in France, and then fulfilled it "under the wide and starry sky" of Samoa. But what asks your attention in "Stormy Nights" is the stark realism in his account of his passage from the fierce, stifling, suppressed lewdness of adolescence through a period of savage Indian revolt to "Greek" serenity, from the midst of which he contemplates the possibility, as the seasons pass, of entering his "Saint" Louis period. All in due season, he tells us, he will be ready to embrace the whole of life. But.
You with the bands and the shilling packet of tracts
Greatly reduced when taken for distribution?
White-robed among the sunshine and the statues
And the fair porticos of carven marble—
Fond of olives and dry sherry,
Good tobacco and clever talks with my fellows,
Free from inordinate cravings.
Isn't he all there in that little poem, in esse and in posse, the "R. L. S." that real Stevensonians have always known and have always loved? Isn't he all there?—the "R. L. S." who did touch the quick of life; know the sting of sex, the taste of blood; get his feet wet—wet to the waist, man; foot the open road; test sleep in lonely hills under "a clear night of stars"; fare on through blossoms—drunk with the scent of them; up rocky pitches, putting his back into it—eh, what! on to the place where the fog began, and the swift bright stream of his life went down—as he had prophesied the day before that it would—"foaming over a precipice."
