'Know how sublime a thing it is
To suffer and be strong.'—Longfellow.
Mr Stevenson's health, although always a cause of more or less anxiety, was from time to time somewhat better; else he could hardly have learned the practical work of a brass foundry, superintended the building of light towers and harbours, and taken such very active holidays as An Inland Voyage, and the tour Through the Cevennes with a Donkey. Nevertheless the delicacy was there, and it not only increased in 1873 but culminated in the autumn of that year in the first of those serious attacks of illness which afterwards frequently caused himself so much suffering and his friends such keen distress all through the life that, in spite of them, he lived so bravely.
In the October of 1873 the doctors took so grave a view of his indisposition that they ordered him south for the winter, and on the 5th of November he started on the first of those pilgrimages in search of health of which he says, somewhat sadly, in writing of his grandfather, in his paper on The Old Manse:
'He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight; I have sought it in both hemispheres, but whereas he found it and kept it, I am still on the quest.'
The anxiety and distress of his parents during that winter were naturally intense, and there is something tragic in the dates so carefully preserved:
'Lou started on 5th November 1873.'
'He returned to Heriot Row on 26th April 1874.'
Ordered South appeared in Macmillan for that same April, and in its very beauty there is a most painful pathos. The polish of its style, its exquisitely chosen words, give to it something of the sadness of the brilliant autumn tints on a wood, the red gold and the glory of decay. It is a brave paper and it is an intensely sad one, the sadness in which goes straight to the reader's heart, while the courage takes his respect by storm. No wonder it calls forth universal sympathy; too many homes have been darkened by the dread sentence 'Ordered South,' too many sufferers have obeyed it in life's gay noonday, or in its sunny prime, and few, alas! very few, have even returned to face the long struggle with fate that Mr Stevenson fought so heroically! This was the first, for him, of many journeys 'South'; for although the winter in the Riviera sent him back somewhat stronger, the inherent delicacy was still there, and time after time, in the twenty years and eleven months that he lived after the November morning when he set out on that melancholy journey, the recurrence of the graver symptoms of his malady obliged him to seek sunnier skies and warmer climates.
Scotland which he loved, the grey skies, the greyer mists, the snell winds,—that even in his happy Samoan life his exile's heart hungered for to the last,—were fatal to his delicate lungs, and year by year he was compelled to live less and less in his old Edinburgh home.