appears in his poems he speaks of an ordinary death as of a hearty
exploit, and draws his figures from lives of adventure and toil:


'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 THE SEA,
AND THE HUNTER HOME FROM THE HILL.'


This man should surely have been honoured with the pomp and colour
and music of a soldier's funeral.

The most remarkable feature of the work he has left is its singular
combination of style and romance. It has so happened, and the
accident has gained almost the strength of a tradition, that the
most assiduous followers of romance have been careless stylists.
They have trusted to the efficacy of their situation and incident,
and have too often cared little about the manner of its
presentation. By an odd piece of irony style has been left to the
cultivation of those who have little or nothing to tell. Sir
Walter Scott himself, with all his splendid romantic and tragic
gifts, often, in Stevenson's perfectly just phrase, 'fobs us off
with languid and inarticulate twaddle.' He wrote carelessly and
genially, and then breakfasted, and began the business of the day.
But Stevenson, who had romance tingling in every vein of his body,