from New York. He bought his ticket on August 10, 1870, "second class, ship Europa, Anchor Line, to land at Glasgow; and off to-morrow." While waiting for the sailing, he notes that he has tried in vain to see Horace Greeley and Henry Ward Beecher, but has got some leaves from a tree by the door of Beecher's church "to send to mother." There, in a sentence, was his unconscious epitome of what the higher culture of the American metropolis had to offer in 1870 to a passionate pilgrim, to a romantic poet: the editorials of a great journalist, the sermons of a great preacher—a rebuff from the office of the one, and a leaf from a tree of the other. A note of the voyage, which he seems to have found very dreary, reminds us that the Franco-Prussian War was then in progress: "A lot of Germans going home to fight filled the ship; a hard, rough lot, and they ate like hogs."
Arrived in Scotland, he turns his back on commercial Glasgow, and makes straight for the haunts of Burns. On September 10, he writes: "God bless these hale and honest Scotch down here at peaceful Ayr. . . . One man showed me more than a hundred books, all by Ayrshire poets, and some of them splendid! I have not dared to tell any one yet that I too hope to publish a book of verse. . . . I go every day from here to the 'Auld Brig' over the Doon, Highland Mary's grave, and Alloway's auld haunted kirk. . . . Poetry is in the air here. I am working like a beaver. . . . September 18: In
