of the most
trying and weakening forms of ill-health--should have been so
full-blooded, as it were, so keen for contact with all forms of human
life and character, what is called the rougher and coarser being by no
means excluded. Not only this: he was himself a rover--seeking daily
adventure and contact with men and women of alien habit and taste and
liking. His patience is supported by his humour. He was a bit of a
vagabond in the good sense of the word, and always going round in search
of "honest men," like Diogenes, and with no tub to retire into or the
desire for it. He thus on this side touches the Chaucers and their
kindred, as well as the Spensers and Dantes and their often illusive
_confreres_. His voyage as a steerage passenger across the Atlantic is
only one out of a whole chapter of such episodes, and is more significant
and characteristic even than the _Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes_
or the _Inland Voyage_. These might be ranked with the "Sentimental
Journeys" that have sometimes been the fashion--that was truly of a
prosaic and risky order. The appeal thus made to an element deep in the
English nature will do much to keep his memory green in the hearts that
could not rise to appreciation of his style and literary gifts at all. He
loves the roadways and the by-ways, and those to be met with there--like
him in this, though unlike him in most else. The love of the roadsides
and the greenwood--and the queer miscellany of life there unfolded and
ever changing--a kind of gipsy-like longing for the tent and familiar
contact with nature and rude human-nature in the open dates from beyond
Chaucer, and remains and will have gratification--the longing for novelty
and all the accidents, as it were, of pilgrimage and rude social travel.
You see it bubble up, like a true and new nature-spring, through all the
surface coatings of culture and artificiality, in Stevenson. He anew,
without pretence, enlivens it--makes it first a part of himself, and then
a part of literature once more. Listen to him, as he sincerely sings
this passion for the pilgrimage--or the modern phase of it--innocent
vagabond roving:

"Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me;
Give the jolly heaven above,
And the by-way nigh me:
Bed in the bush, with stars to see;
Bread I dip in the river--
Here's the life for a man like me,
Here's the life for ever. . . .

"Let the blow fall soo