TIME and the SOLEMN MUSIC. We both agree we would rather go without L'Allegro and Il Penseroso than these; for the reason that these are not so well known to the brutish herd.
(7) Is the ROYAL GEORGE an ode, or only an elegy? It's so good.
(8) We leave Campbell to you.
(9) If you take anything from Clough, but we don't either of us fancy you will, let it be COME BACK.
(10) Quite right about Dryden. I had a hankering after THRENODIA AUGUSTALIS; but I find it long and with very prosaic holes: though, O! what fine stuff between whiles.
(11) Right with Collins.
(12) Right about Pope's Ode. But what can you give? THE DYING CHRISTIAN? or one of his inimitable courtesies? These last are fairly odes, by the Horatian model, just as my dear MEDDOWES is an ode in the name and for the sake of Bandusia.
(13) Whatever you do, you'll give us the Greek Vase.
(14) Do you like Jonson's 'loathed stage'? Verses 2, 3, and 4 are so bad, also the last line. But there is a fine movement and feeling in the rest.
We will have the Duke of Wellington by God. Pro Symonds and Stevenson.
R. L. S.
Letter: TO CHARLES WARREN STODDARD
HOTEL BELVEDERE, DAVOS PLATZ, SWITZERLAND [DECEMBER 1880].
DEAR CHARLES WARREN STODDARD, - Many thanks to you for the letter and the photograph. Will you think it mean if I ask you to wait till there appears a promised cheap edition? Possibly the canny Scot does feel pleasure in the superior cheapness; but the true reason is this, that I think to put a few words, by way of notes, to each book in its new form, because that will be the Standard Edition, without which no g.'s l. will be complete. The edition, briefly, SINE QUA NON. Before that, I shall hope to send you my essays, which are in the printer's hands. I look to get yours soon. I am sorry to hear that the Custom House has proved fallible, like all other human houses and customs. Life consists of that sort of business, and I fear that there is a class of man, of which you offer no inapt type, doomed to a kind of mild, general disappointment through life. I do not believe that a man is the more unhappy for that. Disappointment, except with one's self, is not a very capital affair; and the sham beatitude, 'Blessed is he that expecteth little,' one of the truest, and in a sense, the most Christlike things in literature.
Alongside of you, I have been all my days a red cannon ball of dissipated effort; here I am by the heels in this Alpine valley, with just so much of a prospect of future restoration as shall make my present caged estate easily tolerable to me - shall or should, I would not swear to the word before the trial's done. I miss all my objects in the meantime; and, thank God, I have enough of my old, and maybe somewhat base philosophy, to keep me on a good understanding with myself and Providence.
The mere extent of a man's travels has in it something consolatory. That he should have left friends and enemies in many different and distant quarters gives a sort of earthly dignity to his existence. And I think the better of myself for the belief that I have left some in California interested in me and my successes. Let me assure you, you who have made friends already among such various and distant races, that there is a certain phthisical Scot who will always be pleased to hear good news of you, and would be better pleased by nothing than to learn that you had thrown off your present incubus, largely consisting of letters I believe, and had sailed into some square work by way of change.
And by way of change in itself, let me copy on the other pages some broad Scotch I wrote for you when I was ill last spring in Oakland. It is no muckle worth: but ye should na look a gien horse in the moo'. - Yours ever,
R. L. STEVENSON.
Letter: TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
DECEMBER 21, 1880. DAVOS.
MY DEAR PEOPLE, - I do not understand these reproaches. The letters come between seven and nine in the evening; and every one about the books was answered that same night, and the answer left Davos by seven o'clock next morning.