LITMIR.BIZ

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over a Schnitt (half-glass) for nearly an hour. An opera is far more real than real life to me. It seems as if stage illusion, and particularly this hardest to swallow and most conventional illusion of them all – an opera – would never stale upon me. I wish that life was an opera. I should like to live in one; but I don’t know in what quarter of the globe I shall find a society so constituted. Besides, it would soon pall: imagine asking for three-kreuzer cigars in recitative, or giving the washerwoman the inventory of your dirty clothes in a sustained and flourishous aria.

      I am in a right good mood this morning to sit here and write to you; but not to give you news. There is a great stir of life, in a quiet, almost country fashion, all about us here. Some one is hammering a beef-steak in the rez-de-chaussée: there is a great clink of pitchers and noise of the pump-handle at the public well in the little square-kin round the corner. The children, all seemingly within a month, and certainly none above five, that always go halting and stumbling up and down the roadway, are ordinarily very quiet, and sit sedately puddling in the gutter, trying, I suppose, poor little devils! to understand their Muttersprache; but they, too, make themselves heard from time to time in little incomprehensible antiphonies, about the drift that comes down to them by their rivers from the strange lands higher up the Gasse. Above all, there is here such a twittering of canaries (I can see twelve out of our window), and such continual visitation of grey doves and big-nosed sparrows, as make our little bye-street into a perfect aviary.

      I look across the Gasse at our opposite neighbour, as he dandles his baby about, and occasionally takes a spoonful or two of some pale slimy nastiness that looks like dead porridge, if you can take the conception. These two are his only occupations. All day long you can hear him singing over the brat when he is not eating; or see him eating when he is not keeping baby. Besides which, there comes into his house a continual round of visitors that puts me in mind of the luncheon hour at home. As he has thus no ostensible avocation, we have named him “the W.S.” to give a flavour of respectability to the street.

      Enough of the Gasse. The weather is here much colder. It rained a good deal yesterday; and though it is fair and sunshiny again to-day, and we can still sit, of course, with our windows open, yet there is no more excuse for the siesta; and the bathe in the river, except for cleanliness, is no longer a necessity of life. The Main is very swift. In one part of the baths it is next door to impossible to swim against it, and I suspect that, out in the open, it would be quite impossible. – Adieu, my dear mother, and believe me, ever your affectionate son,

Robert Louis Stevenson(Rentier).

      To Charles Baxter

      On the way home with Sir Walter Simpson from Germany. The L.J.R. herein mentioned was a short-lived Essay Club of only six members; its meetings were held in a public-house in Advocate’s Close; the meaning of its initials (as recently divulged by Mr. Baxter) was Liberty, Justice, Reverence; no doubt understood by the members in some fresh and esoteric sense of their own.

Boulogne Sur Mer, Wednesday, 3rd or 4th September 1872.

      Blame me not that this epistle

      Is the first you have from me.

      Idleness has held me fettered,

      But at last the times are bettered

      And once more I wet my whistle

      Here, in France beside the sea.

      All the green and idle weather

      I have had in sun and shower,

      Such an easy warm subsistence,

      Such an indolent existence

      I should find it hard to sever

      Day from day and hour from hour.

      Many a tract-provided ranter

      May upbraid me, dark and sour,

      Many a bland Utilitarian

      Or excited Millenarian,

      – “Pereunt et imputantur

      You must speak to every hour.”

      But (the very term’s deceptive)

      You at least, my friend, will see,

      That in sunny grassy meadows

      Trailed across by moving shadows

      To be actively receptive

      Is as much as man can be.

      He that all the winter grapples

      Difficulties, thrust and ward —

      Needs to cheer him thro’ his duty

      Memories of sun and beauty

      Orchards with the russet apples

      Lying scattered on the sward.

      Many such I keep in prison,

      Keep them here at heart unseen,

      Till my muse again rehearses

      Long years hence, and in my verses

      You shall meet them rearisen

      Ever comely, ever green.

      You know how they never perish,

      How, in time of later art,

      Memories consecrate and sweeten

      These defaced and tempest-beaten

      Flowers of former years we cherish,

      Half a life, against our heart.

      Most, those love-fruits withered greenly,

      Those frail, sickly amourettes,

      How they brighten with the distance

      Take new strength and new existence

      Till we see them sitting queenly

      Crowned and courted by regrets!

      All that loveliest and best is,

      Aureole-fashion round their head,

      They that looked in life but plainly,

      How they stir our spirits vainly

      When they come to us Alcestis-

      like returning from the dead!

      Not the old love but another,

      Bright she comes at Memory’s call

      Our forgotten vows reviving

      To a newer, livelier living,

      As the dead child to the mother

      Seems the fairest child of all.

      Thus our Goethe, sacred master,

      Travelling backward thro’ his youth,

      Surely wandered wrong in trying

      To renew the old, undying

      Loves that cling in memory faster

      Than they ever lived in truth.

      So; en voilà assez de mauvais vers. Let us finish with a word or two in honest prose, tho’ indeed I shall so soon be back again and, if you be in town as I hope, so soon get linked again down the Lothian road by a cigar or two and a liquor, that it is perhaps scarce worth the postage to send my letter on before me. I have just been long enough away to be satisfied and even anxious to get home again and talk the matter over with my friends. I shall have plenty to tell you; and principally plenty that I do not care to write; and I daresay, you, too, will have a lot of gossip. What about Ferrier? Is the L.J.R. think you to go naked and unashamed this winter? He with his charming idiosyncrasy was in my eyes the vine-leaf that preserved our self-respect. All the rest of us are such shadows, compared to his full-flavoured personality; but I must not spoil my own début. I am trenching upon one of the essayettes which I propose to introduce as a novelty this year before that august assembly. For we must not let it die. It is a sickly baby, but what with nursing, and pap, and the like, I do not see why it should not have a stout manhood

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