Page:Robert Louis Stevenson - a Bookman extra number 1913.djvu/219

 NOTES

The literary contents of this volume are, to some extent, an anthology compiled from back Numbers of that are in constant demand but have long been out of print, and we are indebted to the kindness of Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. Austin Dobson and Mr. William Watson for permission to include the poems by them from their published works.

Our thanks are due to Sir Sidney Colvin for the loan of the three different examples of Stevenson's handwriting, which we reproduce on pages 106 and 107. Nobody knew R. L. S. more intimately than Sir Sidney Colvin, who was always one of his closest friends, and remained his adviser and constant correspondent to the end. By his editing of Stevenson's Letters Sir Sidney has placed all Stevensonians under a lasting debt of gratitude to him, and it is with keenest anticipations we hear that he is contemplating a book about Stevenson that shall be one of a series, part critical and part personal, on Victorian writers and artists he has known. Sir Sidney Colvin knew all the greatest of the later Victorians in art and letters, and the value and interest of such a series of personal recollections from his pen cannot easily be exaggerated.

"The Island of the Blest," from which, on page 32, we extract a description of R. L. S., was written by Mr. Gosse in 1879, and he now confesses for the first time that the characters in this poem were studied from his associates of that day, and in particular from intimate friends. Stevenson was pictured in it under the name of Cynthius, and the picture is a very careful study of the man he then was, at the age of twenty-nine—a very different personality, of course, from the staider and more responsible Stevenson of later years—a Stevenson that is, perhaps, in some danger of being forgotten. This gives the stanzas now a certain historical value, and we are therefore the more obliged to Mr. Gosse for permitting us to reprint the verses here and to make this interesting disclosure concerning them.

The poem, "To Tusitala in Vailima," on page 77, was the dedication to Stevenson by Mr. Gosse of his volume, "In Russet and Silver," which is now included in his Collected