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The Pocket R.L.S., being favourite passages from the works of Stevenson By: Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) |
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Being favourite passages from the works of Stevenson.
By Robert Louis Stevenson SELECTED PASSAGES When you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man himself;
it is as though you had touched a loyal hand, looked into brave eyes,
and made a noble friend; there is another bond on you thenceforward,
binding you to life and to the love of virtue. It is to some more specific memory that youth looks forward in its
vigils. Old kings are sometimes disinterred in all the emphasis of life,
the hands untainted by decay, the beard that had so often wagged in camp
or senate still spread upon the royal bosom; and in busts and pictures,
some similitude of the great and beautiful of former days is handed
down. In this way, public curiosity may be gratified, but hardly any
private aspiration after fame. It is not likely that posterity will fall
in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathise;
and so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit
than a portrait of his face, FIGURA ANIMI MAGIS QUAM CORPORIS. The pleasure that we take in beautiful nature is essentially capricious.
It comes sometimes when we least look for it; and sometimes, when
we expect it most certainly, it leaves us to gape joylessly for days
together, in the very homeland of the beautiful. We may have passed a
place a thousand times and one; and on the thousand and second it will
be transfigured, and stand forth in a certain splendour of reality from
the dull circle of surroundings; so that we see it 'with a child's first
pleasure,' as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the lake side. But every one sees the world in his own way. To some the glad moment may
have arrived on other provocations; and their recollection may be most
vivid of the stately gait of women carrying burthens on their heads; of
tropical effect, with caves and naked rock and sunlight; of the relief
of cypresses; of the troubled, busy looking groups of sea pines, that
seem always as if they were being wielded and swept together by a
whirlwind; of the air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over the
myrtles and the scented underwoods; of the empurpled hills standing
up, solemn and sharp, out of the green gold air of the east at evening.
There go many elements, without doubt, to the making of one such moment
of intense perception; and it is on the happy agreement of these many
elements, on the harmonious vibration of many nerves, that the whole
delight of the moment must depend. You should have heard him speak of what he loved; of the tent pitched
beside the talking water; of the stars overhead at night; of the blest
return of morning, the peep of day over the moors, the awaking birds
among the birches; how he abhorred the long winter shut in cities; and
with what delight, at the return of the spring, he once more pitched his
camp in the living out of doors. It was one of the best things I got from my education as an engineer:
of which, however, as a way of life, I wish to speak with sympathy. It
takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour sides,
which is the richest form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it
gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with
dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go
far to cure him of any taste (if ever he had one) for the miserable life
of cities. And when it has done so, it carries him back and shuts him
in an office! From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing
boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships,
and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining Pharos, he must apply
his long sighted eyes to the pretty niceties of drawing, or measure his
inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise
youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against
two parts of drudgery between four walls, and for the sake of the one,
manfully accept the other... Continue reading book >>
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