g Browning's
noble hymn,

"Let us begin and carry up this corpse,
Singing together!
Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes
Each in its tether
Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain...
That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought,
Rarer, intenser,
Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought,
Chafes in the censer.
Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop;
Seek we sepulture
On a tall mountain...
Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights:
Wait ye the warning!
Our low life was the level's and the night's;
He's for the morning.
Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head,
'Ware the beholders!
This is our master, famous, calm and dead,
Borne on our shoulders...

Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects
Loftily lying,
Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying."

II

PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER

Stevenson had a motley personality, which is sufficiently evident in
his portraits. There was in him the Puritan, the man of the world, and
the vagabond. There was something too of the obsolete soldier of
fortune, with the cocked and feathered hat, worn audaciously on one
side. There was also a touch of the elfin, the uncanny--the mysterious
charm that belongs to the borderland between the real and the unreal
world--the element so conspicuous and so indefinable in the art of
Hawthorne. Writers so different as Defoe, Cooper, Poe, and Sir Thomas
Browne, are seen with varying degrees of emphasis in his literary
temperament. He was whimsical as an imaginative child; and everyone
has noticed that he never grew old. His buoyant optimism was based on
a chronic experience of physical pain, for pessimists like
Schopenhauer are usually men in comfortable circumstances, and of
excellent bodily health. His courage and cheerfulness under depressing
circumstances are so splendid to contemplate that some critics believe
that in time his _Letters_ may be regarded as his greatest literary
work, for they are priceless in their unconscious revelation of a
beautiful soul.

Great as Stevenson was as a writer, he was still greater as a Man. So
many admirable books have been written by men whose character will not