swift waters:--

. . . "Let him lie down with all races and generations of men in the
house of sleep. It was easy to say, easy to do. To stop swimming;
there was no mystery in that, if he could do it. Could he?

"And he could not. He knew it instantly. He was instantly aware of
an opposition in his members, unanimous and invincible, clinging to
life with a single and fixed resolve, finger by finger, sinew by
sinew; something that was at once he and not he--at once within and
without him; the shutting of some miniature valve within the brain,
which a single manly thought would suffice to open--and the grasp of
an external fate ineluctable to gravity. To any man there may come
at times a consciousness that there blows, through all the
articulations of his body, the wind of a spirit not wholly his; that
his mind rebels; that another girds him, and carries him whither he
would not. It came even to Herrick with the authority of a
revelation--there was no escape possible. The open door was closed
in his recreant face. He must go back into the world and amongst men
without illusion. He must stagger on to the end with the pack of his
responsibility and disgrace, until a cold, a blow--a merciful chance
blow--or the more merciful hangman should dismiss him from his
infamy.

"There were men who could commit suicide; there were men who could
not; and he was one who could not. His smile was tragic. He could
have spat upon himself."

Profoundly dissimilar in many ways, one psychological link binds together
Dickens, Browning, and Stevenson--a love of the grotesque, a passion for
the queer, phantastic sides of life. Each of them relished the tang of
roughness, and in Browning's case the relish imparts itself to his style.
Not so with Stevenson. He will delve with the others for curious
treasure; but not until it is fairly wrought and beaten into a thing of
finished beauty will he allow you to get a glimpse of it.

This is different from Browning, who will fling his treasures at you with
all the mud upon them. But I am not sure that Stevenson's is always the
better way. He may save you soiling your fingers; but the real
attractiveness of certain things is inseparable from their uncouthness,
their downright ugliness. Sometimes you feel that a plainer setting
would have shown off the jewel to better advantage. Otherwise one ha