was
full of enchantment and of latent romance, only waiting to take shape
and substance in the forms of art. It was his birthright--

"to hear
The great bell beating far and near--
The odd, unknown, enchanted gong
That on the road hales men along,
That from the mountain calls afar,
That lures the vessel from a star,
And with a still, aerial sound
Makes all the earth enchanted ground."

He had not only the poet's mind but the poet's senses: in youth ginger
was only too hot in his mouth, and the chimes at midnight only too
favourite a music. At the same time he was not less a born preacher and
moralist and son of the Covenanters after his fashion. He had about him,
as has been said, little spirit of social or other conformity; but an
active and searching private conscience kept him for ever calling in
question both the grounds of his own conduct and the validity of the
accepted codes and compromises of society. He must try to work out a
scheme of morality suitable to his own case and temperament, which found
the prohibitory law of Moses chill and uninspiring, but in the Sermon on
the Mount a strong incentive to all those impulses of pity and charity
to which his heart was prone. In early days his sense of social
injustice and the inequalities of human opportunity made him inwardly
much of a rebel, who would have embraced and acted on theories of
socialism or communism, could he have found any that did not seem to him
at variance with ineradicable instincts of human nature. All his life
the artist and the moralist in him alike were in rebellion against the
bourgeois spirit,--against timid, negative, and shuffling substitutes
for active and courageous well-doing,--and declined to worship at the
shrine of what he called the bestial goddesses Comfort and
Respectability. The moralist in him helped the artist by backing with
the force of a highly sensitive conscience his instinctive love of
perfection in his work. The artist qualified the moralist by
discountenancing any preference for the harsh, the sour, or the
self-mortifying forms of virtue, and encouraging the love for all tender
or heroic, glowing, generous, and cheerful forms.

Above all things, perhaps, Stevenson was by instinct an adventurer and
practical experimentalist in life. Many poets are content to dream, and
many, perhaps most, moralists to preach: Stevenson must ever be doing
and undergoing. He was no sentimentalist, to