is use, breathed upon it, and returned it fourfold in beauty and
worth. The longing of the Norseman for the tropic, of the pine for
the palm, took him to the South Seas. There, too, strange secrets
were at once revealed to him, and every island became an 'Isle of
Voices.' Yes, an additional proof of Stevenson's artistic mission lay
in his careless, careful, liberty of life; in that he was an artist no
less than in his work. He trusted to the impulse which possessed
him--that which so many of us have conscientiously disobeyed and too
late have found ourselves in reputable bondage to circumstances.

"But those whom you are waiting to hear will speak more fully of all
this--some of them with the interest of their personal
remembrance--with the strength of their affection for the man beloved
by young and old. In the strange and sudden intimacy with an author's
record which death makes sure, we realise how notable the list of
Stevenson's works produced since 1878; more than a score of books--not
fiction alone, but also essays, criticism, biography, drama, even
history, and, as I need not remind you, that spontaneous poetry which
comes only from a true poet. None can have failed to observe that,
having recreated the story of adventure, he seemed in his later
fiction to interfuse a subtler purpose--the search for character, the
analysis of mind and soul. Just here his summons came. Between the
sunrise of one day and the sunset of the next he exchanged the forest
study for the mountain grave. There, as he had sung his own wish, he
lies 'under the wide and starry sky.' If there was something of his
own romance, so exquisitely capricious, in the life of Robert Louis
Stevenson, so, also, the poetic conditions are satisfied in his death,
and in the choice of his burial-place upon the top of Pala. As for
the splendour of that maturity upon which we counted, now never to be
fulfilled on sea or land, I say--as once before, when the great New-
England romancer passed in the stillness of the night:

"'What though his work unfinished lies? Half bent
The rainbow's arch fades out in upper air,
The shining cataract half-way down the height
Breaks into mist; the haunting strain, that fell
On listeners unaware,
Ends incomplete, but through the starry night
The ear still waits for what it did not tell.'"

Dr Ed