which these two writers probably possess in the greatest degree - from this time on, creeps gradually into his writings. Still another helpful influence that came to him during his apprenticeship to literature was that of Margaret Fuller. Her criticisms were sometimes severe and consequently discouraging; but they were ever kind and just, and Thoreau early learned truly to value them.

In 1842, Henry Thoreau lost his brother John, who was his dearest companion and confidant. This was, perhaps, the saddest period of his life and it throws an added lustre over the laurel-crowned head of the gentle poet, when the world reads of his tender devotion and gratitude to one who had been kind to him. He dearly cherished his memory to the end of his life.

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It was shortly after this bereavement that Thoreau became a welcome inmate at the home of Emerson. Channing was anxious to have him live with him; he expressed it: "These miserable cracks and crannies which have made the wall of life look thin and fungus-like will be cemented by the sweet and solid mortar of friendship."

Soon after this, Thoreau went to live in his little cabin at Walden. We all know how he lived there, alone, with no companions but his beloved woods, and wild animals and birds that were never afraid of the naturalist. They seemed to know he loved them and understood them. Mr. Alcott writes on his return from a day spent with Thoreau at Walden, "If I were to proffer my earnest prayer to all the gods for the greatest of all human privileges, it should be for the gift of a severely candid friend. To most, the presence of such is painfully irksome. They are the lovers of present reputation and not of that exaltation of soul which friends and discourse were given to awaken in us. Intercourse of this kind I have found possible with my friends, Emerson and Thoreau, and the evenings passed in their society during the winter months have realized my conception of what friendship when great and genuine gives to and takes from its objects."

It may be interesting, in this connection, to give Thoreau's praise of the dear old man himself, for it is when he writes of such friends as Alcott and Emerson, and fitly, too, that Thoreau waxes eloquent. "Alcott was one of the last of the phi

losophers," he writes in Walden.' "Connecticut gave him to the world. He peddled first his wares, afterward, as he declares, his brains. These he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only like the nut its kernel. I think he must be the man of the most faith alive. His words and attitudes always suppose a better state than other men are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture in the present. A true friend of almost the only friend of human progress he is perhaps the sanest man of any I happen to know,- the same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow."

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Channing was a true friend of Thoreau's. He took a sincere interest in everything he wrote or did. His letters to Thoreau are a choice collection, always snappy and individual. I quote an extract from one of them in which, in the person of Teufelsdröckh, he gives his friend a valuable piece of advice, which Thoreau seems to have laid to heart. He writes from New York City which has some influence upon his first statement, so I mention it:

"This is a muddy town, muddy, solitary and silent. I saw Teufelsdröckh yesterday. He said a few words to me about you. Says he: That fellow Thoreau might be somebody if he would only take a journey through the everlasting "No." › 'By- !' said the old clothes-bag, warming up, 'I should like to take that fellow out into the everlasting "No" and explode him like a bomb-shell,- he would make a loud report. It would be fun to see him pick himself up again. He is too dry; too composed; too chalky; too con

crete. >>

When Thoreau began his literary work, Horace Greeley gave him much valuable assistance-"Horace in the rôle of Mæcenas." Emerson gives us a graphic description of Thoreau in the short biography he has written for the introduction to Thoreau's "Miscellanies."

He says he never went out for a walk without an old music-book under his arm to press flowers in, and other equipment of like nature. He was such an enthusiastic naturalist that not only did the companions of those delightful walks derive long-to-be-remembered pleasure from them, but posterity may now read with interest and wonder the detailed accounts

of them in his “Yankee in Canada,” in his "Summer," and in his "Miscellanies." Emerson again says of him: "He knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, until the bird, the reptile, or the fish which had retired from him should come back moved by curiosity to watch him. . . . He waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his armor. His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas Fuller records of Butler, the apiarist, that 'either he had told the bees something or the bees had told him.' . . . Snakes coiled around his legs; fishes swam into his hand and he took them out of the water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took the foxes under his protection from the hunters. His powers of observation seemed to indicate additional senses; he saw as with a microscope; heard as with an ear-trumpet; and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. Every fact lay in order and beauty in his mind, a type of the order and beauty and glory of the whole."

He never took the trodden paths when they were winding and long, he everywhere made paths of his own. When going to a certain point he would find a landmark or decide the direction, and in that direction or toward that landmark he would go, over ditches and fences, and through ravines and thickets, and, no matter how many and great the obstacles that presented themselves, he was generally known to "get there" first, though the party travelling by the easy and more circuitous road ridiculed his methods. They were few who put faith in Thoreau's "cultivated instincts," but Emerson was one of them.

The face of Thoreau shows a soul within, and, as Sanborn says, "once seen could not be soon forgotten, so strong was the mark that genius had put upon it." His features are prominent, in the pictures we see of him; his eyes large, round and deep-set under bold brows full of fearless meditation, the color, we are told, varying from blue to gray, "as if with the moods of his mind." How deep and clear is the mark that thought sets upon a man's face. The transparency and spirituality of Thoreau's expression was as deep as the thoughts within were guileless and noble.

