CHAPTER VIII

'We glide through golden seas of grain,We shoot, a shining comet, throughThe mountain range, against the blue,And then, below the walls of snow,We blow the desert dust amain,We see the orange groves below,We rest beneath the oaks, and weHave cleft a continent in twain.'

'We glide through golden seas of grain,

We shoot, a shining comet, through

The mountain range, against the blue,

And then, below the walls of snow,

We blow the desert dust amain,

We see the orange groves below,

We rest beneath the oaks, and we

Have cleft a continent in twain.'

After the long rush across the plains, Mr Stevenson's heart bounded with joy when he caught a glimpse of 'a huge pine-forested ravine, a foaming river, and a sky already coloured with the fires of dawn.'

'You will scarce believe it,' he says, 'how my heart leaped at this. It was like meeting one's wife. I had come home again—home from unsightly deserts to the green and habitable corners of the earth.'

By the afternoon they had reached Sacramento, which he writes of as 'a city of gardens in a plain of corn,' and before the dawn of the next day the train was drawn up at the Oaklands side of San Francisco Bay. The day broke as they crossed the ferry, and he says:

'The fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the bay was perfect, not a ripple, scarce a stain upon its blue expanse, everything was waiting breathless for the sun.

'A spot of gold first lit upon the head of Talampais and then widened downwards on its shapely shoulder' ... and by-and-bye

'The tall hills Titan discovered,'

'and the city of San Francisco and the bay of gold and corn were lit from end to end with summer daylight.'

InThe Old Pacific Capitalhe writes delightfully of San Francisco and the surge of its 'toss'd and tumbled sea,' that echoes forever around Monterey and its woods of oaks and pines and cedars. He has much that is interesting to tell of the curious contrast between San Francisco, modern and American, and Monterey, the 'Old Pacific Capital,' so full of a pathetic and a half-forgotten history. He has a deep sympathy with its refined and impoverished Spanish gentle-folk and their unpractical ideas of what is honourable; and he predicts that the people who do not consider it etiquette to look through an important paperbefore signing it are, in spite of America's assertions that they are well able to take care of themselves, little likely to survive long in a world of Yankee sharpness and smartness.

He revelled in the beautiful woods so often devastated by forest fires. On one occasion, he says, he came perilously near lynching, for he applied a match to the dry moss which clings to the bark of the trees to see if it were so peculiarly ignitable as to be an important factor in the rapid spread of a fire. In a moment flames broke out all over the tree, and he found to his horror that he had started a fresh fire of his own very difficult to put out, and exceedingly likely to arouse the indignation of the men who were struggling to beat out the existing conflagration, to the point of lynching the too officious stranger.

The solemn boom of the Pacific was a constant delight to him, and he gloried in the ever-changing lights and shadows on the sea. If he did not attain to permanent good health while at San Francisco and Monterey he at least found there something else which made for the lasting happiness of his life, as it was there that he married his wife.

After spending about seven years of married life at Bournemouth he again, in 1887, tried a visit to America. His health, however, did not improve, and, during the winter of 1887 and 1888, when he was at Saranac Lake, he speaks of himself, inThe Vailima Letters, as having been—in the graphic Scots words—'far through'; and the idea occurred to him of chartering a yacht and going for a voyage in the South Seas. His mother on thisoccasion accompanied the family party, and between 1888 and 1890 they sailed about among the lovely islands of the South Sea, visiting Honolulu, and finally touching at Apia in Samoa, where they promptly fell in love with the beauty of the scenery and the charm of the climate.

On this voyage, as always, Mr Stevenson made friends wherever he went, and had much pleasant intercourse with wandering Europeans, missionaries and natives.

On her return to Edinburgh, after this cruise with him, his mother used to give most entertaining accounts of the feasts given in their honour by the native kings and chiefs, and of the quaint gifts bestowed on them. At an afternoon tea-party at 17 Heriot Row, shortly before the home there was finally broken up, she put on for our benefit the wreath—still wonderfully green—that had been given to her to wear at one of those island festivities. She had promised the sable majesty who gave it to her to be photographed with it on, and to send him one of the copies. One of these photographs is beside me now, and is an excellent likeness. Close to it is the graceful one of her son, taken at Bournemouth, wearing his hair long, and one of the velvet coats that he loved, and it is a most curious contrast to the sturdy Scotsman, his father, who looks out at it from his frame, in conventional broadcloth and with the earnest gravity so characteristic of his face in repose.

Innumerable photographs, pictures, and busts, were taken of Robert Louis Stevenson, but not one of them has ever been a very real or a very satisfying likeness. In recent years one rarely sees an Academy Exhibition without one or more representations of the mobile face,the expression of which has, alas! eluded the grasp of even the best of artists.

