The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition. Volume 23. Robert Louis Stevenson

was the shadow of the woods all riven with great golden rifts of sunshine. A little faint talk of waves upon the beach; the wild strange crying of seagulls over the sea; and the hoarse wood-pigeons and shrill, sweet robins full of their autumn love-making among the trees, made up a delectable concerto of peaceful noises. I spent the whole afternoon among these sights and sounds with Simpson. And we came home from Queensferry on the outside of the coach and four, along a beautiful way full of ups and downs among woody, uneven country, laid out (fifty years ago, I suppose) by my grandfather, on the notion of Hogarth’s line of beauty. You see my taste for roads is hereditary.

      Friday.– I was wakened this morning by a long flourish of bugles and a roll upon the drums – the réveillé at the Castle. I went to the window; it was a grey, quiet dawn, a few people passed already up the street between the gardens, already I heard the noise of an early cab somewhere in the distance, most of the lamps had been extinguished but not all, and there were two or three lit windows in the opposite façade that showed where sick people and watchers had been awake all night and knew not yet of the new, cool day. This appealed to me with a special sadness: how often in the old times my nurse and I had looked across at these, and sympathised!

      I wish you would read Michelet’s Louis Quatorze et la Révocation de l’Édit de Nantes. I read it out in the garden, and the autumnal trees and weather, and my own autumnal humour, and the pitiable prolonged tragedies of Madame and of Molière, as they look, darkling and sombre, out of their niches in the great gingerbread façade of the Grand Âge, go wonderfully hand in hand.

      I wonder if my revised paper has pleased the Saturday? If it has not, I shall be rather sorry – no, very sorry indeed – but not surprised and certainly not hurt. It will be a great disappointment; but I am glad to say that, among all my queasy, troublesome feelings, I have not a sensitive vanity. Not that I am not as conceited as you know me to be; only I go easy over the coals in that matter.

      I have been out reading Hallam in the garden; and have been talking with my old friend the gardener, a man of singularly hard favour and few teeth. He consulted me this afternoon on the choice of books, premising that his taste ran mainly on war and travel. On travel I had to own at once my ignorance. I suggested Kinglake, but he had read that; and so, finding myself here unhorsed, I turned about and at last recollected Southey’s Lives of the Admirals, and the volumes of Macaulay containing the wars of William. Can you think of any other for this worthy man? I believe him to hold me in as high an esteem as any one can do; and I reciprocate his respect, for he is quite an intelligent companion.

      On Saturday morning I read Morley’s article aloud to Bob in one of the walks of the public garden. I was full of it and read most excitedly; and we were ever, as we went to and fro, passing a bench where a man sat reading the Bible aloud to a small circle of the devout. This man is well known to me, sits there all day, sometimes reading, sometimes singing, sometimes distributing tracts. Bob laughed much at the opposition preachers – I never noticed it till he called my attention to the other; but it did not seem to me like opposition – does it to you? – each in his way was teaching what he thought best.

      Last night, after reading Walt Whitman a long while for my attempt to write about him, I got tête-montée, rushed out up to M. S., came in, took out Leaves of Grass, and without giving the poor unbeliever time to object, proceeded to wade into him with favourite passages. I had at least this triumph, that he swore he must read some more of him. – Ever your faithful friend,

Louis Stevenson.

      To Mrs. Sitwell

      On the question of the authorship of the Ode to the Cuckoo, which Burke thought the most beautiful lyric in our language, the debate was between the claims of John Logan, minister of South Leith (1745-1785), and his friend and fellow-worker Michael Bruce. Those of Logan have, I believe, been now vindicated past doubt.

[Edinburgh], Saturday, October 4, 1873.

      It is a little sharp to-day; but bright and sunny with a sparkle in the air, which is delightful after four days of unintermitting rain. In the streets I saw two men meet after a long separation, it was plain. They came forward with a little run and leaped at each other’s hands. You never saw such bright eyes as they both had. It put one in a good humour to see it.

      8 p.m.– I made a little more out of my work than I have made for a long while back; though even now I cannot make things fall into sentences – they only sprawl over the paper in bald orphan clauses. Then I was about in the afternoon with Baxter; and we had a good deal of fun, first rhyming on the names of all the shops we passed, and afterwards buying needles and quack drugs from open-air vendors, and taking much pleasure in their inexhaustible eloquence. Every now and then as we went, Arthur’s Seat showed its head at the end of a street. Now, to-day the blue sky and the sunshine were both entirely wintry; and there was about the hill, in these glimpses, a sort of thin, unreal, crystalline distinctness that I have not often seen excelled. As the sun began to go down over the valley between the new town and the old, the evening grew resplendent; all the gardens and low-lying buildings sank back and became almost invisible in a mist of wonderful sun, and the Castle stood up against the sky, as thin and sharp in outline as a castle cut out of paper. Baxter made a good remark about Princes Street, that it was the most elastic street for length that he knew; sometimes it looks, as it looked to-night, interminable, a way leading right into the heart of the red sundown; sometimes, again, it shrinks together, as if for warmth, on one of the withering, clear east-windy days, until it seems to lie underneath your feet.

      I want to let you see these verses from an Ode to the Cuckoo written by one of the ministers of Leith in the middle of last century – the palmy days of Edinburgh – who was a friend of Hume and Adam Smith and the whole constellation. The authorship of these beautiful verses has been most truculently fought about; but whoever wrote them (and it seems as if this Logan had) they are lovely —