Page:Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Hitherto unpublished, 1921.djvu/35

 THE MILL-HOUSE—1866

This impressive poem antedates any piece included in any previous volume of Stevenson's verse, and appears to be the longest of his early attempts at poetry. Written presumably at Swanston, it is very successful in many of its descriptive passages, both in its sense of actuality, as where "great horses strain against the load of the sack-laden wagons," and in that imaginative atmosphere created by chivalrous knights and phantom castles. It is permissible to believe that the verses are merely the opening portion of some long composition which Stevenson had in mind; yet in themselves they give a sense of completeness, because the poet, after having let his thought wander into the fields of romance and of faery, ends his manuscript with a mental and spiritual return to those problems of life, those "grim questionings of heart," which were just beginning to absorb the thoughtful and passionate boy.

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