a blood-vessel and suffusion
of blood on the brain. He had up to the moment almost of his sudden and
unexpected death been busy on _Weir of Hermiston_ and _St Ives_, which he
left unfinished--the latter having been brought to a conclusion by Mr
Quiller-Couch.

CHAPTER IX--SOME CHARACTERISTICS

In Stevenson we lost one of the most powerful writers of our day, as well
as the most varied in theme and style. When I use the word "powerful," I
do not mean merely the producing of the most striking or sensational
results, nor the facility of weaving a fascinating or blood-curdling
plot; I mean the writer who seemed always to have most in reserve--a
secret fund of power and fascination which always pointed beyond the
printed page, and set before the attentive and careful reader a strange
but fascinating _personality_. Other authors have done that in measure.
There was Hawthorne, behind whose writings there is always the wistful,
cold, far-withdrawn spectator of human nature--eerie, inquisitive, and, I
had almost said, inquisitorial--a little bloodless, eerie, weird, and
cobwebby. There was Dr Wendell Holmes, with his problems of heredity, of
race-mixture and weird inoculation, as in _Elsie Venner_ and _The
Guardian Angel_, and there were Poe and Charles Whitehead. Stevenson, in
a few of his writings--in one of the _Merry Men_ chapters and in _Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde_, and, to some extent, in _The Master of
Ballantrae_--showed that he could enter on the obscure and, in a sense,
weird and metaphysical elements in human life; though always there was,
too, a touch at least of gloomy suggestion, from which, as it seemed, he
could not there wholly escape. But always, too, there was a touch that
suggests the universal.

Even in the stories that would be classed as those of incident and
adventure merely, _Treasure Island_, _Kidnapped_, and the rest, there is
a sense as of some unaffected but fine symbolism that somehow touches
something of possibility in yourself as you read. The simplest narrative
from his hand proclaimed itself a deep study in human nature--its motives
tendencies, and possibilities. In these stories there is promise at once
of the most realistic imagination, the most fantastic romance, keen
insights into some sides of human nature, and weird fancies, as well as
the most delicate and dainty pictures of character. And this is
precisely what we have--always with a vein of the finest autobiography--a
kin