The Stevenson party had been so charmed with Samoa, that, as the climate suited Louis admirably, they resolved to give up the Bournemouth home, buy some ground in Samoa, and finally settle there. So sometime about 1890 Vailima was bought, and building and reclaiming operations were begun, and, save for occasional visits to Sydney or Honolulu, Mr Stevenson and his household gave up personal communication with the busy and civilised world, and happily settled themselves in a peaceful life among the palms and the sunshine of the tropics and the friendly Samoan natives, who grew to be so deeply attached to them, and so proud of 'Tusitala.'

... 'What we seek is but our other selfOther and higher, neither wholly likeNor wholly different, the half life the godsRetained when half was given—one the manAnd one the woman.'...—Epic of Hades.L. Morris.

... 'What we seek is but our other self

Other and higher, neither wholly like

Nor wholly different, the half life the gods

Retained when half was given—one the man

And one the woman.'...—Epic of Hades.

L. Morris.

'Old friends are best, old coats that fit.'—Robert Richardson.

'Old friends are best, old coats that fit.'

—Robert Richardson.

It was naturally to be supposed that a man of Mr Stevenson's temperament, before whose eyes from his earliest childhood there had been present a woman good enough to give him the very highest ideal of womanhood, would not easily or lightly give his heart away. He knew that he longed for the best, and to nothing less than the best could he give his soul's worship. That he did not find his ideal in the beaten track of everyday social life, or among the gay and agreeable girls whom he met in his young manhood, is not surprising.

The element of romance, as well as the longing for what was noblest in womanhood, was in him; and romance for him was not embodied in a pretty young woman in a ball gown. Possibly he considered that the amusing advice as to matrimony which he gives inVirginibus Puerisque, was as applicable to a man as to a woman, and that 'the bright' girl of Society was as apt to be a wearisome and an exacting helpmate as her brother, 'the bright boy of fiction,' against whom as a husband his essay warns the woman in search of marriage to whom he recommends, as a more comfortable partner, the man old enough to have loved before, and to have undergone something of an apprenticeship in devotion. Very pertinent also is his advice to men in the same essay, that kindred tastes are more likely to ensure lasting happiness than a fair face or an acceptable dowry.

Beneath the easy brightness of thought and style that make the essay so amusing and so readable, one sees that its writer knows his world well, and has given graver thought to matters matrimonial than at a first reading one is inclined to believe.

Holding firmly the faith that 'all things come to him who knows how to wait,' Mr Stevenson was in no hurry to realise his ideal, and it was not until he was between twenty-seven and thirty that he met the woman whom he chose for his wife. That there was an element of romance in their acquaintance altogether removed from everyday love stories made it all the more fitting an ending to that watchful waiting for what fate had to give him.

When Mr Stevenson arrived in San Francisco in 1879, there was living with her sister, at Monterey, Mrs Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne of Indiana. Mrs Osbourne had been married when very young, and her domestic experience was so unhappy that she had to obtain a divorce from her husband. She had, with her son and daughter,lived for some time in that student colony at Fontainbleau which Mr Stevenson knew and loved so well, and in after years they must have had in common many pleasant memories of people and places dear to both, so that his ideal of matrimony described inVirginibus Puerisquewas realised, and he and his wife had 'many an old joke between them which time cannot wither nor custom stale.'

At a party at San Francisco Mr Stevenson much admired Mrs Osbourne and her daughter Belle, who married a Mr Strong, and who afterwards, in the Vailima days, became her step-father's secretary. The young girl he found very fresh and sweet with the gay brightness of youth, but of her mother his impression was much deeper, and he always spoke and wrote of her as the most beautiful and the most charming woman whom he had ever seen. Although she was several years his senior she was then in the very prime of a womanly beauty which, to judge from the photographs taken at Vailima more than ten years later, was only at its ripest when other women are beginning to think of growing old. No one who had even once looked into her dark eyes could fail to endorse Mr Stevenson's verdict, to realise her charm of person, or doubt for a moment the loveliness of nature and the nobility of soul to which these strange deep eyes were the index. She was indeed charming, and it was no wonder that such a nature as Mr Stevenson's found in her that 'other half of the old Platonic tradition, the fortunate finding of which can alone make a marriage perfect.

