'There is nothing,' he says, 'so quiet and so much alive as a woodland. And surely of all smells in the world the smell of many trees is sweetest and most satisfying.'
These are the reflections of a man to whom the teeming silence of the woods was very dear, and who, in Prince Otto, afterwards wrote a prose poem on the mystery of the woods which Thoreau himself could not have excelled.
'If we were charged so much a head for sunsets, or if God sent round a drum before the hawthorns came into flower, what a work we should make about their beauty. But these things, like good companions, stupid people early cease to observe;' a state of affairs fortunately incomprehensible to Mr Stevenson, who had not only a keen perception of the beauty of the world but 'that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude' that enabled him to recall and reproduce from memory these pleasures of the past.
The volume which ends with the statement that 'The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek,' is from its first page to its last brightly readable and full of pleasant and graceful thoughts and fancies. Its style is more mannered and less excellent than that of his later work, but it already appealed to that cultured public who welcomed the appearance of a new writer likely to make his mark as a 'maker' of English style.
In 1895 An Inland Voyage had run into its seventh edition; it was followed by the even more popular Travels in the Cevennes with a Donkey, which the same publishers sent out in 1879, and which in 1895 had reached a ninth edition.
On this occasion Mr Stevenson travelled alone. He had been living for a time in the little town of Le Monastier, fifteen miles from Le Puy, and here, in the late autumn, he bought an ass which he called 'Modestine,' and with it, to the great interest of his simple neighbours, started on a tour in the Cevennes. The pair set forth speeded on their way by many good wishes and, in spite of a slow pace and not a few misfortunes with the baggage and the pack-saddle, the tour was most successful. As to Modestine's pace her master describes it as being 'as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run'!
The experiences of the traveller in the crisp, bright autumn weather and the perfect scenery of the Cevennes were thoroughly enjoyable. The simple peasantry and the homely innkeepers proved more friendly and agreeable than those along the route of the canoeists had done. In the monastery of 'Our Lady of the Snows' he had a kindly welcome from the Trappist monks, who seemed to have found it possible to break their stern rule of silence in their eagerness to convert him to Roman Catholicism. Among themselves this rule of silence and the poorest diet is rigidly enforced, and as the traveller left their hospitable doors he 'blessed God that he was free to wander, free to hope, and free to love.'
In the country of the Camisards—that little sect of persecuted religionists whose fierce brief struggle against the tyranny of the Church of Rome he so graphically describes—the descendant of Scotch Covenanters found himself at home, and at 'Pont de Montvert' his heart beat in a certain stern sympathy with the persecuted remnant, who here slew Du Chayla, and with that strange weird prophet Spirit Séguir, who, after the deed was done, and he was about to suffer death for it at the stake, said: 'My soul is like a garden full of shelter and fountains.'
The rising took place on 24th July 1702, and Mr Stevenson says of it:
''Tis a wild night's work with its accompaniment of psalms; and it seems as if a psalm must always have a sound of threatening in that town upon the Tarn.'