outside this, culminating
in the widely known epitaph

Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill,

has the rarely combined merits of simplicity,
sincerity, music, and strength." One of the
best of Stevenson's poems for children outside
the _Child's Garden of Verses_ is the
powerfully dramatic story called _Heather Ale_.
In attempting to solve the secret of
Stevenson's supremacy, Edmund Gosse calls
attention to the "curiously candid and
confidential attitude of mind" in these poems,
to the "extraordinary clearness and precision
with which the immature fancies of eager
childhood" are reproduced, and particularly, to
the fact that they give us "a transcript of
that child-mind which we have all possessed and
enjoyed, but of which no one, except Mr.
Stevenson, seems to have carried away a
photograph." It is this ability to hand on a
photographic transcript of the child's way of
seeing things that, according to Mr. Gosse,
puts Stevenson in a class which contains only
two other members, Hans Christian Andersen in
nursery stories, and Juliana Horatia Ewing in
the more realistic prose tale. Children find
expressed in these poems their own active
fancies. It has been objected to them that the
child pictured there is a lonely child, but
every child, like every mature person, has an
inner world of dreams and experiences in which
he delights now and then to dwell. The presence
of the qualities mentioned put at least two of
Stevenson's prose romances among the most
splendid adventure stories for young people,
_Treasure Island_ and _Kidnapped_. Perhaps no
book is more popular among pupils of the
seventh and eighth grades than the former. It
has been called a "sublimated dime novel," that
is, it has all the decidedly attractive
features of the "dime novel" plus the fine art
of story-telling which is always lacking in
that sensational type of story.

282

WHOLE DUTY OF CHILDREN

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

A child should always say what's true,
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at table;
At least as