Page:Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Hitherto unpublished, 1921.djvu/25

 prudent, where all is as yet shadowy, to venture upon speculations specific in character, but it seems permissible to wonder whether in the two poems just named we have not heard a rustling premonitory of the gradual lifting of the curtain that has appeared to screen phases at least of the youthful career of the poet and romancer.

That Stevenson was no saint in what Sir Sidney Colvin discreetly calls "his daft student days" has long been clear, despite the deft indefiniteness with which editors, biographers and friends have treated the period; but with the challenge these two poems, interpreted as they have been, fling down to reticence—loyal and commendable though this has surely been thus far—and with the supporting hints and implications that may be gathered from other verses of the same period of immaturity and effervescence, one feels that the legend-making against which Henley raised his much deprecated but unforgettable protest must soon be more or less a thing of the shamefaced past.

It was natural for Stevenson's contemporaries and for the immediately succeeding [ 19 ]