His first few years seem to have been spent in a half-happy, half-careless boyhood; in them he had all the experiences of a poor but healthy Scotch peasant-lad, toiling in the fields, catching now and then a few weeks or months at school, coquetting with neighboring lasses, but with poverty and lack of social position always barring the way to his advancement.
Through all this, poetry was his solace and amusement; at the age of fifteen he had written many verses which, although crude, contained the promise of his subsequent career; but of course at that time they were admired only by a limited circle of his neighbors and friends. He also unhappily contracted certain convivial habits, which lasted in a greater or less degree all through his life, which no one regretted more than he did at times, and which greatly impaired and finally put an early end to a brilliant career.
When Robert was twenty-five years old his father, the good William Burness, died, and the family, who had kept well together, took a farm about eight miles distant from the old home, near Ayr. Here the young farmer-poet undertook to become a thorough and industrious husbandman. He turned his attention toward the literature of the farm; he tried to bend his powerful though dreamy mind toward the prosaic and the practical. But the venture did not thrive; some of the thousand-and-one casualties that are always besetting crops and crop-growers came his way, and the brave venture which he and his brother Gilbert had undertaken together, proved scant of success.
He, however, may be said to have done the greatest work of his life upon that farm. It was while one day weeding the "kailyard," or garden, with his brother, that he first decided, after they had talked it carefully over, to be an author, and to write verses that would "bear publishing." It is to be noticed that from this hour he became more methodical with his muse and seemed to work toward a purpose; and that within a short time after this resolve he wrote most of the poems that have made his name immortal.
In 1786 it was definitely decided that the farm was not going "to pay," and that his efforts as an agriculturist had failed. But these were not the only troubles that were gathering in the young poet's path. In 1785 he became engaged to his "Highland Mary." If we may judge by his poems, this was the one among his numerous love affairs in which his heart was most deeply enthralled; but there was another in which he was inextricably and fatally entangled. It was with a young girl, Jean Armour, to whom he seems to have been as sincerely attached as his headlong, susceptible nature would allow him to be to anyone. He made the best amends he could to "the bonnie lass" by giving her his written acknowledgment of marriage--a process perfectly legal in Scotland, though irregular--but her father still hoped for a more advantageous alliance for his daughter, and refused her to the poor poet; a sentiment in which the daughter, to all appearances, heartily joined.