Page:Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Hitherto unpublished, 1921.djvu/27

 mark the beginning of a period of minute scholarly investigation into each stage of his life. He would have been the last person to object to this, and his best admirers are surely those who serenely welcome every honest attempt at study of his life and works as well as all efforts to recover whatever scrap of his multifarious writings may appear to possess the slightest value.

To such scholarly investigation the present collection and the prior Bibliophile volumes will be indispensable. They show plainly that verse-making played a much larger part in Stevenson's training as a writer—a matter abundantly discussed—than there had formerly been reason even so much as to suspect. It is open to doubt whether Mrs. Stevenson herself, although her intelligence in all that concerned her famous husband was almost equal to her devotion to him and to his memory, ever fully comprehended the range of his poetic interests, or carefully examined the mass of his early experiments in verse. I am at least certain that when some twenty-one years ago I wrote an introduction to an American edition of a part of Stevenson's then [ 21 ]