"Under the wide and starry sky, "This be the verse that they grave for me: And the hunter home from the hill. » No one who reads this will need to be told that its author was a poet capable of attaining the highest reaches of poetical expression. But Stevenson sang only in snatches. In some of these, he is more musical than Burns at his best. In such verses as: "It is ill to break the bonds which God decreed to bind; we hear echoes of such melody as the world had not known for eighteen hundred years. It appears from them, unmistakably, that Stevenson as a poet might have surpassed his highest successes in prose. Why he did not do so it is idle to inquire, but the cause is probably closely involved with the painful reactions which brought him. his untimely death (Apia, Samoa, December 3d, 1894). He was born at Edinburgh, November 13th, 1850. His father was a lighthouse engineer, a son of Robert Stevenson, and the family represented a Scottish ancestral tradition which inspired Stevenson's best work. He had all possible advantages of early training, including education at Edinburgh University and for the bar. After his first literary successes, he went to live in London, but, except in his deep love for Scotland, he was a cosmopolitan. He found his wife in America, and from 1889 he lived, or rather slowly died, in Samoa, where he had gone, that in spite of increasing weakness due to consumption, he might gain strength to complete his work. When he had completed it, the objection that remains against it, is that he did himself too little justice as a poet while putting into his novels the full intensity of a genius which in prose narrative is frequently too close to the intoxicating to be entirely healthy for those who indulge it without reserve. As an essayist, however, no such objection lies against him. Had he attempted his greatest success in essay writing instead of in fiction, he might have become easily first among the essayists of the nineteenth century. In delicacy, he is equaled only by Lamb, while he has the strength of Thackeray. But even when he is gayest or most commonplace, he never ceases to be unearthly. In his essays as in his poems and his fiction, he is the dying man who, having already awakened to realities beyond the earthly, is waiting for death as a deliverance and working for it as a reward. W. V. B. EL DORADO T SEEMS as if a great deal were attainable in a world where there are so many marriages and decisive battles, and where we all, at certain hours of the day, and with great gusto and dispatch, stow a portion of victuals finally and irretrievably into the bag which contains us. And it would seem also, on a hasty view, that the attainment of as much as possible was the one goal of man's contentious life. And yet, as regards the spirit, this is but a semblance. We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series. There is always a new horizon for onward-looking men, and although we dwell on a small planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring beyond a brief period of years, we are so constituted that our hopes are inaccessible, like stars, and the term of hoping is prolonged until the term of life. To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and not of how we end, of what we want and not of what we have. An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be spiritually rich. Life is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre unless we have some interests in the piece; and to those who have neither art nor science, the world is a mere arrangement of colors, or a rough footway where they may very well break their shins. It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colors: it is they that make women beautiful or fossils interesting; and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure. Suppose he could take one meal so compact and comprehensive that he should never hunger any more; suppose him, at a glance, to take in all the features of the world and allay the desire for knowledge; suppose him to do the like in any province of experience would not that man be in a poor way for amusement ever after? One who goes touring on foot with a single volume in his knapsack reads with circumspection, pausing often to reflect, and often laying the book down to contemplate the landscape or the prints in the inn parlor; for he fears to come to an end of his entertainment, and be left companionless on the last stages of his journey. A young fellow recently finished the works of Thomas Carlyle, winding up, if we remember aright, with the ten notebooks upon Frederick the Great. "What!" cried the young fellow, in consternation, "is there no more Carlyle? Am I left to the daily papers?" A more celebrated instance is that of Alexander, who wept bitterly because he had no more worlds to subdue. And when Gibbon had finished the "Decline and Fall," he had only a few moments of joy; and it was with a "sober melancholy" that he parted from his labors. Happily we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual arrows; our hopes are set on an inaccessible El Dorado; we come to an end of nothing here below. Interests are only plucked up to sow themselves again, like mustard. You would think, when the child was. born, there would be an end to trouble; and yet it is only the beginning of fresh anxieties; and when you have seen it through its teething and its education, and at last its marriage, alas! it is only to have new fears, new quivering sensibilities, with every day; and the health of your children's children grows as touching a concern as that of your own. Again, when you have married your wife, you would think you were got upon a hilltop, and might begin to go downward by an easy slope. But you have only ended courting to begin marriage. Falling in love and winning love are often difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits; but to keep in love is also a business of some importance, to which both man and wife must bring kindness. and good-will. The true love story commences at the altar, when there lies before the married pair a most beautiful contest of wisdom and generosity, and a life-long struggle towards an unattainable ideal. Unattainable? Aye, surely unattainable, from the very fact that there are two instead of one. "Of making books there is no end," complained the preacher; and did not perceive how highly he was praising letters as an occupation. There is no end, indeed, to making books or experiments, or to travel, or to gathering wealth. Problem gives rise to problem. We may study forever, and we are never as learned as we would be. We have never made a statue worthy of our dreams. And when we have discovered a continent, or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or |