volume of poems he almost apologises for his excellence in literature:

‘Say not of me, that weakly I declined
The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,
The towers we founded, and the lamps we lit,
To play at home with paper like a child;
But rather say: In the afternoon of time
A strenuous family dusted from its hands
The sand of granite, and beholding far
Along the sounding coasts its pyramids
And tall memorials catch the dying sun,
Smiled well-content, and to this childish task
Around the fire addressed its evening hours.’

Some of his works are, no doubt, best described as paper-games.  In The Wrong Box, for instance, there is something very like the card-game commonly called ‘Old Maid’; the odd card is a superfluous corpse, and each dismayed recipient in turn assumes a disguise and a pseudonym and bravely passes on that uncomfortable inheritance.  It is an admirable farce, hardly touched with grimness, unshaken by the breath of reality, full of fantastic character; the strange funeral procession is attended by shouts of glee at each of its stages, and finally melts into space.

But, when all is said, it is not with work of this kind that Olympus is stormed; art must be brought closer into relation with life, these airy and delightful freaks of fancy must be subdued to a serious scheme if they are to serve as credentials for a seat among the immortals.  The decorative painter, whose pencil runs so freely in limning these half-human processions of outlined fauns and wood-nymphs, is asked at last to paint an easel picture.

Stevenson is best where he shows most restraint, and his peculiarly rich fancy, which ran riot at the suggestion of every passing whim, gave him, what many a modern writer sadly lacks, plenty to restrain, an exuberant field for self-denial.  Here was an opportunity for art and labour; the luxuriance of the virgin forests of the West may be clipped and pruned for a lifetime with no fear of reducing them to the trim similitude of a Dutch garden.  His bountiful and generous nature could profit by a spell of training that would emaciate a poorer stock.  From the first, his delight in earth and the earth-born was keen and multiform; his zest in life

   ‘put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him;’

and his fancy, light and quick as a child’s, made of the world around him an enchanted pleasance.  The realism, as it is called, that deals only with the banalities and squalors of life, and weaves into the mesh of its story no character but would make you yawn if you passed ten minutes with him in a railway-carriage, might well take a lesson from this man, if it had the brains.  Picture to yourself (it is not hard) an average suburb of London.  The long rows of identical bilious brick houses, with the inevitable lace curtains, a symbol merely of the will and power to wash; the awful nondescript object, generally under glass, in the front window—the shrine of the unknown god of art; the sombre invariable citizen, whose garb gives no suggestion of his occupation or his tastes—a person, it would seem, only by courtesy; the piano-organ the music of the day, and the hideous voice of the vendor of half-penny papers the music of the night; could anything be less promising than such a row of houses for the theatre of romance?  Set a realist to walk down one of these streets: he will inquire about milk-bills and servants’ wages, latch-keys and Sunday avocations, and come back with a tale of small meannesses and petty respectabilities, written in the approved modern fashion.  Yet Stevenson, it seems likely, could not pass along such a line of brick bandboxes without having his pulses set a-throbbing by the imaginative possibilities of the place.  Of his own Lieutenant Brackenbury Rich he says:

‘The succession of faces in the lamplight stirred the lieutenant’s imagination; and it seemed to him as if he could walk for ever in that stimulating city atmosphere and surrounded by the mystery of four million private lives.  He glanced at the houses and marvelled what was passing behind those warmly lighted windows; he looked into face after face, and saw them each intent upon some unknown interest, criminal or kindly.’

It was that same evening that Prince Florizel’s friend, under the name of Mr. Morris, was giving a party in one of the houses of West Kensington.  In one at least of the houses of that brick wilderness human spirits were being tested as on an anvil, and most of them tossed aside.  So also, in, The Rajah’s Diamond, it was a quiet suburban garden that witnessed the sudden apparition of Mr. Harry Hartley and his treasures precipitated over the wall; it was in the same garden that the Rev. Simon Rolles suddenly, to his own surprise, became a thief.  A monotony of bad building is no doubt a bad thing, but it cannot paralyse the activities or frustrate the agonies of the mind of man.

To a man with Stevenson’s live and searching imagination, every work of human hands became vocal with possible associations.  Buildings positively chattered to him; the little inn at Queensferry, which even for Scott had meant only mutton and currant jelly, with cranberries ‘vera weel preserved,’ gave him the cardinal incident of Kidnapped.  How should the world ever seem dull or sordid to one whom a railway-station would take into its confidence, to whom the very flagstones of the pavement told their story, in whose mind ‘the effect of night, of any flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean,’ called up ‘an army of anonymous desires and pleasures’?  To have the ‘golden-tongued Romance with serene lute’ for a mistress and familiar is to be fortified against the assaults of tedium.

His attitude towards the surprising and momentous gifts of life was one prolonged passion of praise and joy.  There is none of his books that reads like the meditations of an invalid.  He has the readiest sympathy for all exhibitions of impulsive energy; his heart goes out to a sailor, and leaps into ecstasy over a generous adventurer or buccaneer.  Of one of his earlier books he says: ‘From the negative point of view I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp.  Although it runs to considerably upwards of two hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the imbecility of God’s universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself.’  And this was an omission that he never remedied in his later works.  Indeed, his zest in life, whether lived in the back gardens of a town or on the high seas, was so great that it seems probable the writer would have been lost had the man been dowered with better health.

‘Whereas my birth and spirit rather took
   The way that takes the town,
Thou didst betray me to a ling’ring book,
   And wrap me in a gown,’

says George Herbert, who, in his earlier ambitions, would fain have ruffled it with the best at the court of King James.  But from Stevenson, although not only the town, but oceans and continents, beckoned him to deeds, no such wail escaped.  His indomitable cheerfulness was never embarked in the cock-boat of his own prosperity.  A high and simple courage shines through all his writings.  It is supposed to be a normal human feeling for those who are hale to sympathize with others who are in pain.  Stevenson reversed the position, and there is no braver spectacle in literature than to see him not asking others to lower their voices in his sick-room, but raising his own voice that he may make them feel at ease and avoid imposing his misfortunes on their notice.  ‘Once when I was groaning aloud with physical pain,’ he says in the essay on