St. Ives.
For this reason, the Child's Garden of Verses is not, in any real sense of the word, a child's book at all. It contains the exquisite imaginations of childhood as the grown-up man remembers them: to him they have the charm of the vanished past, they are the utterances of one who has also lived in Arcadia. But to the child, they are the very commonplaces of existence. To sway to and fro in a swing, "the pleasantest thing a child can do,"—to bring home treasures from field and wood, nuts and wooden whistles, and some all-precious unidentifiable stone, "though father denies it, I'm sure it is gold,"—these are everyday affairs to the country-child,—just as watching the lamplighter is to the town child. To read verses about them is but a waste of time, when one might be actively engaged in similar avocations. But to the grown-man who can never play with wooden soldiers in the garden, never be a pirate any more,—these reminiscences of Stevenson's are a delight unfailing. No one else has ever worded them quite so accurately, quite so simply: and, taken all for all, they are in themselves a summing-up of that most excellent philosophy of this author, "The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings!" The world was indeed full of a number of things to R.L.S. and,—passed through the crucible of his own astonishing personality,—they were all, bad or good, transmogrified into things that make for joy.
After eight o'clock dinner was over, the old folks bade good-night,—the father, with touching affection, kissing Louis as though he were a child, and murmuring, "You'll see me in the morning, dearie," as if still addressing that little feeble creature who had been kept alive with such difficulty in the old days at Edinburgh.
The younger man returned to the piano-forte; it drew him like a magnet. For a short time he indulged in his desultory music-making, relishing to the uttermost every success of sound which he achieved: and the happiness, which was his theory of life, radiated in warm abundance from his richly-tinted face and glowing eyes. "It's a fine life," he exclaimed.
At last the day's supply of energy succumbed before the imperious demands of this "fiery threadpaper of a man," and in deference to his wife's suggestion he betook himself to bed. Not necessarily to rest; for even in his dreams his busy brain was working, and his "Brownies," as he termed them, bringing him fresh material for plots. Dr. Jekyll had been thus evolved from three scenes dreamed successively in detail, from which the dreamer waked with cries of horror.
But he did not flinch before the coming night, and anything that it might bring of sickness or unrest. He thought alone upon the past delightful day, fraught with strenuous work and simple pleasures; and he petitioned, in his own words:
"If I have faltered more or less
In my great task of happiness;
If I have moved along my race
And shown no glorious morning face;
If beams from happy human eyes
Have moved me not; if morning skies,
Books, and my food, and summer rain
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:—
Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take
And stab my spirit broad awake!"
(Underwoods.)
His wife hovered around him with gentle ministrations, as suddenly out-wearied, Robert Louis Stevenson extended his long, lean form to a possible repose. There was not, perhaps, a cheerfuller man that night in England.