The romantic and the unusual in the story comes in when, at the request of his doctor, Mrs Osbourne gavewillingly of her kindness and her skill in nursing to the young man who was lying at point of death alone in a far land. The child of the people with whom he was boarding had been very ill, and when other folk left the house of sickness, Mr Stevenson, who had liked his little playfellow, remained to help the parents with the nursing, and wore himself out in their service as only a man of his rare human sympathy and tenderness of heart would have done. The child recovered, and long years afterwards when the monument to his memory was erected at San Francisco, the mother laid a wreath at its base in remembrance of that unforgotten kindness. Unfortunately, already far from well and suffering much from the effects of the journey by emigrant ship and train and the stern experience of 'roughing it' which that had entailed, Mr Stevenson was quite unfit for the fatigue of nursing and he became so ill that the doctor despaired of his life. This doctor, who then and afterwards proved a very real friend, was greatly distressed about his patient, especially as the danger of his illness was greatly increased by the lack of that skilled nursing which was there very difficult to obtain. In such a case the physician could do much, but a good nurse could do far more, so the doctor, in his anxiety, recollected that Mrs Osbourne was, like himself, interested in the talented young Scotsman, and was also possessed of a rare and womanly gift of nursing, and he begged her to do what she could for his patient. She responded to his appeal, and with her sister showed the invalid a kindness so great that it did more to help his recovery than the best of drugs could have done. He was restored to a certain measure of health, and it maythus be said that he owed his life to his future wife, but he owed her much more for her unselfish devotion in his time of weakness and loneliness, as a stranger in a strange land, glorified to him all womanhood in her person, and the man who knew what it was to have an ideal mother was so peculiarly fortunate as to find an ideal wife also. Two such natures as theirs were inevitably attracted to each other, and it is not surprising that their friendship deepened into love, or that in later years he says of her:

'Teacher, tender comrade, wife,A fellow-farer true through life,Heart-whole and soul-free,The august FatherGave to me.'

'Teacher, tender comrade, wife,

A fellow-farer true through life,

Heart-whole and soul-free,

The august Father

Gave to me.'

At San Francisco, on the 19th of May 1880, Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne were married, and there began for them that perfect life together which anxiety and illness could not cloud, and which found its earthly termination when in that awful and sudden moment in December 1894 Mr Stevenson entered into 'the Rest Eternal.'

Belle Osbourne became Mrs Strong, and by-and-bye she and her little boy Austin joined the Stevensons in their home life. 'Sam,' as Mr Lloyd Osbourne was called in those days, accompanied them to England when they made their home at Bournemouth. He was a bright, eager boy when he used to appear in Edinburgh, and one who was very welcome to the elder Stevensons at Heriot Row. By-and-bye he went to the Edinburgh University and there he was full of life and interest, keen on pleasures, keen on friendships, interested in classes,and even then there was something of the same earnestness, the same humour and brightness in him that characterised his stepfather and which made him, by-and-bye, with no small measure of the same gifts, his collaborator and friend. A friendship that was begun in very early days when the two told each other stories and issued romances from a toy printing-press, and when the junior received that delightful dedication ofTreasure Islandin which he is described as 'a young American gentleman' to whose taste the tale appeals.

Shortly after their marriage Mr and Mrs R. L. Stevenson had had the quaint experience of housekeeping so charmingly described inSilvarado Squatters, but their first real home was at Skerryvore, and Bournemouth was the headquarters of the household until the necessities of Mr Stevenson's health again made them wanderers; and that move in 1887 finally ended in the purchase of Vailima, and the pitching of their camp in far Samoa.

The curtest mention of their Bournemouth life would be incomplete without some notice of the many friends who found it so easy to reach from London and so pleasant to visit, and who, themselves well known in the literary world, so greatly appreciated the genius of Mr Stevenson. Among old Edinburgh friends of long standing were his many Balfour and Stevenson cousins and his old comrades of early days, and among the latter Mr Charles Baxter and the late Sir Walter G. Simpson held a principal place in his regard. Mr Sydney Colvin he had first met in 1873, Mr Henley he first knew in Edinburgh about the end of 1874, and Mr Edmund Gosse was another much valued friend of long standing.Mr Colvin was to the last one of the friends highest in his regard, and to him were writtenThe Vailima Letters.

His wonderful attire, at the Savile Club and elsewhere in orthodox London, at first astonished and somewhat repelled literary men accustomed to a more conventional garb than the velvet coats, the long loose hair, and the marvellous ties Mr Stevenson delighted in; but very soon they found out the charm of the personality that lay behind a certain eccentricity of appearance, and Mr Leslie Stephen, Mr James Payn, Dr Appleton, Professor Clifford, Mr Cosmo Monkhouse, and Mr George Meredith, whom he met in 1878 and whose work he so much admired, were numbered among his life-long friends. Mr Henley's description of him in these days is better than any picture:

'Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably,Neat-footed, weak-fingered, in his face,—Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race,Bold-lipped, rich tinted, mutable as the sea,The brown eyes radiant with vivacity,—There shines a brilliant and romantic grace,A spirit intense and rare, with trace on traceOf passion, impudence, and energy.'

'Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably,

Neat-footed, weak-fingered, in his face,—

Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race,

Bold-lipped, rich tinted, mutable as the sea,

The brown eyes radiant with vivacity,—

There shines a brilliant and romantic grace,

A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace

Of passion, impudence, and energy.'

Another friend of those days, Mr Andrew Lang, also lets his friendship run into rhyme, and sends across the seas to the author ofThe Master of Ballantraea quaint greeting in the best of Southland Doric:

'Whan Suthern winds gar spindrift fleeAbune the clachan, faddumes hie,Whan for the cluds I canna seeThe bonny lift,I'd fain indite an odd to theeHad I the gift!...... 'O Louis, you that writes in Scots,Ye're far awa' frae stirks and stots,Wi' drookit herdies, tails in knots,An unco way!My mirth's like thorns aneth the potsIn Ballantrae!'

'Whan Suthern winds gar spindrift fleeAbune the clachan, faddumes hie,Whan for the cluds I canna seeThe bonny lift,I'd fain indite an odd to theeHad I the gift!...

'Whan Suthern winds gar spindrift flee

Abune the clachan, faddumes hie,

Whan for the cluds I canna see

The bonny lift,

I'd fain indite an odd to thee

Had I the gift!...

... 'O Louis, you that writes in Scots,Ye're far awa' frae stirks and stots,Wi' drookit herdies, tails in knots,An unco way!My mirth's like thorns aneth the potsIn Ballantrae!'

... 'O Louis, you that writes in Scots,

Ye're far awa' frae stirks and stots,

Wi' drookit herdies, tails in knots,

An unco way!

My mirth's like thorns aneth the pots

In Ballantrae!'

To this Mr Stevenson promptly replied in equally fine Doric, and with a playful allusion to the early 'grizzelled' hair which gives to Mr Andrew Lang an appearance venerable beyond his years.

Mr Crockett, in the delightful dedication toThe Stickit Minister, celebrates his friendship with Mr Stevenson; and among the younger school of writers, for whose work he had so generous an appreciation, he had many friends as well as admirers. Mr Barrie, Mr Rudyard Kipling, Mr Le Galliene, and a host of others loved him as a friend, as well as looked up to him as a literary leader. To many of them he wrote charming letters, although in several cases no actual meeting had ever taken place. It was a keen disappointment to both men that circumstances prevented Mr Rudyard Kipling from paying a visit to Samoa.

In his island home he was not forgetful of his 'own romantic town,' nor of the interests of one, at least, of its publishing firms, whose travellers and agents he introduced to new fields of usefulness in India and the South Seas. One of his own favourite books wasCoral Island, by Mr R. M. Ballantyne, published by the Messrs Nelson.

But Stevenson, whose charm of personality was even greater than his fame, had other friends, whose friendship is not measured by the intellect but by the heart. Little children and young folk everywhere loved the man whoseChild's Garden of Versesshows such a marvellous insight into the hearts of children.

The ass Modestine, the Samoan horse Jack, well knew that the indignant flow of language meant nothing, and that their master's heart was altogether in the right place, although, when they were too provoking, his words might be very unparliamentary.

For dogs he had as great an attraction as they had for him, and the master of Coolin the wise, and Woggs, or Bogue, the gallant, discourses as few men could do about canine thoughts and feelings in his essayThe Character of Dogs.

No fear of his being among the foolish people who remark that 'they like dogs in their proper place,' and, as he stingingly adds, say, '"Poo' fellow! Poo' fellow!" and are themselves far poorer!' He knew, because he had taken the trouble to study him, that 'to the dog of gentlemanly feelings, theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices.'

'Golden thoughts that ever will resound,And be re-echoed to the utmost parts of land and sea.'—R. S. Mutch.

'Golden thoughts that ever will resound,And be re-echoed to the utmost parts of land and sea.'

'Golden thoughts that ever will resound,

And be re-echoed to the utmost parts of land and sea.'

—R. S. Mutch.

Mr Stevenson inherited both from the Stevenson and Balfour families some measure of literary talent. His father and his grandfather had written with considerable acceptance on the subject of their profession. His father also wrote on religious matters, and at least one of these pamphlets was believed to be of lasting value by competent judges. On scientific and engineering subjects his work was thought so excellent, and was so well known, that R. L. Stevenson tells, with some amusement, that he was surprised to find in the New World it was his father and not himself who was considered the important author.The Life of Robert Stevenson, of Bell Rock fame, written by David Stevenson, is a very interesting book.

Among his mother's relatives the gift of fluent and graceful expression is also widely diffused, and in common with Mrs Thomas Stevenson and her son, not a few of the Balfour connection have been very charming letter writers, in the days when letters were worth receiving, and not the hurried and uncharacteristic scraps which do duty for present-day correspondence.

