didst betray me to a ling'ring book,
And wrap me in a gown,'

says George Herbert, who, in his earlier ambitions, would fain have
ruffled it with the best at the court of King James. But from Stevenson,
although not only the town, but oceans and continents, beckoned him to
deeds, no such wail escaped. His indomitable cheerfulness was never
embarked in the cock-boat of his own prosperity. A high and simple
courage shines through all his writings. It is supposed to be a normal
human feeling for those who are hale to sympathize with others who are in
pain. Stevenson reversed the position, and there is no braver spectacle
in literature than to see him not asking others to lower their voices in
his sick-room, but raising his own voice that he may make them feel at
ease and avoid imposing his misfortunes on their notice. 'Once when I
was groaning aloud with physical pain,' he says in the essay on _Child's
Play_, 'a young gentleman came into the room and nonchalantly inquired if
I had seen his bow and arrow. He made no account of my groans, which he
accepted, as he had to accept so much else, as a piece of the
inexplicable conduct of his elders; and, like a wise young gentleman, he
would waste no wonder on the subject.' Was there ever a passage like
this? The sympathy of the writer is wholly with the child, and the
child's absolute indifference to his own sufferings. It might have been
safely predicted that this man, should he ever attain to pathos, would be
free from the facile, maudlin pathos of the hired sentimentalist.

And so also with what Dr. Johnson has called 'metaphysical distresses.'
It is striking enough to observe how differently the quiet monasteries of
the Carthusian and Trappist brotherhoods affected Matthew Arnold and
Robert Louis Stevenson. In his well-known elegiac stanzas Matthew Arnold
likens his own state to that of the monks:

'Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride--
I come to shed them at their side.'

To Stevenson, on the other hand, our Lady of the Snows is a mistaken
divinity, and the place a monument of chilly error,--for once in a way he
takes it on himself to be a preacher, his temperament gives voice in a
creed:

'And ye, O brethren, what if God,
When from Heaven's top He spies abroad,
And sees on this t