Channing observes: "In height he [Thoreau] was about the average, his build square, with limbs rather longer than usual, or of which he made a longer use. His whole figure had an active earnestness as if he had no moment to waste; the clenched hand betokened purpose."

Mr. Ricketson says that Thoreau was misunderstood by those who called him cynical. He remarks: "Some have accused him of being an imitator of Emerson, others as unsocial, impracticable, and ascetic. Now, he was none of these. A more original man never lived, nor one more thoroughly a personification of civility."

He had some queer notions, it must be confessed, and many are prone to look askant at his exploit with the tax-collector, for which he was sent to prison. But there are always thousands who can criticize where there is one who can truly appreciate a living masterpiece. We all have faults, it is said. Thoreau's faults were eccentricities.

That he was loved and venerated by his family breathes from every line of one of his sister's letters, written during his last illness: "It is not possible," she writes, "to be sad in his presence. No shadow of gloom attaches to anything in my mind connected with my precious brother Henry. His whole life impresses me as one grand miracle." "With an unfaltering trust in God's mercies," writes William Ellery Channing, "and never deserted by his good genius, he most bravely and unsparingly passed down the inclined plane of a terrible malady, pulmonary consumption, working steadily at the completion of his papers till the last hour, or so long as he could hold the pencil between his trembling fingers. Yet, if he did get a little sleep to comfort him in this year's campaign of sleepless affliction, he was sure to interest those around him in his singular dreams; dreams more than usually fantastic. He said once that having got a few moments of repose sleep seemed to hang around his bed in festoons. He declared uniformly that he preferred to endure with a clear mind all the worst penalties of suffering rather than be plunged in a turbid dream by narcotics. His patience was unfailing. He knew naught save resignation; he did mightily cheer and console those whose strength was less.

His every instant, now, his least thought and work sacredly belonged to them (dearer than his rapidly perishing life) whom he should so quickly leave behind."

But best of all these tributes of love, esteem, and affection from the great men of his time are the words of his lifetime friend and admirer,― Ralph Waldo Emerson, one word of praise from whom might seem to be worth more than many another paragraph or essay in his honor.

"A truth-speaker, he," said Emerson at his funeral, capable of the most deep

and strict conversation, a physician to the wounds of any soul; a friend, knowing not only the secret of friendship, but almost worshipped by the few persons who resorted to him as their confessor and prophet, and knew the deep value of his mind and great heart. His soul was made for the noblest society; in short he had in life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge; wherever there is virtue; wherever there is beauty, he will find a home."

EUNICE V. PENNYWITT.

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OBERT LOUIS STEVENSON was the literary man pure and simple, in the sense that Hazlitt, or Leigh Hunt, or Matthew Arnold was, and this is his most honorable distinction. Born in 1850, dying in 1894, he was devoted from his boyhood onwards, to the art of literature, to the beauty of style, to the attainment of balanced and harmonius, if not impassioned, prose. It was not enough for him to write; he must write well, and learn the secret of the great masters. Little more than three years have passed, observes a writer in "The Westminster Review," from whose contribution we have made this condensed study, since Stevenson died in distant Upolu, that gem set in the wide waste of the Southern seas. Flying, like Tristram Shandy, from disease to the ends of the earth, death caught him up and laid him by the heels at last in that beautiful spot which is, perhaps, nearest of all habitations to the earthly Paradise. We can never be sure of what verdict posterity will pass on any writer; perhaps we stand too near our contemporary to call him great; yet, if ever there was a star in the spacious firmament of English literature worthy of the place, surely Stevenson is that star.

A man of wide sympathies, he easily took the cue from his surroundings and found in them a message for himself. Like Ulysses, he might say: "I am a part of all that I have met." For, as no other's was, his work was himself, and a transcript or transmutation of his environment. His surroundings, his studies, his experiences must be taken into account, along with his own nature, if his writings

are to be correctly understood and appreciated.

Heredity counts for so much in these days that it is indispensable if you speak of a man to mention his parents. From his father, Thomas Stevenson, the son gained some of those traits which were after to serve him in such good stead as a writer. A lover of art, of certain Latin authors, a discreet theologian, and a student of romance, chivalrous to a degree which led him into upholding unpopular theories, fond of nature and science, the father handed on to the son, who would have none of his business career, all these charming qualities and likings. Through his mother he had kinship with the Balfours of Pilrig, his grandfather, the Rev. David Balfour, being minister of Colinton and a cadet of that old Scottish house. Stevenson was thus "of a kent hoose," as the fastidious Scottish temper phrases it. The love of Bohemia, which was kept within bounds by his father, became a ruling passion with the son, and led him into curious byways of adventure in a time when Bohemia was yet a land of romance and dreams, where the artist, the literary man, and the wit could meet on common terms.

