The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 2

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C. Scribner's Sons, 1901 - Authors, Scottish
 

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Page 188 - UNDER the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be ; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.
Page 217 - Now the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully hazarded...
Page 189 - Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably, Neat-footed and weak-fingered: in his face Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race, Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea, The brown eyes radiant with vivacity There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace Of passion and impudence and energy.
Page 169 - There are, so far as I know, three ways, and three ways only, of writing a story. You may take a plot and fit characters to it, or you may take a character and choose incidents and situations to develop it, or lastly — you must bear with me while I try to make this clear...
Page 201 - For fourteen years I have not had a day's real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly.
Page 165 - It is the first realistic South Sea story; I mean with real South Sea character and details of life. Everybody else who has tried, that I have seen, got carried away by the romance, and ended in a kind of sugar candy sham epic, and the whole effect was lost — there was no etching, no human grin, consequently no conviction. Now I have got the smell and look of the thing a good deal. You will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale than if you had read a library.
Page 203 - ... beginning of his illness he began to feel the ebbing of this power, it was strange and painful to hear him reject one word after another as inadequate, and at length desist from the search and leave his phrase unfinished rather than finish it without propriety. It was perhaps another Celtic trait that his affections and emotions, passionate as these were, and liable to passionate ups and downs, found the most eloquent expression both in words and gestures. Love, anger, and indignation shone through...
Page 235 - Go with each of us to rest; if any awake, temper to them the. dark hours of watching; and when the day returns...
Page 124 - Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another.
Page 212 - Yet would to-day when Courtesy grows chill, And life's fine loyalties are turned to jest, Some fire of thine might burn within us still ! Ah, would but one might lay his lance in rest, And charge in earnest . . were it but a mill...

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