after moving to the parish of Mauchline he had fallen in love with
Jean Armour, the daughter of a mason in the village. What was for
Burns a prolonged courtship ensued, and in the spring of 1786 he
learned that Jean's condition was such that he gave her a paper
acknowledging her as his wife. To his surprise and mortification the
girl's father, who is said to have had a personal dislike to him and
who well may have thought a man with his reputation and prospects was
no promising son-in-law, opposed the marriage, forced Jean to give up
the paper, and sent her off to another town. Burns chose to regard
Jean's submission to her father as inexcusable faithlessness, and
proceeded to indulge in the ecstatic misery of the lover betrayed.
There is no doubt that he suffered keenly from the affair: he writes
to his friends that he could "have no nearer idea of the place of
eternal punishment" than what he had felt in his "own breast on her
account. I have tried often to forget her: I have run into all kinds
of dissipation and riot ... to drive her out of my head, but all in
vain." This is in a later letter than that in which he has "sunk into
a lurid calm," and "subsided into the time-settled sorrow of the sable
widower."

Yet other evidence shows that at this crisis also Burns's emotional
experience was far from simple. It was probably during the summer of
the same year that there occurred the passages with the mysterious
Highland Mary, a girl whose identity, after voluminous controversy,
remains vague, but who inspired some of his loftiest love poetry.
Though Burns's feeling for her seems to have been a kind of interlude
in reaction from the "cruelty" of Jean, he idealized it beyond his
wont, and the subject of it has been exalted to the place among his
heroines which is surely due to the long-suffering woman who became
his wife.