Less vivid than the above is the invocatory sonnet, apparently showing acquaintance with the geological theory of volcanic upheaval, which Keats was presently moved to address _To Ailsa Rock_. Coming down into Ballantrae in blustering weather, the friends met a country wedding party on horseback, and Keats tried a song about it in the Burns dialect, for Brown to palm off on Dilke as an original: 'but it won't do,' he rightly decides. From Maybole he writes to Reynolds with pleased anticipation of the visit to be paid the next day to Burns's cottage. 'One of the pleasantest means of annulling self is approaching such a shrine as the cottage of Burns--we need not think of his misery--that is all gone--bad luck to it--I shall look upon it all with unmixed pleasure, as I do upon my Stratford-on-Avon day with Bailey.' On the walk from Maybole to Ayr Keats has almost the only phrase which escapes him during the whole tour to indicate a sense of special inspiring power in mountain scenery for a poet:--'The approach to it [Ayr] is extremely fine--quite outwent my expectations--richly meadowed, wooded, heathed, and rivuleted--with a Grand Sea view terminated by the black mountains of the Isle of Arran. As soon as I saw them so nearly I said to myself, "How is it they did not beckon Burns to some grand attempt at an Epic."' Nearing Kirk Alloway, Keats had been delighted to find the first home of Burns in a landscape so charming. 'I endeavoured to drink in the Prospect, that I might spin it out to you, as the Silkworm makes silk from Mulberry leaves--I cannot recollect it.' But his anticipations were deceived, the whole scene disenchanted, and thoughts of Burns's misery forced on him in his own despite, by the presence and chatter of the man in charge of the poet's birthplace:--
The Man at the Cottage was a great Bore with his Anecdotes--I hate the rascal--his life consists in fuz, fuzzy, fuzziest. He drinks glasses five for the Quarter and twelve for the hour--he is a mahogany-faced old Jackass who knew Burns. He ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him. He calls himself 'a curious old Bitch'--but he is a flat old dog--I should like to employ Caliph Vathek to kick him. O the flummery of a birthplace! Cant! cant! cant! It is enough to give a spirit the guts-ache. Many a true word, they say, is spoken in jest--this may be because his gab hindered my sublimity: the flat dog made me write a flat sonnet. My dear Reynolds--I cannot write about scenery and visitings--Fancy is indeed less than a present palpable reality, but it is greater than remembrance--you would lift your eyes from _Homer_ only to see close before you the real Isle of Tenedos--you would rather read _Homer_ afterwards than remember yourself. One song of Burns's is of more worth to you than all I could think for a whole year in his native country. His Misery is a dead weight upon the nimbleness of one's quill--I tried to forget it--to drink Toddy without any Care--to write a merry sonnet--it won't do--he talked with Bitches--he drank with blackguards, he was miserable. We can see horribly clear, in the works of such a Man his whole life, as if we were God's spies.[4] What were his addresses to Jean in the latter part of his life?
