have seen the grass grow
rankly on my grave; I have heard the train of mourners come weeping and
go laughing away again. And when I was alone there in the kirk-yard, and
the birds began to grow familiar with the grave-stone, I have begun to
laugh also, and laughed and laughed until night-flowers came out above
me. I have survived myself, and somehow live on, a curious changeling, a
merry ghost; and do not mind living on, finding it not unpleasant; only
had rather, a thousandfold, died and been done with the whole damned
show for ever. It is a strange feeling at first to survive yourself, but
one gets used to that as to most things. _Et puis_, is it not one's own
fault? Why did not one lie still in the grave? Why rise again among
men's troubles and toils, where the wicked wag their shock beards and
hound the weary out to labour? When I was safe in prison, and stone
walls and iron bars were an hermitage about me, who told me to burst the
mild constraint and go forth where the sun dazzles, and the wind
pierces, and the loud world sounds and jangles all through the weary
day? I mind an old print of a hermit coming out of a great wood towards
evening and shading his bleared eyes to see all the kingdoms of the
earth before his feet, where towered cities and castled hills, and
stately rivers, and good corn lands made one great chorus of temptation
for his weak spirit, and I think I am the hermit, and would to God I had
dwelt ever in the wood of penitence[20]----

R. L. S.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

The _Burns_ herein mentioned is an article undertaken in the early
summer of the same year for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In the end
Stevenson's work was thought to convey a view of the poet too frankly
critical, and too little in accordance with the accepted Scotch
tradition; and the publishers, duly paying him for his labours,
transferred the task to Professor Shairp. The volume here announced
on the three Scottish eighteenth-century poets unfortunately never
came into being. The _Charles of Orleans_ essay appeared in the
Cornhill Magazine for December of the following year; that on Villon
(with the story on the same theme, _A Lodging for the Night_) not
until the autumn of 1877. The essay on Beranger referred to at the
end of the letter was one commissioned and used by the editor of the
Encyclopaedia; _Spring_ was a prose poem, of which the manuscript,
sent to me at Cambridge,