y and invincible stoicism:

"Profound joy mingles with my grief. I feel as if something very
beautiful had happened--not death; although Henry is with us no
longer, yet the memory of his sweet and virtuous soul must ever cheer
and comfort me. My heart is filled with praise to God for the gift of
such a brother, and may I never distrust the love and wisdom of Him
who made him and who has now called him to labour in more glorious
fields than earth affords. You ask for some particulars relating to
Henry's illness. I feel like saying that Henry was never affected,
never reached by it. I never before saw such a manifestation of the
power of spirit over matter. Very often I heard him tell his visitors
that he enjoyed existence as well as ever. The thought of death, he
said, did not trouble him. His thoughts had entertained him all his
life and did still. . . . He considered occupation as necessary for
the sick as for those in health, and accomplished a vast amount of
labour in those last few months."

A rare "invalidity" this--a little confusing easy classifications. I
think Stevenson would have felt and said that brother and sister were
well worthy of each other; and that the sister was almost as grand and
cheery a stoic, with no literary profession of it, as was the brother.

The other thing relates to Stevenson's _human soul_. I find Mr Symons
says, at p. 243, that Stevenson "had something a trifle elfish and
uncanny about him, as of a bewitched being who was not actually human--had
not actually a human soul"--in which there may be a glimmer of truth
viewed from his revelation of artistic curiosities in some aspects, but
is hardly true of him otherwise; and this Mr Symons himself seems to have
felt, when, at p. 246, he writes: "He is one of those writers who speak
_to us on easy terms_, with whom we _may exchange affections_." How
"affections" could be exchanged on easy terms between the normal human
being and an elfish creature actually _without a human soul_ (seeing that
affections are, as Mr Matthew Arnold might have said, at least, three-
fourths of soul) is more, I confess, than I can quite see at present; but
in this rather _maladroit_ contradiction Mr Symons does point at one
phase of the problem of Stevenson--this, namely that to all the ordinary
happy or pleasure-endings he opposes, as it were of set purpose, gloom,
as though to certain things he was quite i