Part 1 (1/2)

Robert Louis Stevenson

by Margaret Moyes Black

PREFACE AND DEDICATION

In so small a volume it would be somewhat hopeless to attempt an exhaustive notice of R L Stevenson, nor would it be desirable The only possible full biography of him will be the _Life_ in preparation by his intimate friend Mr Sydney Colvin, and for it his friends and his public look eagerly This little book is only a reminiscence and an appreciation by one who, in the old days between 1869 and 1880, knew hie has been derived from his mother and those other members of his mother's family hoe news of his sayings and doings

In the actual writing of this volurateful thanks to the givers For the verification of dates and a few other particulars I am indebted to Mr Colvin's able article in the _Dictionary of National Biography_

It is dedicated, in the first instance, to the memory of Mr and Mrs Thomas Stevenson and their son, and, in the second, to all the dearly prized friends of the Balfour connection who have either, like the household at 17 Heriot Row, passed into the 'Silent Land,' or who are still here to gladden life with their friendshi+p

MARGARET MOYES BLACK

_August_ 1898

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

CHAPTER I

HEREDITY AND ANTECEDENTS

'These are thy works, O father, these thy crown, Whether on high the air be pure they shi+ne Along the yellowing sunset, and all night A the unnus arise, and far and wide The low sea-level drown--each finds a tongue, And all night long the tolling bell resounds

So shi+ne so toll till night be overpast, Till the stars vanish, till the sun return, And in the haven rides the fleet at last'

--R L STEVENSON

In no country in the world is hereditysons freely acknowledge the debt they owe, for the successes of to-day, to the brave struggle with sterner conditions of life their ancestors waged froeneration We of the present are 'the heirs of all the ages'; but we are also in no sree the clay from the potter's hands, moulded and kneaded by the natures, physical and one before us, and whose lives and circumstances have made us e are

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson--for so the writer whom the world knows as Robert Louis Stevenson, was baptised--valued greatly this doctrine of heredity, and always bore enthusiastic testimony to the influence his ancestry and antecedents had exercised inhis temperament and character He was proud of that ancestry, with no foolish pride, but rather with that appreciation of all that was noble and worthy in his forefathers, whichlife-work, as good a man as they

'And I--can I be base?'--he says; 'Iseahly of the honourable name which he received from his father's family Britain and the whole world hasour rough north coasts, but in every part of the world where the mariner rejoices to see their beacon's blaze have the firineers to the Indian, the New Zealand, and the japanese Lighthouse Boards, lit those lights of which Rudyard Kipling in his 'Songs of the English,' sings--

'Our brows are bound with spindrift, and the weed is on our knees; Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, s seas; From reef and rock and skerry, over headland, ness, and voe, The coastguard lights of England watch the shi+ps of England go'

Wild and wind-swept are the isles and headlands of the northern half of the sister kingdohts that have been kindled by Robert Stevenson, the hero of Bell Rock fame, and his descendants flash and flame across the sea, andto the storm-tossed sailor

The author was third in descent from that Robert Stevenson, who, by skill and heroishthouse on the wave-swept Bell Rock--only uncovered for the possibility of work for a short time at low tides--and made safety on the North Sea, where before there had been death and danger, frouard that iron coast