genius mingles strength with grace,
... 'Neath thy spell the world grows fair;
Our hearts revive, our inmost souls are stirred,
And all our English race awaits thy latest word.'
--Sir L. MORRIS'
Birthday Ode to the late Lord Tennyson.

Beginning his literary career as a writer of such quaint books of travel
as _An Inland Voyage_ and _Through the Cevennes with a Donkey_, such
charming essays as _Roads_, _Ordered South_, _El Dorado_, and many
others, Mr Stevenson was not long in entering the arena as a
story-teller. His first printed stories were _A Lodging for the Night_,
which appeared in _Temple Bar_ in October 1877; _The Sire de Maletroit's
Door_, in the same magazine in January 1878; and _Will o' the Mill_, in
_Cornhill_, also in January 1878.

In _Cornhill_, in 1876 had appeared the series of essays republished as
_Virginibus Puerisque_, and in 1877 and 1878 those afterwards collected
under the title _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_. There also began,
now and then, to be short stories from his pen in _Cornhill_,
_Macmillan_, _Longmans_, Mr H. Norman's _Christmas Annual_, _The Court
and Society Review,_ and other magazines. These, as they added
originality and a certain weirdness of plot to his already recognised
beauty of style, still further attracted that cultured public which had
at once accepted his earlier work as that of a master of English. As
already stated, it was _Will o' the Mill_, a charmingly written story of
still life, with a quiet philosophy all its own, that Mr Hamerton had
pronounced a masterpiece of style. _Markheim_ was a graphic, but very
unpleasant, story of a murder; _Olalla_, a horrible, but powerfully
written, sketch of hereditary insanity, with a beautiful setting of
Italian scenery to relieve the gloomy picture.

_Thrawn Janet_ which, with most of the tales in _The Merry Men_, was
written at Pitlochry, appeared in _Cornhill_ in 1880. Mr Stevenson
himself considered it one of his best stories, and thought it an
excellent piece of dialect writing. It is weird and impressive in the
extreme, and no one who has read it is likely to forget the minister of
Balweary in the vale of Dull, and his terrible experiences in the matter
of a housekeeper; the 'het lowin' wind' and the coppery sky of that day
on which he met the black man coming down by Dull water, and knew that
he had spoken with the enemy of souls himself; or the awful