I remember, as a particular instance--I suppose there are thousands--of the tenacity with which Burns seizes on the memory, and twines round the very fibres of one's heart, that when I was travelling in Italy, along that beautiful declivity above the river Clitumnus, languidly enjoying the balmy air, and gazing with no careless eye on those scenes of rich and classical beauty, over which memory and fancy had shed A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the earth; even then, by some strange association, a feeling of my childish years came over me, and all the livelong day I was singing, _sotto voce_-- Their groves o' sweet myrtle let foreign lands reckon, Where bright-beaming summers exalt the perfume; Far dearer to me yon lone glen o' green bracken, Wi' the burn stealing under the long yellow broom! Far dearer to me are yon humble broom bowers, Where the blue-bell and gowan lurk lowly unseen, For there, lightly tripping among the wild flowers, A' listening the linnet, oft wanders my Jean. Thus the heath, and the blue-bell, and the gowan, had superseded the orange and the myrtle on those Elysian plains, Where the crush'd weed sends forth a rich perfume. And Burns and Bonnie Jean were in my heart and on my lips, on the spot where Virgil had sung, and Fabius and Hannibal met. Besides celebrating her in verse, Burns has left us a description of his Bonnie Jean in prose. He writes (some months after his marriage) to his friend Miss Chalmers,--"If I have not got polite tattle, modish manners, and fashionable dress, I am not sickened and disgusted with the multiform curse of boarding-school affectation; and I have got the handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the kindest heart in the country. Mrs. Burns believes, as firmly as her creed, that I am _le plus bel esprit, et le plus honnete homme_ in the universe; although she scarcely ever, in her life, (except reading the Scriptures and the Psalms of David in metre) spent five minutes together on either prose or verse. I must except also a certain late publication of Scots Poems, which she has perused very devoutly, and all the ballads in the country, as she has (O, the partial lover! you will say) the finest woodnote-wild I ever heard."