Stevenson was thus a genuine Scot, and, what is more, an Edinburgh Scot. No Scots boy can quite escape his romantic surroundings- the product of strange memories and long ages of chivalrous deeds. A boy like Stevenson, with keen instincts and thirsty mind, was alive to them in every nerve. Edinburgh, be it old or new, carries a story in almost every stone. More memories of past history throng the thoughtful

wayfarer in the High Street and Canongate of that romantic town than can be counted. Phan

toms of the past, in greater number than the crowd of unwashed idlers who now wander aimlessly along these classic streets, touch his elbow and whisper in his ear. And Stevenson, as he grew up, had communings with them all, and told himself a story of all the archways and corners that met his eye. He carried that love of Scotland, of his native town, far over seas, and never forgot them. Carlyle, who also expatriated himself, but no farther than London, is less identified with Scotland, though a true Scot to the last, than Stevenson will always be. In distant Samoa

his eyes beheld the Hebrides and saw in vision Pentland's grassy slopes, with their musical tinkling burns; his ears still caught the bugle-blast as it rang sharp and sudden from Edinburgh's castled steep across the housetops. "Now," says he, with a pathetic and wistful note, "when I think upon my latter end, as I do sometimes, I feel that when I shall come to die out here among these beautiful islands, I shall have lost something that had been my due- my native, predestinate, and forfeited grave among honest Scots sods."

"The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotsman," he declares with en

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

thusiasm. His fatherland supplied him with copious material for one side of his nature to feed on; the Shorter Catechism, that venerable document, was food for another, and, with the teaching of his parents, accounts for that note of austerity which sounds through all his writings. His was no lack-lustre nature, incapable of being moved, irresponsive to impressions; he noted with a critical yet sympathetic eye everything he saw; and if there were no story hanging odorously around it, straightway he weaved one to suit the occasion. Hence, his journeyings with his father opened up only the more fresh fields and pastures new to his ruminating mind.

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It is easy to see how these were all formative influences in his early life and afforded raw material out of which to weave a beautiful fabric by-and-by. school, it is said, he was conceived to be (in schoolboy phrase) half-mad; when other boys were thinking of the cricketfield and of football he was bent on turning phrases and learning how to write. Like most children, he lived in a world of make-believe; a world bounded by the nursery walls and the garden railings, where pirates sailed the Spanish Main and Red Indians, grim and gory, flourished flashing tomahawks; where everything was something else, and reality was as nothing compared with its use to the imagination. From childhood onwards he was a dreamer, abandoned to that luxury of the vivid mind; consistently, in sleep and out of it, using up the full materials of life in the construction of filmy air-castles. Indeed, at a later time, Stevenson, like Crabbe, found some of his best inspirations in his dreams. Ideas conceived in youth dominated his literary tastes. It is easy to give examples. If a man "has never been on a quest for buried treasure," he says, in answer to Mr. Henry James, "it can be demonstrated that he has never been a child." Most of us can imagine the joy of such an imaginary quest in child-play; we can tell whence the idea sprang-out of romances about the Spanish Main and Captain Kidd, it is most likely; but few, if any, of us are dominated by the idea in later life, save in an unromantic, commercial way. Stevenson, it appears, never lost sight of it. "Treasure Island » could not have been written without it; it is the motif of "The Merry Men"; it reappears in "The Treasure of Franchard" and in "The Master of Ballantrae." He was, in fact, always asking himself, "What story can I fit on to this?" There were places which (he was sure) waited calmly on the appointed hour when some stirring action ог some gruesome tragedy should affront them and rouse their echoes. There were places which, failing all else, must occupy themselves with the creatures of his fancy — Edinburgh, the sanddunes of North Berwick, the ancient seaport of South Queensferry, the Western Highlands. All these are memorable places for the student of his writings. There was no end to his supposing," writes a friend. It was the same with the

people he read of and the people he met. They stuck in his memory: many of them figure in his stories and would be surprised, could they know it, to find with what faithful finger they were drawn. He used up his own experiences; the novels, tales, and essays are compacted of them, real or imagined.

It has been already said that he learned to write. Books were food to him from earliest childhood, and they awoke in him, one after another, a responsive chord which presently set him imitating the writer's style and matter. Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bunyan, Spenser, Wordsworth, Whitman, George Meredith, to name but a few, were favorites from the first, and fell victims to his imitative craft. If genius, as is erroneously supposed, be the capacity for taking infinite pains, then Stevenson, in this sense, was a genius, learning to write in the same way as Alphonse Daudet, turning phrases as he walked, noting down a description in his version-book, constructing a story, a poem, a drama, in the manner of the favorite of the hour. It is better that literary work should thus acquire carefulness, polish, delicate chiselling, than that we should be swept away before that flood of slipshod English sent abroad by "the mob of gentlemen who write with ease" in those evil days on which we have fallen. People will exclaim that this method smells of the lamp. For our part, we are content that should be so. After all, in literature as in life, the goal is reached by a straight and narrow way.

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At school and college he would have none of the ordinary pabulum; he preferred to "babble o' green fields" rather than put his nose to the educational grindstone. His father before him had been a mere idler at school; he, for his part, for no consideration was to be bound to those narrow paths of virtue where Latin supports the scholar on one side and the mathematics on the other. The brooks tinkled, the birds sang, the sun shone, here was a pleasant book, and life was a merry pageant, and off went our truant with his cap flung in the air. This truant disposition may give great enjoyment to him who has it, and lead him into many a pleasant by-path meadow, but it will be a sore annoyance to constituted authorities, and to all dons, professors, pedagogues, and proctors.