1 September 1879 – 7 September 1879

Left home about 9 — Lancaster — Carnforth — to the westward wide hills and vales and misty mountain-land, ante-room and portals to the Lake region. Kendal, scatter of houses along the hill-side ; and Lake-land, lying under clouds and mists. Ullswater in the twilight, water gray and wintry, woods and mountains beautiful, old trees hanging into lake.

To Patterdale — xA.ira Force — Penrith. — Dumfries, Hotel. Read in Burns's Life.

Dumfries, Seek Burns Street, not easy to find — formerly ' Mill Hole.' New School House with bust of R. B. ; and next door Burns's little house, unaltered. Into the house. Portrait of R. B. in lower room. Upstairs, — little room where he died (certain .''), little closet where 'tis said he used to write. Walk over Old Bridge, lane, thatched cottages — corn- fields, hills, Criffel, wide cheerful prospect. Cassilands — ' Mr. Carlyle gone — to the Hill,' I walk down to town — speak to decent elderly man. 'Mr. Carlyle ? — yes — he's been stopping here at Cassilands. I never heard much about him till last year — I under- stan' he's vera clever. No Sir, I never read any o' his warks. What may he hae written ? ' (I told him.) To the Hill, pretty red-stone house, in shrubbery, with peep of the hills to eastward. Portraits of Carlyle, Mary — Enter Mrs. Aitken. The Doctor very ill, poor fellow : they don't know what it is. A doctor has been here, ' but you know he (i.e. Dr. Carlyle) has no belief in medical skill.' T. C. with Mary and Alick, at Moffat.^ Out. River, sweeping round, houses, low wall — beautiful. Up Nith pathway, trees, fields, swift river (reminds me of Erne). ' Globe Tavern ' — small snug rooms, Burns's corner and chair (boarded in), narrow forked entrance — rough stable-yard — upstairs, writing on panes. Gin a body meet a body Comin' through the grain. Gin a body kiss a body The thing's a body's ain. (There was, and perhaps is, a way through the stable-yard and back lanes from the ' Globe ' to Burns's house in Mill Hole.) I also saw where he lived in Bank Street (i.e. river- * Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, newly married, had just been joined by Mr. Carlyle at MofFat. bank ?) a few doors from the corner of the wide space by the River (which reminded me of Ballyshannon).

To Beattock — Moffat. Buccleuch Arms — enter Mary, friendly greetings — then Alex- ander. We go up into Carlyle's room — he shakes hands in friendly wise. After luncheon we four drive to the De'il's Beef-Tub. Mary recalled Carlyle's first journey to Edinburgh, on foot, at the age of fourteen. C. — ' Ah yes — about seventy years ago, I came through here, in the charge of a very decent man who was driving two carts of potatoes up to Edinburgh. When I got tired, he let me lie on the potatoes and happed me in some sort of covering he had.' On this youthful journey Carlyle peeped at the source of the Annan in the De'il's Beef-Tub — a hollow under Hartfell with steep sloping green sides, here and there a streak of loose stones, and some little threads of water slipping down. Over the hill, not far, is the source of Tweed, which I would fain have seen (there is a strong attraction in river sources), but rain threatened. We saw a long way down Annandale : Annan is doubtless the same as Avon, Evan, etc. etc. — various forms of one of the Gaelic words for water. To-night we took up Burns, and Carlyle urged me to read something — ' Let me see how you'll read it.' I began ' The muckle deevil wi' a woodie Harle.' He stopt me at every line, catechising. He then read and repeated several pieces, showing great tenacity and readiness of memory. He uttered a verse of ' Auld Lang Syne ' in a kind of chant, evidently intended to suggest that he was singing it, or could sing it if he liked. One word of his version was different from the words in the usual copies, and perhaps better : instead of An' here's a hand, my trusty fiere, An' gie's a hand o' thine — C. said, — gic's a haud (a hold) o' thine.