He himself considered that he inherited his literary talent largely from his father's family, but there is interesting proof that even in his grandfather's day it was inherent also in his Balfour ancestors. The minister of Colinton wrote verses in his youth, and a sonnet preserved by his surviving son and daughter is interesting as a proof of his earnest mind and his literary skill. It was written on the fly-leaf of a folio copy ofPearson on the Creed, presented to him by his friend, the Reverend Patrick Macfarlane, who became, about 1832, minister of the West Church at Greenock, and is dated 18th May 1801.

'My friend, my Patrick, let me boast the name,For my breast glows with no inferior flame,This gift was thine, expressive of thy love,Which spurning earthborn joys for those aboveWould teach my friend in sacred lore to grow,And feel the truths impressive as they flow.While with our faith our kindred bosoms glow,And love to God directs our life below,One view of things now seen, and things to come,But pilgrims here, a future state our home,Nor time, nor death, our friendship shall impair,Begun below, but rendered perfect there.'

'My friend, my Patrick, let me boast the name,

For my breast glows with no inferior flame,

This gift was thine, expressive of thy love,

Which spurning earthborn joys for those above

Would teach my friend in sacred lore to grow,

And feel the truths impressive as they flow.

While with our faith our kindred bosoms glow,

And love to God directs our life below,

One view of things now seen, and things to come,

But pilgrims here, a future state our home,

Nor time, nor death, our friendship shall impair,

Begun below, but rendered perfect there.'

More than one of the old gentleman's family inherited his talent for graceful and forcible writing. His son, Dr George W. Balfour, has written two well-known medical books which have brought to him a large measure of fame. These areClinical Lectures on Diseases of the Heart, and the even more popularThe Senile Heart. About the latter he tells an excellent story. A well-known literary critic, seeing the book lying on the table, thoughtit a work of fiction with an admirable and unique title, carried it off for review, and found to his disgust it was a learned medical treatise. Dr John Balfour, an elder son of the manse, wrote papers inThe Indian AnnalsandThe Edinburgh Medical Journal, which were very highly esteemed.

In the younger generation, a cousin of Mr R. L. Stevenson, Mrs Beckwith Sitwell, has written much and pleasantly, principally for young people. Another cousin, Mrs Marie Clothilde Balfour, whose father was a son of the Colinton manse, who died young, and who is married to her cousin—a son of Dr G. W. Balfour, who can also, like his father, write acceptably on medical and other subjects—has already gained for herself no inconsiderable repute as a novelist, her third book,The Fall of the Sparrow, having been considered by competent critics one of the notable books of last year.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the bent towards literature which appears in both families should in Robert Louis Stevenson have been developed into that rare gift which men call genius. While he was still a careless student of twenty, his papers inThe Edinburgh University Magazinepossessed a peculiar attraction, and appealed to cultured minds with a charm not often found in the work of so young a writer.

An Old GardenerandA Pastoralespecially had much of the depth of thought and the finish of style which so largely characterised Mr Stevenson's later work. Interesting and delightful as he is as a story-teller, there is in his essays a graceful fascination which makes them for many of his readers infinitely more satisfying than themost brilliant of his tales. In the essays you seem to meet the man face to face, to listen to his spoken thoughts, to see the grave and the gay reflections of his mind, to enjoy with him 'the feast of reason and the flow of soul' provided by the writers into whose company he takes you, or to return with him to his boyhood, and, inThe Old ManseandRandom Memoriessee familiar places and people touched by the light of genius, and made as wonderful to your own commonplace understanding as to the intense and high-souled boy who wandered about among them, hearing and seeing the everyday things of life as only the romancist and the poet can hear and see them.

His style, too—strong and virile as it is in his tales—attains, one almost fancies, its full perfection in his essays. The thoughts, both grave and gay, are presented in a dainty dress that is peculiarly fitted to do them justice. There is room in this quiet writing, disturbed by no exigencies of plot, to give perfect scope to the grace and the leisure which are the great charms of Mr Stevenson's work. One can take up a volume of the essays or a slim book of verses at any time and dip into it as one would into some clear and cold mountain well, full of refreshment for the weary wayfarer, and, like the well, it is sure to give one an invigorating sense of keen enjoyment, to take one far from the dusty highways of life and plunge one into the depth and coolness of the wide silence of nature, or to fill one's mind with strong and worthy thoughts gleaned from the world of men and books.

