Stevanson Memories

Horowhenua Chronicle, 16 November 1916, Page 3

Stevanson Memories

« I'LACES THAT HE LOVED Stevenson was a wanderer from his birth, tin absolute stranger to the hom- ' ■ng spirit. Mr Edmund Gosse has relatol. how. while the rest of hi.s contemporaries settled down' and acquired the impedimenta of the householder. Stevenson wa.s wont to laugh at theii encumbrances, and dispise their provinciality. He himself had no continuing, city ; he was an- Ariel of the open field. But, if he can be pinned to any tarryin g-plaee, the imagination will always associate him most closely with that "grey metropolis of the winds," whose "beauty of natural locality, impress, veness of monumental grandeur, and richness of romantic atmosphere" kept calling his fancy to the most congenial home he ever knew -the Edinburgh of his boyhood. .S'ometli/hg in his own temperament seems peculiarly akin to that keen and questing city of dreams. He nevei forgot ''the august air of the castle on its rock, -nocturnal passages of lights and trees. . . . the bidding up of the city on a misty day, house above, house, spire above spire, until it was received into a sky of softly glowing clouds and seemed to pass on and upward, by fresh grades and rises, city bevond city, a new Jerusalem, bodily scaling heaven." Ediburgh was undoubtedly his nearest approach to home and with it went also his young memories of the I'entlandi- Hlill. which later on was enshrined in the pages of "St. Ives" and "Weir of Herniinston." It is typically characteristic of Stevenson's invalid condition through life that, just as his brain was always buoyant in bed, so his recollection was liveliest and most detailed in absence. It was from Hyeres, after twenty years of separation from the garden of Colinton Manse, that he wrote with such eager accuracy the impression of that enehauted pleasaunce of his childhood It was in Vailima, after an even longer exile, th'at lie set out his glow.'ifrig inventory of the charms of Swnnston Cottage with its air of a rambling, infinitesimal cathedral. And with these must be commemorated that alea-i holiday refuge. Cramond ,on the Firth of Forth "a little hamlet on a little river, embowered in woods Mid, looking forth

over » <rreat flat of qnioksand to where little'islet stood planted in the sea. The tenderness of all these keen descriptions in one more proof that it ever R-.L.S. was at home, it was m Scotland. Tn England certainly he was never at home; he could not appreciate the country, nor set upon easy terms with its inhabitants. . . flitf .in France freely embracing the nomad Is'Pe which lav nearest his heart, he was at least as. happv as he could' bo. .He felt well there and lie could enjoy life. Ho liked the people n.»d their pleasant easy wins ■civilisation. The absence ot rostra-'.nt, the freedom. the romantic imnginaton of the country warmed I i heart.-Arthur Waugh. .in the. Out-, look.