is half-formed being, at a
great expense of spirit and body. Add the storms, which from time to
time attacked him, of shivering repulsion from the climate and
conditions of life in the city which he yet deeply and imaginatively
loved; the moods of spiritual revolt against the harsh doctrines of the
creed in which he had been brought up, and to which his parents were
deeply, his father even passionately, attached; the seasons of
temptation, to which he was exposed alike by temperament and
circumstance, to seek solace among the crude allurements of the city
streets.

In the later and maturer correspondence which will appear in these
volumes, the agitations of the writer's early days are often enough
referred to in retrospect. In the boyish letters to his parents, which
make up the chief part of this first section, they naturally find no
expression at all; nor will these letters be found to differ much in
any way from those of any other lively and observant lad who is also
something of a reader and has some natural gift of writing. At the end
of the section I have indeed printed one cry of the heart, written not
to his parents, but about them, and telling of the strain which matters
of religious difference for a while brought into his home relations. The
attachment between the father and son from childhood was exceptionally
strong. But the father was staunchly wedded to the hereditary creeds and
dogmas of Scottish Calvinistic Christianity; while the course of the
young man's reading, with the spirit of the generation in which he grew
up, had loosed him from the bonds of that theology, and even of dogmatic
Christianity in general, and had taught him to respect all creeds alike
as expressions of the cravings and conjectures of the human spirit in
face of the unsolved mystery of things, rather than to cling to any one
of them as a revelation of ultimate truth. The shock to the father was
great when his son's opinions came to his knowledge; and there ensued a
time of extremely painful discussion and private tension between them.
In due time this cloud upon a family life otherwise very harmonious and
affectionate passed quite away. But the greater the love, the greater
the pain; when I first knew Stevenson this trouble gave him no peace,
and it has left a strong trace upon his mind and work. See particularly
the parable called "The House of Eld," in his collection of _Fables_,
and the many studies of difficult paternal and fili