In hisFamiliar Studies of Men and Books, published,in one volume, by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1882, with a charming dedication to his father, Mr Stevenson gives in the preface a most interesting account of his own fuller point of view regarding the studies which had originally appeared in theNew Quarterly,Macmillan, andCornhill. The essays deal with such well-known men as Knox, Burns, Thoreau, Charles of Orleans, Samuel Pepys, and others, and are always fresh and agreeable reading. The papers on Knox and Burns have an especial interest for Mr Stevenson's fellow-countrymen who naturally appreciate the judgment of a later day genius on the character and work of the two men who have had so wide an influence on Scottish life and feeling.

To John Knox Scotland largely owes her reformed religion, her rigid presbyterianism, and it is, to many people, a new and an interesting phase of the character of the great Reformer—who so enjoyed brow-beating Queen Mary—that Mr Stevenson shows, when he depicts Knox as the confidential friend of the religious women of his day, writing letters to them, comforting them in domestic trials, even shedding tears with them, and keeping up, through a harassed and busy life, these friendships which seem to have been as great a source of pleasure to the Reformer as to the ladies.

Of Robert Burns, the peasant poet, whose songs did as much to bring back the sunshine into everyday Scotch life as the Reformer's homilies did to banish it, Mr Stevenson writes with sympathy and tenderness. For the work he is full of admiration; for the man, whosecircumstances and temperament made his whole life a difficult walking in slippery places where the best of men could hardly have refrained from falling, he has a gentle understanding, a manly pity. There was much in the poet's life and temperament repellent to a nature like Mr Stevenson's, but there was far more where the human feeling of man to man and of soul to soul could touch with comprehension, so that in his paper, and more especially in his preface, we find him giving to Scotland's national bard an ungrudging admiration in his struggles after the right, and no petty condemnation when he lapsed and fell from his own higher ideals.

Of Walt Whitman and Thoreau, both most interesting studies in the volume, he has much that is stimulating to say; and many readers, who may not have time or opportunity for deep personal research, will find his essays onVillon,Victor Hugo's Romances,Samuel Pepys,Yoshida TorajiroandCharles of Orleansa very pleasant means of obtaining a great deal of information in a very limited space.

In the early essays, republished in volume form in 1881 by Messrs Chatto & Windus, under the titleVirginibus Puerisque, Mr Stevenson discourses delightfully on many things, touching, for instance, with a light hand but a wise heart on matrimony and love-making, and the little things, so small in themselves, so large as they bulk for happiness or misery, that go to make peace or discord in married life. It is all done with a pointed pen and a smiling face; but its lightness covers wisdom, and it is full of sound counsel and makes wiserreading for young men and maidens than many books of more apparent gravity.

That pathos always lay close behind his playful mockeries and was never far away from the man whose paper onOrdered Southis like the bravely repressed cry of all his fellow-sufferers the companion paper onEl Doradoproves convincingly. Under its graceful phrases there lies deep and strong sympathy for toil, for hope deferred and longed for, for the disappointment of attainment, for the labour that after all has so often to be its own reward.

Between 1880 and 1885 Mr Stevenson collaborated with Mr Henley in the writing of four plays which were privately printed,Deacon Brodiein 1880,Beau Austinin 1884,Admiral Guineain 1884, andRobert Macairein 1885—the whole being finally published in volume form in an edition limited to 250 copies, in 1896.Beau Austinwas acted in 1890 at The Haymarket, and quite recentlyAdmiral Guineahas been played with Mr Sydney Valentine in the part of David Pew, but in spite of the literary distinction of the collaborators the plays have not been a great success on the stage.

In the later papers, 'A Christmas Sermon,' 'A Letter to a Young Gentleman,' and 'Pulvis et Umbra,' in the volume of collected essays calledAcross the Plains, the note of pathos which appears now and then inVirginibus Puerisqueis even more forcibly struck. The writer is older, he has known more of life and of suffering, he has more than once looked death closely in the face, and, though his splendid courage is there all the time, the sadnessof humanity is more apparent than in most of his work. The other essays in this volume are very pleasant reading, andAcross the PlainsandThe Old and New Pacific Capitalsgive most graphic descriptions of the life and scenery on the shore of the Pacific, and of the journey to get there.

In 'Random Memories' in the same volume, he goes back to his boyhood, and we meet him at home beside the 'Scottish Sea,' under grey Edinburgh skies, larking with his fellow-boys in their autumn holidays, touring with his father inThe Pharosround the coast of Fife, and later inspecting harbours at Anstruther, and on the bleak shores of Caithness, an apprentice engineer, for whom, apart from the open air and the romance of a harbour or a light tower, his profession had no charms.

