mewhat under compulsion, and we doubt not he would
much more gladly have gone straight back to farm-life, and kept these
leisurely pilgrimages to a more convenient season. One is not in a mood
for dreaming on battlefields, or wandering in a reverie by romantic
rivers, when the future is unsettled and life is for the time being
without an aim. There is something of mystery and melancholy hanging
about these peregrinations, and the cause, it seems to us, is not far to
seek. These months are months of waiting and wearying; he is unsettled,
oftentimes moody and despondent; his bursts of gaiety appear forced, and
his muse is well-nigh barren. In the circumstances, no doubt it was the
best thing he could do, to gratify his long-cherished desire of seeing
these places in his native country, whose names were enshrined in song
or story. But how much more pleasant--and more profitable both to the
poet himself and the country he loved--had these journeys been made
under more favourable conditions!

The past also as much as the future weighed on the poet's mind. His
days had been so fully occupied in Edinburgh that he had little leisure
to think on some dark and dramatic episodes of Mauchline and Kilmarnock;
but now in his wanderings he has time not only to think but to brood;
and we may be sure the face of Bonnie Jean haunted him in dreams, and
that his heart heard again and again the plaintive voices of little
children. In several of his letters now we detect a tone of bitterness,
in which we suspect there is more of remorse than of resentment with the
world. He certainly was disappointed that Creech could not pay him in
full, but he must have been gratified with the reception his poems had
got. The list of subscribers ran to thirty-eight pages, and was
representative of every class in Scotland. In the words of Cunningham:
'All that coterie influence and individual exertion--all that the
noblest and humblest could do, was done to aid in giving it a kind
reception. Creech, too, had announced it through the booksellers of the
land, and it was soon diffused over the country, over the colonies, and
wherever the language was spoken. The literary men of the South seemed
even to fly to a height beyond those of the North. Some hesitated not to
call him the Northern Shakspeare.'

This surely was a great achievement for one who, a few months
previously, had been skulking from covert to covert to escape the
terrors of a jail. He had hardly