Moffat. Fine. In open carriage, C, M., A., and I for Ecclefechan ; tKey going on to Newlands to meet James Carlyle and others. At Lockerbie we stopt half an hour to bait the horses. I walked through the village and returning to the carriage found him seated there (horses gone) with his thick gray hair uncovered. Barefooted children ran about, people stood at shop-doors, no one appeared to F recognise him. As we approached Ecclefechan he talked a little of the localities, pointed out the wooded hill called Woodcockair, and Repentance Tower — also the conspicuous flat - topt hill known as ' Burnswark ' [Birrenswark], from which one can ' look down into Yorkshire,' and on which stood a Roman city. We ' skirted Ecclefechan, and they drove on after dropping me. A (tw steps brought me into the village street and before the humble house, or half-house, in which Thomas Carlyle was born. The small stone building has a gateway through the middle of it. On each side of this gateway is a tenement — of three rooms. In the right-hand tenement, in the [larger] room upstairs, the son of James and Margaret Carlyle was born on the '4th December 1795. The ascent to the upper rooms is by a steep flight of stone steps direct from the front door to a very small landing, from which the little room (birth-room) opens. Behind the tenement are two or three other rooms. A brook emerges from an arch a little above the Carlyle house, and runs down past half a dozen houses — a source of perpetual pleasure to the tairns, some of whom are always ' paidling ' and trying to catch little fishes, which they call ' beardies.' In the other half of the house I found a girl of nineteen. After some chat I inquired had she ever seen Mr. Carlyle ^. ' O aye, often enough.' ' Would you like to see him again ? ' 'No.' At half-past four, as agreed, the carriage came, and stopt to take me up. Two or three small groups of villagers looked our way, but there was no kind of greeting or palpable recognition whatever. Imagine an Irishman of equal fame seen in his native place ! The scene of the family meeting, at which were fourteen small nephews and nieces, was Newlands, a farm occupied by one of James's sons. James is also tenant of Thomas's Farm, Craigenputtock. ' James never knew such bad times for farmers,' C. told me on the way back. At Lockerbie we again stopt half an hour. C. sat in the carriage as before, I leant over the side and talked to him. While we talked a biggish man came out of the inn, — like a comfortable farmer, and bearing a general resemblance to C. as many of the men do here — he advanced to the carriage, took off his hat, and said in a slow distinct voice without any expression in his face or tone, ' 1 request the honour of shaking hands with you. Sir ; I understand you're Mr. -Carlyle.' C. looked at him, and after some seconds said, ' Who are you. Sir } ' — the other, a little taken aback, ' O, I'm only a farmer in the neighbourhood — I'm an admirer of your writings. Sir, and I wished to shake hands with you. I asked permission to shake hands with the grandson of our national poet, Robert Burns, at Lockerbie Station, and it was granted to me.' C. slowly took off his glove and gave him a thin, brown hand. ' Ye're lookin' fresh, Mr. Carlyle,' says the farmer. ' Fresh,' returns C. — ' I'm very old and very weak' — whereon the farmer, taking his hat off again, withdrew, while C. muttered, 'I wish you well, Sir.' We got back to Moffat about half-past eight — the weather having threatened rain, but kept up all through.

I walked in the morning up hill and by field path to Spa, some two miles, and drank a glass of the water — pretty glen and rocky brook. In Moffat Street meet C. and Alick coming slowly across — rain begins — C. sits on a doorstep — we notice name on signboard ' Jannetson,' which C. says he never saw elsewhere. Back to inn, where C. comes with me into the common parlour and I read to him from the guide book an account of the source of Annan, etc. In the evening I came into his room. Burns again — ' poor fellow — utterly misplaced — the best songster ever lived.' I said Burns showed no signs of improvement in conduct as he grew older. Did his wife make any attempts to reform him .? No, C. thought, she tried little or nothing that way, thought it no use. ' I was once brought to see Mrs. Burns in her old age — she said little, nor did I, I had unspeakable feelings in looking upon her, as though it were one of the Greek tragic heroines — Clytemnestra herself! — Bonnie Jean !— She was a quiet, grave person, no good looks left.' C. spoke of how Burns took his death, coming late out of the ' Globe,' drunk, and sitting down on a stone (a louping-on-stane probably), which is still in the close, on a cold, freezing winter's night. Strange that no one looked after him. It was doubtless too frequent a case to excite attention. I C. said, ' I remember a man in Annandale telling me I that he saw Burns lying dead-drunk in the back-yard of ithe *' King's Head," and totally unheeded, save by a passing look.' Old John Tait, the sexton or bedrai, shewed me the Mausoleum in St. Michael's churchyard of Dumfries, a foolish kind of greenhouse or glass-case enclosing a relievo of a clumsy Burns. I Burns's body was moved hither from its original f resting-place under a simple, and far more expressive, j slab. Carlyle told me, ' I went up one morning early, before the graveyard was open, and climbed over the wall ; there were many tombstones of Covenanters to I be seen ; searching about in the grass I suddenly came upon a flat stone with " Robert Burns " on it and the dates : it was the most impressive experience of the i kind I have had in my life.' Old Sexton Tait told me something of a grandson of the Poet, who died in Dumfries a few weeks ago at the age of fifty-eight. He drank daily as much whisky as he could get by ' sponging,' chiefly at the ' Globe Tavern,' on folk who ' treated ' him in memory of the National Bard. He had in his middle life a recognisable likeness to the Poet, and his father was still more like, ' with the same black eyes (Carlyle told me) — only the soul entirely wanting in them ; they had no depth, — their darkness was like that of polished cannel coal.' This third Robert, lately dead, ' used to say (the Sexton told me) he would like to have his grave here ' — namely, under a small tree in a corner of the enclosed ground, in front of the mausoleum or glass-case. ' He kennt weel he wadna be allowed inside.' There are illegitimate Burnses, I believe, still breath- ing vital air at Dumfries. Better for his countrymen, for mankind, and indeed for his own memory, if much less noise had been made about the unlucky one's grave, if the stone had been left in the churchyard grass to be found by one and another pilgrim, not without tears. I quoted to Carlyle Goethe's remark that, to win high popular success and fame a man must have, not only genius, but opportunity, — Napoleon inherited the French Revolution, Burns the old Scottish Songs. C. did not appear to know how much Burns owed to the old songs, as Mary and I went over some of the instances. C. said that while the Poet in his last illness was staying at the Brow, some miles from Dumfries, he heard one day a farm-labourer speaking of various things he was busy upon, and Burns said with a deep sigh, ' Ah ! those were my happy days ' — meaning, when he was thus occupied. To which Carlyle added, * Gilbert Burns used often to say that his brother's conversation was never afterwards so delightful as when they two were working in the field, or digging peat together. Robert was full of poetry and enthusiasm.'