IV.—­The Clarinda Romance

During the winter of 1787—­1788, he had a little romance with Mrs. McLehose, the beautiful widow to whom he addressed the song, “Clarinda, mistress of my soul,” and a series of letters which present more instances of bad taste, bombastic language, and fulsome sentiment than could be produced from all his writings besides.  It was the same lady who inspired the lines which furnished Byron with a motto, and Scott declared to be “worth a thousand romances “: 

    Had we never loved so kindly
    Had we never loved sae blindly,
    Never met—­or never parted,
    We had ne’er been broken-hearted.

At this time the publication of Johnson’s “Scots Musical Museum” was going on in Edinburgh; and Burns, being enlisted as a contributor, furnished many of his best songs to that work.  From his youth upwards he had been an enthusiastic lover of the old minstrelsy and music of his country; but he now studied both subjects with better opportunities and appliances than he could have commanded previously; and it is from this time that we must date his ambition to transmit his own poetry to posterity, in eternal association with those exquisite airs which had hitherto, in far too many instances, been married to verses that did not deserve to be immortal.  Later, beginning in 1792, he wrote about sixty songs for George Thomson’s collection, many of which, like “Auld Lang Syne” and “Scots Wha Hae,” are in the front rank of popularity.  The letters he addressed to Thomson are full of interesting detail of various kinds.  In one he writes: 

“Until I am complete master of a tune in my own singing, such as it is, I can never compose for it.  My way is this.  I consider the poetic sentiment correspondent to my idea of the musical expression—­then choose my theme—­compose one stanza.  When that is composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in Nature round me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom, humming every now and then the air, with the verses I have framed.  When I feel my muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effusions to paper; swinging at intervals on the hind legs of my elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my pen goes.  Seriously this, at home, is almost invariably my way.”

But to return.  During his second winter in Edinburgh, Burns met with a hackney coach accident which kept him to the house for six weeks.  While in this state he learned from Mauchline that his intimacy with Jean Armour had again exposed her to the reproaches of her family.  The father sternly turned her out of doors, and Burns had to arrange about a shelter for her and his children in a friend’s house.  In the meantime, through the influence of some sympathisers, he had been appointed an officer of excise.  “I