Page:Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Hitherto unpublished, 1921.djvu/43

 THE WELL-HEAD—1869

The "Prayer," which was the opening poem in the 1916 Bibliophile edition of Stevenson manuscripts, was written in October, 1869; and to the month of March of that year belongs the present poem, composed also in a spirit of religious reverence, yet with an interesting element of doubt as to the superiority of a future life over man's "dear world of hill and plain."

The "mottoes for the beginning," jotted down by Stevenson and here retained, show the source of the theme, and incidentally establish the identity of the "Ayrshire peasant" who might otherwise have been mistaken for Robert Burns. But the young Stevenson is unable to follow Sir Thomas Browne, or [ 35 ]