but when he was moved to anger or any fierce emotion, they seemed literally to blaze and glow with a fiery light. His hair was fair and even yellow in colour until he was five-and-twenty; after that it rapidly deepened, and in later years was quite dark, but without any touch of black. When he reached the tropics, and the fear of taking cold was to some extent removed, he wore it short once more, to his own great satisfaction and comfort. His complexion was brown and always high, even in the confinement of the sickroom; the only phrase for it is the "rich-tinted" used by W. E. Henley in the spirited and vivid lines which he kindly permitted me to quote.

In height he was about five feet ten, slender in figure, and thin to the last degree. In all his movements he was most graceful: every gesture was full of an unconscious beauty, and his restless and supple gait has been well compared to the pacing to and fro of some wild forest animal. To this unusual and most un-English grace it was principally due that he was often taken for a foreigner. We have seen that Mr. Lang found his appearance at three-and-twenty like anything but that of a Scotsman, and the same difficulty pursued Stevenson through life, more especially on the Continent of Europe. "It is a great thing, believe me," he wrote in the Inland Voyage, "to present a good normal type of the nation you belong to"; and, as he says in the same chapter, "I might come from any part of the globe, it seems, except from where I do." In France he was sometimes taken for a Frenchman from some other prov. ince; he has recorded his imprisonment as a German

spy; and at a later date he wrote: "I have found out what is wrong with me-I look like a Pole."

His speech was distinctly marked with a Scottish intonation that seemed to every one both pleasing and appropriate, and this, when he chose, he could broaden to the widest limits of the vernacular. His voice was always of a surprising strength and resonance, even when phthisis had laid its hand most heavily upon him. It was the one gift he really possessed for the stage, and in reading aloud he was unsurpassed. In his full, rich tones there was a sympathetic quality that seemed to play directly on the heart-strings like the notes of a violin. Mrs. Stevenson wrote: "I shall never forget Louis reading Walt Whitman's Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, followed by O Captain, my Captain, to a room full of people, some of whom had said that Whitman lacked sentiment and tenderness. All alike, men and women, sat spellbound during the reading, and I have never seen any audience so deeply moved.” Nor, for my part, shall I forget his rendering of the Duke of Wellington Ode on the evening after the news of Tennyson's death had arrived at Vailima.

When his attention was given to objects or persons his observation was singularly keen and accurate, but for the most part his memory for the faces of his acquaintances was positively bad. His hearing was singularly acute, although the appreciation of the exact pitch of musical notes was wanting. But between delicate shades of pronunciation he could discriminate with great precision. I can give an instance in point. The vowels in Polynesian languages

are pronounced as in Italian, and the diphthongs retain the sounds of the separate vowels, more or less slurred together. Thus it can be understood that the difference between ae and ai at the end of a word in rapid conversation is of the very slightest, and in Samoa they are practically indistinguishable. In the Marquesas Stevenson was able to separate them. At Vailima one day we were making trial of these and other subtleties of sound; in almost every case his ear was exactly correct.. Nothing more shook his admiration for Herman Melville than that writer's inability to approximate to the native names of the Marquesas and Tahiti: and in his own delicate hearing lay perhaps the root of his devotion to style.

CHAPTER XVII

R. L. S.

"Who is it that says most? which can say more
Than this rich praise that you alone are you?"

F

OR any who have read the foregoing pages it should be unnecessary here to dwell upon the

sources of many qualities which distinguished Stevenson throughout his life, or the degree to which they were called forth in turn or affected by the many variations of his environment. A Scot born, we have seen how Edinburgh and Swanston set the seal upon his nationality, and how from father and mother he drew diverse elements of temperament and character. We have seen the effect of his schooling, such as it was, and the prolonged leisure of his boyhood; of the influence of his friends and his reading; the results of his training as an engineer and as an advocatè; of his wanderings in France, his breakdown in America, and the happiness of his married life.

In several respects it must be owned that he was fortunate. His long preludes and painful apprenticeship would clearly have proved impossible, had it been necessary for him to make money at an early age, and even the history of his maturity would have been materially changed if he had been compelled to rely solely upon his writing to meet the expenses of his household. His late beginning had, again, this advantage: tardy in some ways as he was, he had left

behind him the ignobler elements of youth before his voice was heard or recognised. The green-sickness of immaturity was over, at the worst, only one or two touches of self-consciousness remained, and even in his earliest published essays there rings out the note of high spirit and cheerfulness which issued from the sick-room of later years, deceived for a time the most penetrating of critics, and was perhaps the best part of his message to a world that had fallen on weary days.

In regarding Stevenson, both as man and writer, we find that the most unusual fact about him, was the coupling of the infinite variety of his character and intellect, with the extraordinary degree in which he was moved by every thought and every feeling. Few men are acted upon by so wide a range of emotions and ideas; few men hold even two or three ideas, or feel even a few emotions, with nearly as much intensity as compelled him under all. When we have considered both number and degree, we shall find other gifts no less remarkable and even more characteristic —the unfailing spirit of chivalry and the combination of qualities that went to make up his peculiar and individual charm. Though it is inevitable thus to take him piecemeal and to dwell upon one side at a time to the exclusion of the others he so rapidly turned upon us, we must never allow this process to efface in our minds what is far more essential-the image of the living whole.

I. If I have failed to produce a correct impression of his intense energy, I have quoted him and written