HEN the telegram came, early one Monday morning, what was our first thought, as soon as the immediate numbness of sorrow passed The royal feast was done; the King The jester doffed his cap and bells, and the selfish instinct began to reassert itself (as it always does) and whisper "What have I lost? What is the difference to me?" Was it not something like this-"Put away books and paper and pen. Stevenson is dead. Stevenson is dead, and now there is nobody left to write for." Our children and grandchildren shall rejoice in his books; but we of this generation possessed in the living man something that they will not know. So long as he lived, though it were far from Britain though we had never spoken to him and he, perhaps, had barely heard our nameswe always wrote our best for Stevenson. To him each writer amongst us -small or more than small-had. greatness. It was native in him to rejoice in the successes of other men at least as much as in his own triumphs. One almost felt that, so long as good books were written, it was no great concern to him whether he or others wrote them. Born with an artist's craving for beauty of expression, he achieved that beauty with infinite pains. Confident in romance and in the beneficence of joy, he cherished the flame of joyous romance with more than Vestal fervor, and kept it ardent in a body which Nature, unkind from the beginning, seemed to delight in visiting with more unkindnessa "soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed" almost from birth. And his books leave the impression that he did this chiefly from a sense of duty: that helabored and kept the lamp alight chiefly because, for the time, other and stronger men did not se s Had there been another Scott, another Dumas He bowed his head, and bent his knee "No pity, Lord, could change the heart "'T is not by guilt the onward sweep We hold the earth from heaven away. "These clumsy feet, still in the mire, Go crushing blossoms without end; (Concluded on next page) been proud to have carried his best. That best might be poor enough. So long as it was not slipshod. Stevenson could forgive. While he lived, he moved men to put their utmost even into writings that quite certainly would never meet his eye. Surely another age will wonder over this curiosity of letters that for five years the needle of literary endeavor in Great Britain has quivered towards a little island in the South Pacific, as to its magnetic pole. Yet he founded no school, though most of us from time to time have poorly tried to copy him. He remained altogether inimitable, yet never seemed conscious of his if I may change the image to take up the torch of romance and run with it, I doubt if Stevenson would have offered himself. I almost think in that case he would have consigned with Nature and sat at ease, content to read of new Ivanhoes and new D'Artagnans: for-let it be said again-no man had less of the ignoble itch for merely personal success. Think, too, of what the struggle meant for him: how it drove him unquiet about the world, if somewhere he might meet with a climate to repair the constant drain upon his feeble vitality; and how at last it flung him, as by a "sudden freshet," upon Samoa-to die "far from These hard, well-meaning hands we favorite, Sir Thomas Browne: a passage beginning "He was fruitlessly put in hope of advantage by change of Air, and imbibing the pure Aerial Nitre of those Parts; and therefore, being so far spent, he quickly found Sardinia in Tivoli, and the most healthful air of little effect, where Death had set her Broad Arrow." A statelier sentence of the same author occurs to me now: "To live indeed, is to be again ourselves, which being not only a hope, but an evidence in noble believers, it is all one to lie in St. Innocent's Churchyard, as in the sands of Egypt. Ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the moles of Adrianus." Among the heart-strings of a friend. stung? The word we had not sense to say- "Our faults no tenderness should ask, them all; But for our blunders-oh, in shame Argos, dear land of home." .. ... "Earth bears no balsam for mistakes; tool That did his will; but Thou, O Lord, The room was hushed; in silence rose I remember now (as one remembers little things at such times) that, when first I heard of his going to Samoa, there came into my head (Heaven knows why) a trivial, almost ludicrous passage from his This one lies, we are told, on a mountain-top, overlooking the Pacific. At first it seemed SO much easier to distrust a News Agency than to accept Stevenson's loss. " О сарtain, my captain!" One needs not be an excellent writer to feel that writing will be thankless work, now that Stevenson is gone. But the papers by this time leave no room for doubt. "A grave was dug on the summit of Mount Vaea, thirteen hundred feet above the sea. The coffin was carried up the hill by Samoans with great difficulty, a track having to be cut through the thick bush which covers the side of the hill, from the base to the peak." For the good of man, his father and grandfather planted the high sealights upon the Inchcape and the Tyree Coast. He, the last of their line, nursed another light and tended it. Their lamps still shine upon the Bell Rock and the Skerryvore; and though in alien seas, upon a rock of exile-this other light shall continue, unquenchable by age, beneficent, serene. "The Death of Robert Louis Stevenson," by Sir A. T. Quiller-Couch. USIC is to me an ethereal rain, an ever-soft distillation, fragrant and liquid and wholesome to the soul, as dew to flowers; an incomprehensible delight, a joy, a voice of mystery, that seems to stand on the boundary between the sphere of the senses and the soul, and plead with pure, unrefined human nature to ascend into regions of seraphic uncontained life. O wondrous power! Art thou not the nearest breath of God's own beauty, born to us amid the infinite, whispering gallery of His reconciliation! Type of all love and reconciliation, solvent of hard, contrary elements-blender of soul with soul, and all with the Infinite Harmony.