VIEW OF VAILIMA FROM STEVENSON’S GRAVE
We remained on the plateau for over an hour resting our weary limbs, and eating our lunch of fruit; and during that time we sat on the broad sun-warmed slab. A tiny lizard, with a golden head, a green body, and a blue tail, flickered to and fro. Overhead a huge flying fox, with outspread “batty wings” sailed majestically. We seemed alone in the world, we four human beings, and as we gazed about us we saw everywhere, far beneath us, the beautiful “sapphire-spangled marriage-ring of the land,” and down from us to the blueness, and beyond us, to an infinitude of distance, billow upon billow of wooded heights. Sitting there, on that green and level plateau on the summit of the mountain, my thoughts turned involuntarily to the last lofty resting-place of Browning’s “Grammarian.”
“Well, here’s the platform, here’s the proper place!
Hail to your purlieus,
All ye high flyers of the feathered race,
Swallows and curlews!”
“Here, here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!”
The wind sighed softly in the branches of the Tavau trees, from out the green recesses of the Toi came the plaintive coo of the wood-pigeon. In and out of the branches of the magnificent Fau tree, which overhangs the grave, a kingfisher, sea-blue, iridescent, flitted to and fro, whilst a scarlet hibiscus, in full flower, showed up royally against the gray lichened cement. All around was light and life and colour, and I said to myself, “He is made one with nature”; he is now, body and soul and spirit, commingled with the loveliness around. He who longed in life to scale the height, he who attained his wish only in death, has become in himself a parable of fulfilment. No need now for that heart-sick cry:—
“Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,
Say, could that lad be I.”
No need now for the despairing finality of:—
“I have trod the upward and the downward slopes,
I have endured and done in the days of yore,
I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope,
And I have lived, and loved, and closed the door.”
Death has set his seal of peace on the unequal conflict of mind and matter; the All-Mother has gathered him to herself.
In years to come, when his grave is perchance forgotten, a rugged ruin, home of the lizard and the bat, Tusitala—the story teller—“the man with a heart of gold” (as I so often heard him designated in the Islands) will live, when it may be his tales have ceased to interest, in the tender remembrance of those whose lives he beautified, and whose hearts he warmed into gratitude.