“He says something that has set me up for life: that Mrs. Stevenson told him R. L. S. had a great fancy for my little doings, and used to ‘search for them in such magazines as came to Samoa.’ I will keep on writing, I will; I shall never despair after that.”
To Robert Louis Stevenson: A Study, privately printed in 1895, she contributed a notable sonnet, the sestette beginning:
“Louis, our priest of letters and our knight,”
and a longer Valediction of a metre disturbing to the unpractised ear, but full of isolated lines of an individual beauty and also of a real grief: the lament of the pupil over his master, signalized in the significant line:
“The battle dread is on us now, riding afield alone.”
There is a light-heartedness, too, about the poem, like burnished fringes on a mourning robe. For youth is in it as well as sorrow. Her lamentation can break into the iridescent foam of a stanza like this, where she pre-figures the living spirit of Tusitala absorbed into the island life he loved and blossoming from it forever:
“There on summer’s holy hills
In illumined calms,
Smile of Tusitala thrills
Through a thousand palms;