-John S. Dwight. AUGHTER, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the faculties, and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the powers of the soul; and thus far it may be looked upon as a weakness in the composition of human nature. But if we consider the frequent reliefs we receive from it, and how often it breaks the gloom which is apt to depress the mind and damp our spirits, with transient, unexpected gleams of joy, one would take care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life.-Addison. OW blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep: it covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap; and it is the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even. There is only one thing, which somebody once put into my head, that I dislike in sleep: it is, that it resembles death; there is very little difference between a man in his first sleep and a man in his last sleep. -Cervantes. CAN conceive of a national destiny surpassing the glories of the present and the pasta destiny which meets the responsibilities of today and measures up to the possibilities of the future patriots to those who sit in darkness. Behold a republic gradually but surely becoming the supreme moral factor in the world's progress and the accepted arbiter of the world's disputes-a republic whose history, like the path of the just, is "as the shining light that shineth more and more unto the perfect day."-" The Ideal Republic," by William Jennings Bryan. I wandered lonely as a cloud Behold a republic, resting securely upon tuted among men to secure these rights; that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Behold a republic in which civil and religious liberty stimulate all to earnest endeavor, and in which the law restrains every hand uplifted for a neighbor's injurya republic in which Continuous as the stars that shine For oft, when on my couch I lie every citizen is a sovereign, but in which Behold a republic increasing in popula- by William Wordsworth ing a prettier shell, or a smoother pebble than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. -Newton. S a writer, I have only one desireto fill you with fire, to pour into you the distilled essence of the sun itself. I want every thought, every word, every act of mine to make you feel that you are receiving into your body, into your mind, into your soul, the sacred spirit that changes clay into men and men into gods. -Thomas Dreier. OURSCORE and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.-" Address at Gettysburg," by Abraham Lincoln. ENIUS is its own reward: for a man's best qualities must necessarily benefit himself. " He who is born with a talent, for a talent, finds in it his happiest existence," says Goethe. If we look up to a great man of the past, we do not say, "How happy he is to be still admired by all of us;" but "How happy he must have been in the direct enjoyment of a mind whose traces continue to delight mankind for centuries." Not fame itself is of value, but that wherewith it is acquired; and in the begetting of immortal children lies the real enjoyment. -Schopenhauer. IF Fit's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury have retired and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." " So do I," says everybody else except two men who ought to have dined at three, and seem more than half-disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles and puts up his watch: Well, gentlemen, what do we say? Plaintiff, defendant, gentlemen? I rather think, so far as I am concerned, gentlemen-I say I rather think-but don't let that influence you-I rather think the plaintiff's the man."-Charles Dickens. I MMORTALITY is a word that Hope through all the ages has been whispering to Love The miracle of thought we can not understand. The mystery of life and death we can not comprehend. This chaos called world has never been explained. The golden bridge of life from gloom emerges, and on shadow rests. Beyond this we do not know. Fate is speechless, destiny is dumb, and the secret of the future has never yet been told. We love; we wait; we hope. The more we love, the more we fear. Upon the tenderest heart the deepest shadows fall. All paths, whether filled with thorns or flowers, end here. Here success and failure are the same. The rag of wretchedness and the purple robe of power all differences and distinction lose in this democracy of death. Character survives; goodness lives; love is immortal.-Robert G. Ingersoll. HERE is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good: myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy if I may.-R. L. Stevenson. Some people are so painfully good that they would rather be right than be pleasant.-L. C. Ball. |
