Mary Campbell was a poor peasant-girl, whose life had been spent in servile offices, who could just spell a verse in her Bible, and could not write at all,--who walked barefoot to that meeting on the banks of the Ayr, which her lover has recorded. But Mary Campbell will live to memory while the music and the language of her country endure. Helen of Greece and the Carthage Queen are not more surely immortalised than this plebeian girl.--The scene of parting love, on the banks of the Ayr, that spot where "the golden hours, on angel-wings," hovered over Burns and his Mary, is classic ground; Vaucluse and Penshurst are not more lastingly consecrated: and like the copy of Virgil, in which Petrarch noted down the death of Laura, which many have made a pilgrimage but to look on, even such a relic shall be the Bible of Highland Mary. Some far-famed collection shall be proud to possess it; and many hereafter shall gaze, with glistening eyes, on the handwriting of _him_,--who by the mere power of truth and passion, shall live in all hearts to the end of time. * * * * * Some other loves commemorated by Burns are not very interesting or reputable. "The lassie wi' the lint white locks," the heroine of many beautiful songs, was an erring sister, who, as she was the object of a poet's admiration, shall be suffered to fade into a shadow. The subject of the song, Had we never lov'd sae kindly-- Had we never lov'd sae blindly-- Never met--or never parted-- We had ne'er been broken-hearted, was also real, and I am afraid, a person of the same description. Of these four lines, Sir Walter Scott has said, "that they were worth a thousand romances;" and not only so, but they are in themselves a complete romance. They are the _alpha_ and _omega_ of feeling; and contain the essence of an existence of pain and pleasure, distilled into one burning drop. Of almost all his songs, the heroines are real, though we must not suppose he was in love with them all,--that were too unconscionable; but he sometimes sought inspiration, and found it, where he could not have hoped any farther boon. In one of his letters to Mr. Thompson, for whose collection of Scottish airs he was then adapting words, he says, "Whenever I want to be more than ordinary _in song_, to be in some degree equal to your divine airs, do you imagine I fast and pray for the celestial emanation?--_tout au contraire_. I have a glorious recipe, the very one that, for his own use, was invented by the divinity of healing and poetry, when erst he piped to the flocks of Admetus,--I put myself on a regimen of admiring a fine woman."