Every bush of roses,
Every blue forget-me-not
Where the dew reposes.'
Differing much in their natures, but fitting, as it were, closely into each other's souls and characters, Louis Stevenson's parents early made for him that ideal of home and of marriage that shows itself from the first in his writings, just here a line and there a sentence, which indicates how his thoughts ran, and how, whatever enjoyment he might take in poking cynicism at women in the abstract, he was full of a noble idea, a manly longing for that one woman, of whose soul and his own, he could say—
'Once and beyond recollection,
Once ere the skies were unfurled,
These an immortal affection
Found at the birth of the world,'
a woman who would be what his mother was to his father, a something as sacred as all through his life that mother was to him. Save that Mrs Thomas Stevenson's eyes were rather hazel than blue, it might have been of her that the late Professor Blackie wrote so sweetly:—
'True to herself and to the high ideal