scolding them sharply when they came too near her. The stable, dark and cavernous, was just beyond. The bird, not finding what she wanted outside, boldly ventured into the stable, and was presently captured by the farmer. What did she want? was the query. What but a horse-hair for her nest, which was in an apple-tree near by? and she was so bent on having one that I have no doubt she would have tweaked one out of the horse's tail had he been in the stable. Later in the season I examined her nest, and found it sewed through and through with several long horse-hairs, so that the bird persisted in her search till the hair was found.