“And the Kingdom of Heaven is of the childlike, of those who are easy to please, who love and who give pleasure.  Mighty men of their hands, the smiters, and the builders, and the judges, have lived long and done sternly, and yet preserved this lovely character; and among our carpet interests and two-penny concerns, the shame were indelible if we should lose it. Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties....”

I remember now (as one remembers little things at such times) that, when first I heard of his going to Samoa, there came into my head (Heaven knows why) a trivial, almost ludicrous passage from his favorite, Sir Thomas Browne:  a passage beginning “He was fruitlessly put in hope of advantage by change of Air, and imbibing the pure Aerial Nitre of those Parts; and therefore, being so far spent, he quickly found Sardinia in Tivoli, and the most healthful air of little effect, where Death had set her Broad Arrow....”  A statelier sentence of the same author occurs to me now—­

“To live indeed, is to be again ourselves, which being not only a hope, but an evidence in noble believers, it is all one to lie in St. Innocent’s Churchyard, as in the sands of Egypt.  Ready to be anything in the ecstacy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the moles of Adrianus.”

This one lies, we are told, on a mountain-top, overlooking the Pacific.  At first it seemed so much easier to distrust a News Agency than to accept Stevenson’s loss.  “O captain, my captain!” ...  One needs not be an excellent writer to feel that writing will be thankless work, now that Stevenson is gone.  But the papers by this time leave no room for doubt.  “A grave was dug on the summit of Mount Vaea, 1,300 feet above the sea.  The coffin was carried up the hill by Samoans with great difficulty, a track having to be cut through the thick bush which covers the side of the hill from the base to the peak.”  For the good of man, his father and grandfather planted the high sea-lights upon the Inchcape and the Tyree Coast.  He, the last of their line, nursed another light and tended it.  Their lamps still shine upon the Bell Rock and the Skerryvore; and—­though in alien seas, upon a rock of exile—­this other light shall continue, unquenchable by age, beneficent, serene.

* * * * *

Nov. 2, 1895.  The “Vailima Letters.”

Eagerly as we awaited this volume, it has proved a gift exceeding all our hopes—­a gift, I think, almost priceless.  It unites in the rarest manner the value of a familiar correspondence with the value of an intimate journal:  for these Samoan letters to his friend Mr. Sidney Colvin form a record, scarcely interrupted, of Stevenson’s thinkings and doings from month to month, and often from day to day, during the last four romantic years of his life.  The first is dated November 2nd, 1890, when he and his household were clearing the ground