and scarlet, and the hollow of heaven
was filled with the daylight. The isle--the undiscovered,
the scarce believed in--now lay before them and close
aboard; and Herrick thought that never in his dreams had he
beheld anything more strange and delicate.

Stevenson's similes, instead of illustrating concrete things by
others less concrete, often reverse the process, as in the
following: "The isle at this hour, with its smooth floor of
sand, the pillared roof overhead and the pendant illumination of
the lamps, wore an air of unreality, like a deserted theater or
a public garden at midnight." Every image gets its foothold in
some tap-root of reality.

The place of Robert Louis Stevenson is not explained by
emphasizing the perfection of his technique. Artist he is, but
more: a vigorous modern mind with a definite and enheartening
view of things, a philosophy at once broad and convincing. He is
a psychologist intensely interested in the great questions--which,
of course, means the moral questions. Read the quaint
Fable in which two of the characters in "Treasure Island" hold
converse upon themselves, the story in which they participate
and the author who made them. It is as if Stevenson stood aside
a moment from the proper objectivity of the fictionist, to tell
us in his own person that all his story-making was but an
allegory of life, its joy, its mystery, its duty, its triumph
and its doom. Although he is too much the artist to intrude
philosophic comments upon human fate into his fiction, after the
fashion of Thackeray or Meredith, the comment is there, implicit
in his fiction, even as it is explicit in his essays, which are
for this reason a sort of complement of his fiction: a sort of
philosophical marginal note upon the stories. Stevenson was that
type of modern mind which, no longer finding it possible to hold
fast by the older, complacent cock-sureness with regard to the
theologian's heaven, is still unshaken in its conviction that
life is beneficent, the obligation of duty imperative, the
meaning of existence spiritual. Puzzlingly protean in his
expressional moods (his conversations in especial), he was
constant in this intellectual, or temperamental, attitude:
"Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him," represents his
feeling, and the strongest poem he ever wrote, "If This Were
Faith," voices his deepest conviction. Meanwhile, the
superficies of life offered a hundred consolations, a hundr