e mode of cultivation is different from
that of the west, and the cold humid bottom of Mossgiel bears no
resemblance to the warm and stony loam of Ellisland."

When on the 13th June he went to live on his farm, he had, as there
was no proper dwelling-house on it, to leave Jean and her one
surviving child behind him at Mauchline, and himself to seek shelter
in a mere hovel on the skirts of the farm. "I remember the house
well," says Cunningham, "the floor of clay, the rafters japanned with
soot, the smoke from a hearth-fire streamed thickly out at door and
window, while the sunshine which struggled in at those apertures
produced a sort of twilight." Burns thus writes to Mrs. Dunlop, "A
solitary inmate of an old smoky spence, far from every object I love
or by whom I am beloved; nor any acquaintance older than yesterday,
except Jenny Geddes, the old mare I ride on, while uncouth cares and
novel plans hourly insult my awkward ignorance and bashful inexperience."
It takes a more even, better-ordered spirit than Burns' to stand such
solitude. His heart, during those first weeks at Ellisland, (p. 097)
entirely sank within him, and he saw all men and life coloured by his
own despondency. This is the entry in his commonplace book on the
first Sunday he spent alone at Ellisland:--"I am such a coward in
life, so tired of the service, that I would almost at any time, with
Milton's Adam, 'gladly lay me in my mother's lap, and be at peace.'
But a wife and children bind me to struggle with the stream, till some
sudden squall shall overset the silly vessel, or in the listless
return of years its own craziness reduce it to wreck."

The discomfort of his dwelling-place made him not only discontented
with his lot, but also with the people amongst whom he found himself.
"I am here," he writes, "on my farm, but for all the pleasurable part
of life called social communication, I am at the very elbow of
existence. The only things to be found in perfection in this country
are stupidity and canting.... As for the Muses, they have as much idea
of a rhinoceros as a poet."

When he was not in Ayrshire in bodily presence, he was there in
spirit. It was at such a time that looking up to the hills that divide
Nithsdale from Ayrshire, he breathed to his wife that most natural and
beautiful of all his love-lyrics,--

Of a' the airts the wind can blaw
I dearly like the west,
For there the bonnie lassie