Dear Colvin, please remember that my life passes among my “blacks or chocolates.” If I were to do as you propose, in a bit of a tiff, it would cut you off entirely from my life. You must try to exercise a trifle of imagination, and put yourself, perhaps with an effort, into some sort of sympathy with these people, or how am I to write to you? I think you are truly a little too Cockney with me.—Ever yours,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
To W. B. Yeats
Vailima, Samoa, April 14, 1894.
DEAR SIR,—Long since when I was a boy I remember the emotions with which I repeated Swinburne’s poems and ballads. Some ten years ago, a similar spell was cast upon me by Meredith’s Love in the Valley; the stanzas beginning “When her mother tends her” haunted me and made me drunk like wine; and I remember waking with them all the echoes of the hills about Hyères. It may interest you to hear that I have a third time fallen in slavery: this is to your poem called the Lake Isle of Innisfree. It is so quaint and airy, simple, artful, and eloquent to the heart—but I seek words in vain. Enough that “always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds on the shore,” and am, yours gratefully,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
To George Meredith
The young lady referred to in the following is Mr. Meredith’s daughter, now Mrs. H. Sturgis; the bearer of the introduction, Mr. Sidney Lysaght, author of The Marplot and One of the Grenvilles. It is only in the first few chapters of Mr. Meredith’s Amazing Marriage that the character of Gower Woodseer has been allowed to retain any likeness to that of R. L. S.
Vailima, Samoa, April 17th, 1894.