[20th December? 1787]
Your last, my dear Madam, had the effect on me that Job’s situation
had on his friends, when “they sat down seven days and seven nights
astonied, and spake not a word.” — “Pay my addresses to a married
woman!” I started, as if I had seen the ghost of him I had injur’d: I
recollected my expressions; some of them indeed were, in the law
phrase, “habit and repute,” which is being half guilty.— I cannot
positively say, Madam, whether my heart might not have gone astray
a little; but I can declare upon the honor of a Poet that the vagrant
has wandered unknown to me—I have a pretty handsome troop of
Follies of my own; and, like some other people’s retinue, they are
but undisciplined blackguards: but the luckless rascals have
something of honor in them; they would not do a dishonest thing.-
To meet with an unfortunate woman, amiable and young; deserted
and widowed by those who were bound by every tie of Duty, Nature
and Gratitude, to protect, comfort and cherish her; add to all, when
she is perhaps one of the first of Lovely Forms and Noble Minds, the
Mind too that hits one’s taste as the joys of Heaven do a Saint—
should a vague infant-idea, the natural child of Imagination,
thoughtlessly peep over the fence—were you, My Friend, to sit in
judgement, and the poor, airy Straggler brought before you,
trembling self-condemned; with artless eyes, brimful of contrition,
looking wistfully on its Judge—you could not, My dear Madam,
condemn the hapless wretch to “death without benefit of Clergy?”
I won’t tell you what reply my heart made to your raillery of “Seven
Years;” but I will give you what a brother of my trade says on the
same allusion—
The Patriarch to gain a wife
Chaste, beautiful and young,
Serv’d fourteen years a painful life
And never thought it long:
0 were you to reward such cares, And life so long would stay,
Nor fourteen but four hundred years
Would seem but as one day!
I have written you this scrawl because I have nothing else to do, and
you may sit down and find fault with it if you have no better way of
consuming your time; but finding fault with the vaguings of a Poet’s
fancy is much such another business as Xerxes chastising the waves
of Hellespont.—
My limb now allows me to sit in some peace; to walk I have yet no
prospect of, as I can’t mark it to the ground.—
I have just now looked over what I have written, and it is such a
chaos of nonsense that I daresay you will throw itinto the fire, and
call me an idle, stupid fellow; but whatever you think of my brains,
believe me to be, with the most sacred respect, and heart-felt esteem,
My Dear Madam, your humble servant
Robt Burns
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