Not the least pleasant of his volumes ofEssaysis that calledMemories and Portraits, published by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1887, and dedicated to his mother, whom his father's death in the May of that year had so recently made a widow. In it there is a most interesting paper entitled 'Thomas Stevenson,' in which he writes very appreciatively of that father who was so great a man in the profession which the son admired although he could not follow it. Here, too, are papers on 'The Manse,' that old home of his grandfather at Colinton which he when a child loved so well; on the old gardener at Swanston, who so lovingly tended the vegetables of which he remarked to his mistress, when told to send in something choice for the pot, that 'it was mair blessed to give than to receive,' but gave herof his best all the same, and who loved the old-fashioned flowers, and gave a place to

'Gardener's garters, shepherd's purse,Batchelors' buttons, lady's smock,And the Lady Hollyhock.'

'Gardener's garters, shepherd's purse,

Batchelors' buttons, lady's smock,

And the Lady Hollyhock.'

In this book also are 'A Pastoral,' in which we learn to know John Todd, that typical shepherd of the Pentlands, and his dogs; the charming paper on 'The Character of Dogs,' and four literary essays beginning with an account of his early purchases in the old book shop in Leith Walk, and ending in 'A Humble Remonstrance,' with a summary of his views on romance writing, and what it really ought to be.

Somewhat of the nature too of essays or sketches is that delightful volume, made up of different chapters in a most ideal life,The Silvarado Squatters, published in 1883, in which Mr Stevenson gives a brilliant description of the very primitive existence he and his wife with Mr Lloyd Osbourne, then a very small boy indeed, led shortly after their marriage, in a disused miner's house—if one can by courtesy call ahousethe three-roomed shed, into which sunlight and air poured through the gaping boards and the shattered windows!—on the slope of Mount Saint Helena, where once had been the Silvarado silver mine.

Primitive in the extreme, the life must nevertheless have been delightful; and, given congenial companionship and the perfect climate of a Californian summer, one can imagine no more blissful experience than 'roughing it' in that sheltered cañon on the mountain sidewith the ravine close below, and the most marvellous stretch of earth, and sea, and sky, hill and plain, spread out like an ever-changing picture before the eyes, while to the ears there came no sound more harsh than the shrill notes of the woodland birds. There came also the noise of the rattlesnake very often, Mr Stevenson says, but they did not realise its sinister significance until almost the end of their sojourn there, when their attention was drawn to it, and certainly no evil befell them.

Silvarado Squatters, likeThe Vailima Letters, shows to perfection how simple and how busy, with the most primitive household details, the Stevensons often were on their wanderings, and how supremely happy people, whose tastes and habits suit each other, can be without the artificial surroundings and luxuries of society and civilisation that most folk consider well-nigh necessary to their salvation.

One of the most beautiful descriptions of nature in all Mr Stevenson's books, is that of the sea mist rising from the Pacific, and seen from above, like a vast white billowy ocean, by the squatters on their mountain ledge. Bret Harte, for whom and for whose works Mr Stevenson had a sincere admiration, also alludes graphically to the curious scenic effects of the mist rising from the Pacific. Very interesting, too, are the papers on wine and wine-growers, and the two vineyards on the mountain side; and Scotch hearts, warm even to the Scotch tramp who looked in at the door, and to the various fellow-countrymen who arrived to shake hands with Mr Stevenson because he was a Scot and like themselves,an alien from the grey skies and the clanging church bells of home.

'From the dim sheiling on the misty islandMountains divide us and a world of seas,Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,'

'From the dim sheiling on the misty island

Mountains divide us and a world of seas,

Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,'

he quotes and adds—

'And Highland and Lowland all our hearts are Scotch.'[5]

One last notice of his prose is connected with Edinburgh, and very probably with a church charity, for to help some such sale as churches patronise he wroteThe Charity Bazaar: a Dialogue, which was given to me by its author at 17 Heriot Row one day very long ago, and which, rather frayed and yellow, is still safely pasted in my Everyday Book with the initials 'R. L. S.' in strong black writing at the end of it.

Mr Stevenson has done so much in prose that the general reader is very prone to forget those four thin volumes of verse which alone would have done much to establish his fame as an author. The first published in 1885 wasThe Child's Garden of Verses, and anything more dainty than the style and the composition of that really wonderful little book cannot be imagined, nor has there ever been written anything, in prose or in verse, more true to the thoughts and the feelings of an imaginative child.

Ballads, published in 1890 by Messrs Chatto & Windus, the firm who have published all the essays, is a collection of very interesting narrative poems. The first two, 'Rahéro, a Legend of Tahiti' and 'The Feast of Famine, Marquesan Manners,' deal with native life in the sunny islands of the tropics, and show, with the same graphic and powerful touch as his South Sea tales do, that human life, love, hatred, and revenge are as fierce and as terrible there as in the sterner north. With the north are associated the old and curious Scotch legends,TiconderogaandHeather Ale. The first gives in easily flowing lines a Highland slaying, the rather mean appeal of the slayer for protection to the dead man's brother and thehonourable fashion in which the living Cameron elects to stand by his oath to the stranger in spite of the three times repeated complaint and curse of his dead brother. The spectre tells him that he will die at a place called Ticonderoga, but such a word is known to no man, and yet, when Pitt sends a Highland regiment, in which Captain Cameron is an officer, to the East, the doomed man sees his own wraith look at him from the water, and knows, when he hears the place is Ticonderoga, he will be the first to fall in battle there.

