ad
(Heaven knows why) a trivial, almost ludicrous passage from his
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 ecstacy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the
_moles_ of Adrianus."

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. "O captain, 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, 1,300 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 sea-lights 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.

* * * * *

Nov. 2, 1895. The "Vailima Letters."

Eagerly as we awaited this volume, it has proved a gift exceeding all
our hopes--a gift, I think, almost priceless. It unites in the rarest
manner the value of a familiar correspondence with the value of an
intimate journal: for these Samoan letters to his friend Mr. Sidney
Colvin form a record, scarcely interrupted, of Stevenson's thinkings
and doings from month to month, and often from day to day, during the
last four romantic years of his life. The first is dated November 2nd,
1890, when he and his household were clearing the ground for their
home on the mountain-side of Vaea: the last, October 6th, 1894, just
two months before his grave was dug on