From Stranraer the friends made straight for Burns's country, walking along the coast by Ballantrae, Girvan, Kirkoswald and Maybole (the same walk that Stevenson took the reverse way in the winter of 1876) to Ayr. Brown grows especially lyrical, and Keats more enthusiastic than usual, over the beauty of the first day's walk from Stranraer by Cairn Ryan and Glen App, with Ailsa Craig suddenly looming up through showers after they topped the pass:-- When we left Cairn [writes Keats] our Road lay half way up the sides of a green mountainous shore, full of clefts of verdure and eternally varying--sometimes up sometimes down, and over little Bridges going across green chasms of moss, rock and trees--winding about everywhere. After two or three Miles of this we turned suddenly into a magnificent glen finely wooded in Parts--seven Miles long--with a Mountain stream winding down the Midst--full of cottages in the most happy situations--the sides of the Hills covered with sheep--the effect of cattle lowing I never had so finely. At the end we had a gradual ascent and got among the tops of the Mountains whence in a little time I descried in the Sea Ailsa Rock 940 feet high--it was 15 Miles distant and seemed close upon us. The effect of Ailsa with the peculiar perspective of the Sea in connection with the ground we stood on, and the misty rain then falling gave me a complete Idea of a deluge. Ailsa struck me very suddenly--really I was a little alarmed. 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