Chapter 11

too, but as to the dialect Mr Stevenson himself disarms criticism. He find his words, he says, in all localities; he spells them, he allows, sometimes with a compromise.

'I have stuck for the most part to the proper spelling,' he writes; and again--

'To some the situation is exhilarating; as for me I give one bubbling cry and sink. The compromise at which I have arrived is indefensible, and I have no thought of trying to defend it.'

And indeed he has no need of it; it is good, forcible 'Scots' after all, and the thoughts he clothes in it are as 'hame-ower' and as pithy as the words.

_The Maker to Posterity_, _Ille Terrarum, A Blast_, _A Counterblast_, and _The Counterblast Ironical_, are all excellent; and one can point to no prettier picture of a Scottish Sunday than _A Lowden Sabbath Morn_, which has recently been published alone in book form very nicely illustrated, while he pokes some, not undeserved, fun at our Scottish good opinion of ourselves and our religious privileges in _Embro, her Kirk_, and _The Scotsman's Return from Abroad_. Surely nowhere is there Scots more musical or lines more true to the sad experience which life brings to us all than these with which the book ends:

'It's an owercome sooth for age and youth, And it brooks wi' nae denial, That the dearest friends are the auldest friends And the young are just on trial.

'There's a rival bauld wi' young an' auld, And it's him that has bereft me, For the surest friends are the auldest friends And the maist o' mine hae left me.'...

The last volume of verses, _Songs of Travel_, has a pathos all its own, for, like _St Ives_ and _Weir of Hermiston_, the author never saw it in print. The verses were sent home shortly before his death, and in the note appended to them Mr Sydney Colvin says they were to be finally printed as Book III. of _Underwoods_, but meantime were given to the world in their present form in 1896.

They were written at different periods, and they show their author in varying moods; but they incline rather to the sadder spirit of the last two years of his life, and have left something if not of the courage for the fight, at least of the gaiety of living behind them. Two of them are written to his wife, many of them to friends; some of them have the lilt and the brightness of songs, others, like _If this were Faith_ and _The Woodman_, are filled with the gravity of life and the bitterness of the whole world's struggle for existence.

In _The Vagabond_ he is still in love with the open air life and the freedom of the tramp. In his exile he longs to rest at last beside those he loves; he feels the weariness of life, he writes--

'I have trod the upward and the downward slope; I have endured and done in days before; I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope; And I have lived, and loved, and closed the door.'

After that one feels no surprise that he is waiting for the final summons, and one has only a sense of the eternal fitness of things when in the last words of the book he says--

'I hear the signal, Lord,--I understand The night at Thy command Comes. I will eat and sleep, and will not question more.'

FOOTNOTE:

[5] Mr Stevenson was very fond of this quotation, which appeals so truly to Caledonia's sons and daughters. He found it in an old volume of _Good Words_, and never knew its source. Like many other people he quoted it incorrectly. According to information kindly supplied by Mr W. Keith Leask, the lines, which have an interesting history, stand thus in the original--

'From the lone sheiling on the misty island Mountains divide us and a waste of seas, Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland, And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.'

In _Tait's Magazine_ for 1849 it is given as 'Canadian Boat Song, from the Gaelic.' The author of the English version was Burns' 'Sodger Hugh,' the 12th Earl of Eglinton, who was M.P. for Ayrshire from 1784 to 1789, and was the great-grandfather of the present Earl. When in Canada the author is said to have heard a song of lament sung by evicted Hebridean crofters in Manitoba, which gave him the idea for his verses--the first four lines, and chorus, of which are--

'Listen to me as when we heard our father Sing long ago the song of other shores; Listen to me, and then in chorus gather All your deep voices as ye pull your oars. _Chorus_--Fair the broad meads, these hoary woods are grand, But we are exiles from our fathers' land.'

Professor Mackinnon believes that the Gaelic version, known in the Highlands to this day, is founded upon the Earl of Eglinton's lines, and is not, as might be supposed, an earlier form of the poem which is known and loved by Scotch folk all the world over.