TheHeather Aleis a Galloway legend which tells how the last Pict on the Galloway moors prefers to see his son drowned and to die himself rather than sell his honour and betray his secret to the King.

Christmas at Seais a sad little tale of how, when all men are glad on board the labouring ship—that stormy Christmas Day—that she has at last cleared the dangerous headland and is safely out at sea, the lad who has left the old folk to run away to be a sailor can only see the lighted home behind the coastguard's house,

'The pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair ...... And oh the wicked fool I seemed in every kind of wayTo be here hauling frozen ropes on Blesséd Christmas Day ...... They heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea.But all that I could think of in the darkness and the coldWas just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.'

'The pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,

My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair ...

... And oh the wicked fool I seemed in every kind of way

To be here hauling frozen ropes on Blesséd Christmas Day ...

... They heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,

As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea.

But all that I could think of in the darkness and the cold

Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.'

Underwoodswas published by the same firm in 1887, and is most touchingly dedicated to all the many doctors of whose skill and kindness Mr Stevenson had had such frequent need. The verses in it were written at differenttimes and in different places, and while many of them are full of the early freshness of youth some of them give as pleasantly and quaintly the riper wisdom of manhood.

Several of the verses are written to friends or relatives, some very charming lines are to his father.

Eight lines called 'The Requiem' seem the very perfection of his own idea of a last resting-place, and are almost prophetic of that lone hill-top where he lies.

Book II. ofUnderwoodsis 'In Scots,' very forcible and graphic Scots too, but as to the dialect Mr Stevenson himself disarms criticism. He find his words, he says, in all localities; he spells them, he allows, sometimes with a compromise.

'I have stuck for the most part to the proper spelling,' he writes; and again—

'To some the situation is exhilarating; as for me I give one bubbling cry and sink. The compromise at which I have arrived is indefensible, and I have no thought of trying to defend it.'

And indeed he has no need of it; it is good, forcible 'Scots' after all, and the thoughts he clothes in it are as 'hame-ower' and as pithy as the words.

The Maker to Posterity,Ille Terrarum, A Blast,A Counterblast, andThe Counterblast Ironical, are all excellent; and one can point to no prettier picture of a Scottish Sunday thanA Lowden Sabbath Morn, which has recently been published alone in book form very nicely illustrated, while he pokes some, not undeserved, fun at our Scottish good opinion of ourselves and our religious privileges inEmbro, her Kirk, andThe Scotsman's Return from Abroad. Surely nowhere is there Scots more musicalor lines more true to the sad experience which life brings to us all than these with which the book ends:

'It's an owercome sooth for age and youth,And it brooks wi' nae denial,That the dearest friends are the auldest friendsAnd the young are just on trial.'There's a rival bauld wi' young an' auld,And it's him that has bereft me,For the surest friends are the auldest friendsAnd the maist o' mine hae left me.'...

'It's an owercome sooth for age and youth,And it brooks wi' nae denial,That the dearest friends are the auldest friendsAnd the young are just on trial.

'It's an owercome sooth for age and youth,

And it brooks wi' nae denial,

That the dearest friends are the auldest friends

And the young are just on trial.

'There's a rival bauld wi' young an' auld,And it's him that has bereft me,For the surest friends are the auldest friendsAnd the maist o' mine hae left me.'...

'There's a rival bauld wi' young an' auld,

And it's him that has bereft me,

For the surest friends are the auldest friends

And the maist o' mine hae left me.'...

The last volume of verses,Songs of Travel, has a pathos all its own, for, likeSt IvesandWeir of Hermiston, the author never saw it in print. The verses were sent home shortly before his death, and in the note appended to them Mr Sydney Colvin says they were to be finally printed as Book III. ofUnderwoods, but meantime were given to the world in their present form in 1896.

They were written at different periods, and they show their author in varying moods; but they incline rather to the sadder spirit of the last two years of his life, and have left something if not of the courage for the fight, at least of the gaiety of living behind them. Two of them are written to his wife, many of them to friends; some of them have the lilt and the brightness of songs, others, likeIf this were FaithandThe Woodman, are filled with the gravity of life and the bitterness of the whole world's struggle for existence.

InThe Vagabondhe is still in love with the open air life and the freedom of the tramp. In his exile he longs to rest at last beside those he loves; he feels the weariness of life, he writes—

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