Pocket R.L.S., being favourite passages from the works of Stevenson , livre ebook

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71 pages

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pubOne.info present you this new edition. When you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal hand, looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another bond on you thenceforward, binding you to life and to the love of virtue.

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	06 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819941453
Langue	English

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THE POCKET R. L. S.
Being favourite passages from the works ofStevenson.
By Robert Louis Stevenson
SELECTED PASSAGES
When you have read, you carry away with you a memoryof the man himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal hand,looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is anotherbond on you thenceforward, binding you to life and to the love ofvirtue.
It is to some more specific memory that youth looksforward in its vigils. Old kings are sometimes disinterred in allthe emphasis of life, the hands untainted by decay, the beard thathad so often wagged in camp or senate still spread upon the royalbosom; and in busts and pictures, some similitude of the great andbeautiful of former days is handed down. In this way, publiccuriosity may be gratified, but hardly any private aspiration afterfame. It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us,but not impossible that it may respect or sympathise; and so a manwould rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than aportrait of his face, FIGURA ANIMI MAGIS QUAM CORPORIS.
The pleasure that we take in beautiful nature isessentially capricious. It comes sometimes when we least look forit; and sometimes, when we expect it most certainly, it leaves usto gape joylessly for days together, in the very homeland of thebeautiful. We may have passed a place a thousand times and one; andon the thousand and second it will be transfigured, and stand forthin a certain splendour of reality from the dull circle ofsurroundings; so that we see it 'with a child's first pleasure, 'as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the lake-side.
But every one sees the world in his own way. To somethe glad moment may have arrived on other provocations; and theirrecollection may be most vivid of the stately gait of womencarrying burthens on their heads; of tropical effect, with cavesand naked rock and sunlight; of the relief of cypresses; of thetroubled, busy-looking groups of sea-pines, that seem always as ifthey were being wielded and swept together by a whirlwind; of theair coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over the myrtles and thescented underwoods; of the empurpled hills standing up, solemn andsharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at evening. There gomany elements, without doubt, to the making of one such moment ofintense perception; and it is on the happy agreement of these manyelements, on the harmonious vibration of many nerves, that thewhole delight of the moment must depend.
You should have heard him speak of what he loved; ofthe tent pitched beside the talking water; of the stars overhead atnight; of the blest return of morning, the peep of day over themoors, the awaking birds among the birches; how he abhorred thelong winter shut in cities; and with what delight, at the return ofthe spring, he once more pitched his camp in the livingout-of-doors.
It was one of the best things I got from myeducation as an engineer: of which, however, as a way of life, Iwish to speak with sympathy. It takes a man into the open air; itkeeps him hanging about harbour-sides, which is the richest form ofidling; it carries him to wild islands; it gives him a taste of thegenial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with dexterities toexercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go far tocure him of any taste (if ever he had one) for the miserable lifeof cities. And when it has done so, it carries him back and shutshim in an office! From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of thetossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memoryfull of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shiningPharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to the pretty nicetiesof drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages ofconsecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who canbalance one part of genuine life against two parts of drudgerybetween four walls, and for the sake of the one, manfully acceptthe other.
No one knows the stars who has not slept, as theFrench happily put it, A LA BELLE ETOILE. He may know all theirnames and distances and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of whatalone concerns mankind, — their serene and gladsome influence onthe mind. The greater part of poetry is about the stars; and veryjustly, for they are themselves the most classical of poets.
He surprised himself by a sudden impulse to writepoetry— he did so sometimes, loose, galloping octosyllabics in thevein of Scott— and when he had taken his place on a boulder, nearsome fairy falls, and shaded by a whip of a tree that was alreadyradiant with new leaves, it still more surprised him that he shouldfind nothing to write. His heart perhaps beat in time to some vastindwelling rhythm of the universe.
No man can find out the world, says Solomon, frombeginning to end, because the world is in his heart; and so it isimpossible for any of us to understand, from beginning to end, thatagreement of harmonious circumstances that creates in us thehighest pleasure of admiration, precisely because some of thesecircumstances are hidden from us for ever in the constitution ofour own bodies. After we have reckoned up all that we can see orhear or feel, there still remains to be taken into account somesensibility more delicate than usual in the nerves affected, orsome exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain, whichis indeed to the sense of the beautiful as the eye or the ear tothe sense of hearing or sight. We admire splendid views and greatpictures; and yet what is truly admirable is rather the mind withinus, that gathers together these scattered details for its delight,and snakes out of certain colours, certain distributions ofgraduated light and darkness, that intelligible whole which alonewe call a picture or a view. Hazlitt, relating in one of his essayshow he went on foot from one great man's house to another's insearch of works of art, begins suddenly to triumph over these nobleand wealthy owners, because he was more capable of enjoying theircostly possessions than they were; because they had paid the moneyand he had received the pleasure. And the occasion is a fair onefor self-complacency. While the one man was working to be able tobuy the picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy thepicture. An inherited aptitude will have been diligently improvedin either case; only the one man has made for himself a fortune,and the other has made for himself a living spirit. It is a fairoccasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when the event shows a manto have chosen the better part, and laid out his life more wisely,in the long-run, than those who have credit for most wisdom. Andyet even this is not a good unmixed; and like all otherpossessions, although in a less degree, the possession of a brainthat has been thus improved and cultivated, and made into the primeorgan of a man's enjoyment, brings with it certain inevitable caresand disappointments. The happiness of such an one comes to dependgreatly upon those fine shades of sensation that heighten andharmonise the coarser elements of beauty. And thus a degree ofnervous prostration, that to other men would be hardlydisagreeable, is enough to overthrow for him the whole fabric ofhis life, to take, except at rare moments, the edge off hispleasures, and to meet him wherever he goes with failure, and thesense of want, and disenchantment of the world and life.
THE VAGABOND (TO AN AIR OF SCHUBERT)
Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And the byway nigh me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river—
There's the life for a man like me,
There's the life for ever.
Let the blow fall soon or late,
Let what will be o'er me;
Give the face of earth around,
And the road before me.
Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I ask, the heaven above
And the road below me.
Every one who has been upon a walking or a boatingtour, living in the open air, with the body in constant exerciseand the mind in fallow, knows true ease and quiet. The irritatingaction of the brain is set at rest; we think in a plain, unfeverishtemper; little things seem big enough, and great things no longerportentous; and the world is smilingly accepted as it is.
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feelthe needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down offthis feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life,and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is athing that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddleagainst a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, butit is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when thepresent is so exacting who can annoy himself about the future?
A SONG OF THE ROAD
The gauger walked with willing foot,
And aye the gauger played the flute:
And what should Master Gauger play
But OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY?
Whene'er I buckle on my pack
And foot it gaily in the track,
O pleasant gauger, long since dead,
I hear you fluting on ahead.
You go with me the selfsame way—
The selfsame air for me you play;
For I do think and so do you
It is the tune to travel to.
For who would gravely set his face
To go to this or t'other place?
There's nothing under Heav'n so blue
That's fairly worth the travelling to.
On every hand the roads begin,
And people walk with zeal therein;
But wheresoe'er the highways tend,
Be sure there's nothing at the end.
Then follow you, wherever hie
The travelling mountains of the sky.
Or let the streams in civil mode
Direct your choice upon a road;
For one and all, or high or low,
Will lead you where you wish to go;
And one and all go night and day
OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY!
A walking tour should be gone upon alone, becausefreedom is of the essence; because you should be able to stop andgo o