the successes of other men at least as much as in his own triumphs.
One almost felt that, so long as good books were written, it was no
great concern to him whether he or others wrote them. Born with an
artist's craving for beauty of expression, he achieved that beauty
with infinite pains. Confident in romance and in the beneficence of
joy, he cherished the flame of joyous romance with more than Vestal
fervor, and kept it ardent in a body which Nature, unkind from the
beginning, seemed to delight in visiting with more unkindness--a
"soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed" almost from birth. And his
books leave the impression that he did this chiefly from a sense of
duty: that he labored and kept the lamp alight chiefly because, for
the time, other and stronger men did not.

Had there been another Scott, another Dumas--if I may change the
image--to take up the torch of romance and run with it, I doubt if
Stevenson would have offered himself. I almost think in that case he
would have consigned with Nature and sat at ease, content to read of
new Ivanhoes and new D'Artagnans: for--let it be said again--no man
had less of the ignoble itch for merely personal success. Think, too,
of what the struggle meant for him: how it drove him unquiet about the
world, if somewhere he might meet with a climate to repair the
constant drain upon his feeble vitality; and how at last it flung him,
as by a "sudden freshet," upon Samoa--to die "far from Argos, dear
land of home."

And then consider the brave spirit that carried him--the last of a
great race--along this far and difficult path; for it is the man we
must consider now, not, for the moment, his writings. Fielding's
voyage to Lisbon was long and tedious enough; but almost the whole of
Stevenson's life has been a voyage to Lisbon, a voyage in the very