Letter from Robert Burns to Agnes McLehose, 20 December 1787

Your last, my dear Madam, had the effect on me that Job's situation had on
his friends, when "they sat down seven days and seven nights astonied.
"and spake not a word." - "Pay my addresses to a married woman.
I started, as if I had seen the ghost of him I had inur'd: I recollected
any expressions, some of them indeed were in the law phrase,
"habit and repute," which is being half guilty. - I cannot positive
ly say, Madam, whether my heart might not have gone astray a
but I can declare upon the honour of a Poet that the vagrant
wandered unknown to me. - I have a pretty handsome
troop of Follies of my own; and, like some other people's retinue
they are but undisciplined black guards: but the luckless rascals
have something of honour in them; they would not do a dis-
honest thing. -
To meet with an unfortunate woman, amiable and young;
deserted and widowed by those who were bound by every tie of
Duty, Nature and Gratitude, to protect, comfort and cherish
her; add to all, when she is perhaps one of the first of Lovely
Forms and Noble Minds, the Mind ^too that hits one's taste as
the joys of Heaven do a Saint - should a vague infant-idea,
natural child of Imagination, thoughtlessly peep over
the

fence - were you, My Friend, to sit in judgement, and
the poor airy Straggler brought before you, trembling, self
condemned; with artless eyes, brim-full of contrition, looking
wistfully on its judge - you could not, My dear Madam,
condemn the hapless wretch to death without benefit of
"Clergy"?
I won't tell you what reply my heart made to your
raillery of "Seven Years"; but I will give you what a brother
of my trade says on the same allusion -

The Patriarch to gain a wife
Chaste, beautiful and young,
Serv'd fourteen years a painful life
And never thought it long:
O were you to reward such cares,
And life so long would stay,
Not fourteen but four hundred years
Would seem but as one day!


I have written you this scrawl because I have nothing else
to do, and you may sit down and find fault with it if you
have no better way of consuming your time; but finding fault
with the vaguings of a Poet's fancy is much such another business
as Xerxes chastising the waves of Hellespont. -
My limb now allows me to sit in some peace; to walk
I have yet no prospect of, as I can't mark it to the

ground. -
I have just now looked over what I have written, and it is
such a chaos of nonsense that I dare say you will throw it
into the fire, and call me an idle, stupid fellow; but whatever
you think of my brains, believe me to be, with the most sa-
cred respect, and heart-felt esteem,
My dear Madam,
your humble servant