nd sight!--look!"
"I would not look--look, sir, at your bidding," said the bard, turning
away, "were it into the mouth of hell!" When he visited, at a future
time, the romantic Linn of Creehope, in Nithsdale, he looked silently
at its wonders, and showed none of the hoped-for rapture. "You do not
admire it, I fear," said a gentleman who accompanied him; "I could not
admire it more, sir," replied Burns, "if He who made it were to desire
me to do it." There are other reasons for the silence of Burns amid
the scenes of the Devon: he was charmed into love by the sense and the
beauty of Charlotte Hamilton, and rendered her homage in that sweet
song, "The Banks of the Devon," and in a dozen letters written with
more than his usual care, elegance, and tenderness. But the lady was
neither to be won by verse nor by prose: she afterwards gave her hand
to Adair, the poet's companion, and, what was less meritorious, threw
his letters into the fire.

The third and last tour into the North was in company of Nicol of the
High-School of Edinburgh: on the fields of Bannockburn and
Falkirk--places of triumph and of woe to Scotland, he gave way to
patriotic impulses, and in these words he recorded them:--"Stirling,
August 20, 1787: this morning I knelt at the tomb of Sir John the
Graham, the gallant friend of the immortal Wallace; and two hours ago I
said a fervent prayer for old Caledonia, over the hole in a whinstone
where Robert the Bruce fixed his royal standard on the banks of
Bannockburn." He then proceeded northward by Ochtertyre, the water of
Earn, the vale of Glen Almond, and the traditionary grave of Ossian. He
looked in at princely Taymouth; mused an hour or two among the Birks of
Aberfeldy; gazed from Birnam top; paused amid the wild grandeur of the
pass of Killiecrankie, at the stone which marks the spot where a second
patriot Graham fell, and spent a day at Blair, where he experienced the
graceful kindness of the Duke of Athol, and in a strain truly elegant,
petitioned him, in the name of Bruar Water, to hide the utter nakedness
of its otherwise picturesque banks, with plantations of birch and oak.
Quitting Blair he followed the course of the Spey, and passing, as he
told his brother, through a wild country, among cliffs gray with eternal
snows, and glens gloomy and savage, reached Findhorn in mist and
darkness; visited Castle Cawdor, where Macbeth murdered Duncan; hastened
through Inverness to Urquhart Castle, and the Falls