There, and with delight to take and render,
Through the trance of silence, quiet breath;
Lo! for there, among the flowers and grasses,
Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;
Only winds and rivers, life and death.
I felt the poetry of the day more poignantly as the hour for parting approached, and when the sun began to wane, I went out on the lawn to see the place under the spell of the lengthened shadows and the mellow sun-rays that turn the tree-trunks to burnished gold. This has always been my favorite hour, this charmed hour before sunset, when we can almost feel the earth's movement under our feet—an hour that transcends in poetry anything that can be imagined by the finite mind.
I walked up and down under the cedars bordering the river, to quiet my emotion. It was there, too, under the cedars, that a remark of Mr. Eaton's, in describing to me his first meeting with Stevenson, flashed across my memory: "He combined the face of a boy with the distinguished bearing of a man of the world."
And I thought, as I saw him then, merrily recalling the scenes and escapades of student life, "How well the distinguished man of the world had succeeded in keeping the heart of a boy!"
A passage in Mr. Low's book, "A Chronicle of Friendships," that recalls that day most vividly, is this: "Stevenson never once excused himself from our company on the plea of having work to do." For so it was with us; he seemed to have no cares or preoccupations, but to be content to be there, enjoying the conversation and the pleasantness of the passing hour.
I had a cosy quarter of an hour with his mother after my walk, and off by ourselves, in a corner, away from interruption, she spoke of her son's childhood. In her eyes, he was still the "bonnie wee laddie" who scouted about in his make-believe worlds among the chairs and tables in the drawing-room while she entertained her friends, and we repeated bits from "A Child's Garden of Verses."