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Robert Louis Stevenson by Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
page 8 of 39 (20%)


It was that same evening that Prince Florizel's friend, under the
name of Mr. Morris, was giving a party in one of the houses of West
Kensington. In one at least of the houses of that brick wilderness
human spirits were being tested as on an anvil, and most of them
tossed aside. So also, in, THE RAJAH'S DIAMOND, it was a quiet
suburban garden that witnessed the sudden apparition of Mr. Harry
Hartley and his treasures precipitated over the wall; it was in the
same garden that the Rev. Simon Rolles suddenly, to his own
surprise, became a thief. A monotony of bad building is no doubt a
bad thing, but it cannot paralyse the activities or frustrate the
agonies of the mind of man.

To a man with Stevenson's live and searching imagination, every
work of human hands became vocal with possible associations.
Buildings positively chattered to him; the little inn at
Queensferry, which even for Scott had meant only mutton and currant
jelly, with cranberries 'vera weel preserved,' gave him the
cardinal incident of KIDNAPPED. How should the world ever seem
dull or sordid to one whom a railway-station would take into its
confidence, to whom the very flagstones of the pavement told their
story, in whose mind 'the effect of night, of any flowing water, of
lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean,'
called up 'an army of anonymous desires and pleasures'? To have
the 'golden-tongued Romance with serene lute' for a mistress and
familiar is to be fortified against the assaults of tedium.

His attitude towards the surprising and momentous gifts of life was
one prolonged passion of praise and joy. There is none of his
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