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belonged to the comely order of the sanctuary, the secrets of its white linen, and holy vessels, and fonts of pure water; and its hieratic purity and simplicity became the type of something he desired always to have about him in actual life. He pored over the pictures in religious books, and knew by heart the exact mode in which the wrestling angel grasped Jacob, how

departed to the churchyard, nor were quite so motionless as they looked, but led a secret, halffugitive life in their old homes, quite free by night, though sometimes visible in the day, dodging from room to room, with no great goodwill towards those who shared the place with them. All night the figure sat beside him in the reveries of his broken sleep, and was not quite gone in the morning-an odd, irreconci- | Jacob looked in his mysterious sleep, how the lable new member of the household, making the bells and pomegranates were attached to the sweet familiar chambers unfriendly and suspect hem of Aaron's vestment, sounding sweetly as by its uncertain presence. He could have hated he glided over the turf of the holy place. His the dead he had pitied so, for being thus. way of conceiving religion came then to be in Afterwards he came to think of those poor, effect what it ever afterwards remained-a home-returning ghosts, which all men have fan- sacred history indeed, but still more a sacred cied to themselves—the revenants—pathetically, | ideal, a transcendent version or representation, as crying, or beating with vain hands at the under intenser and more expressive light and doors, as the wind came, their cries distinguish- shade, of human life and its familiar or excepable in it as a wilder inner note. But, always tional incidents, birth, death, marriage, youth, making death more unfamiliar still, that old age, tears, joy, rest, sleep, waking-a mirror, experience would ever, from time to time, re- towards which men might turn away their eyes turn to him; even in the living he sometimes from vanity and dullness, and see themselves caught its likeness; at any time or place, in a therein as angels, with their daily meat and moment, the faint atmosphere of the chamber drink, even, become a kind of sacred transacof death would be breathed around him, and tion-a complementary strain or burden, apthe image with the bound chin, the quaint smile, plied to our every-day existence, whereby the the straight, stiff feet, shed itself across the stray snatches of music in it re-set themselves, air upon the bright carpet, amid the gayest and fall into the scheme of some higher and company, or happiest communing with himself. more consistent harmony. A place adumbrated To most children the sombre questionings to itself in his thoughts, wherein those sacred perwhich impressions like these attach themselves, sonalities, which are at once the reflex and the if they come at all, are actually suggested by pattern of our nobler phases of life, housed religious books, which therefore they often re- themselves; and this region in his intellectual gard with much secret distaste, and dismiss, scheme all subsequent experience did but tend as far as possible, from their habitual thoughts still further to realise and define. Some ideal, as a too depressing element in life. To Florian | hieratic persons he would always need to occupy such impressions, these misgivings as to the ultimate tendency of the years, of the relationship between life and death, had been suggested spontaneously in the natural course of his mental growth by a strong innate sense for the soberer tones in things, further strengthThus a constant substitution of the typical ened by actual circumstances; and religious for the actual took place in his thoughts. sentiment, that system of biblical ideas in Angels might be met by the way, under English which he had been brought up, presented itself elm or beech-tree; mere messengers seemed like to him as a thing that might soften and dig- angels, bound on celestial errands; a deep nify, and light up as with a "lively hope,''з mysticity brooded over real meetings and parta melancholy already deeply settled in him. So ings; marriages were made in heaven; and he yielded himself easily to religious impres- deaths also, with hands of angels thereupon, sions, and with a kind of mystical appetite to bear soul and body quietly asunder, each to for sacred things; the more as they came to its appointed rest. All the acts and accidents him through a saintly person who loved him of daily life borrowed a sacred colour and sigtenderly, and believed that this early pre-nificance; the very colours of things became occupation with them already marked the child themselves weighty with meanings like the out for a saint. He began to love, for their sacred stuffs of Moses' tabernacle, full of own sakes, church lights, holy days, all that

3 I Peter, i, 3.

it and keep a warmth there. And he could hardly understand those who felt no such need at all, finding themselves quite happy without such heavenly companionship, and sacred double of their life, beside them.

4 Genesis, xxxil, 24; xxviii, 11; Exodus, xxviii,
33-35.
5 Exodus, xxvi.

penitence or peace. Sentiment, congruous in the first instance only with those divine transactions, the deep, effusive unction of the House of Bethany, was assumed as the due attitude for the reception of our every-day existence; and for a time he walked through the world in a sustained, not unpleasurable awe, generated by the habitual recognition, beside every circumstance and event of life, of its celestial correspondent.

Sensibility-the desire of physical beautya strange biblical awe, which made any refer ence to the unseen act on him like solemn music-these qualities the child took away with him, when, at about the age of twelve years, he left the old house, and was taken to live in another place. He had never left home before, and, anticipating much from this change, had long dreamed over it, jealously counting the days till the time fixed for departure should come; had been a little careless about others even, in his strong desire for it-when Lewis fell sick, for instance, and they must wait still two days longer. At last the morning came, very fine; and all things-the very pavement with its dust, at the roadside-seemed to have a white, pearl-like lustre in them. They were to travel by a favourite road on which he had often walked a certain distance, and on one of those two prisoner days, when Lewis was sick, had walked farther than ever before, in his great desire to reach the new place. They had started and gone a little way when a pet bird was found to have been left behind, and must even now-so it presented itself to him -have already all the appealing fierceness and wild self-pity at heart of one left by others to perish of hunger in a closed house; and he returned to fetch it, himself in hardly less stormy distress. But as he passed in search of it from room to room, lying so pale, with a look of meekness in their denudation, and at last through that little, stripped white room, the aspect of the place touched him like the face of one dead; and a clinging back towards it came over him, so intense that he knew it would last long, and spoiling all his pleasure in the realisation of a thing so eagerly anticipated. And so, with the bird found, but himself in an agony of home-sickness, thus capriciously sprung up within him, he was driven quickly away, far into the rural distance, so fondly speculated on, of that favourite countryroad.

6 The house of Simon the leper, where the woman poured the box of ointment on Jesus' head-a "deep, effusive unction." See Matthew, xxvi, 7.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894)

EL DORADO*

It seems as if a great deal were attainable in a world where there are so many marriages and decisive battles, and where we all, at certain hours of the day, and with great gusto and despatch, stow a portion of victuals finally and irretrievably into the bag which contains us. And it would seem also, on a hasty view, that the attainment of as much as possible was the one goal of man's contentious life. And yet, as regards the spirit, this is but a semblance. We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series. There is always a new horizon for onward-looking men,1 and although we dwell on a small planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring beyond a brief period of years, we are so constituted that our hopes are inaccessible, like stars, and the term of hoping is prolonged until the term of life. To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and not of how we end, of what we want and not of what we have. An aspiration is a joy forever,2 a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be spiritually rich. Life is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre unless we have some interests in the piece; and to those who have neither art nor science, the world is a mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where they may very well break their shins. It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours: it is they that make women beautiful or fossils interesting: and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure. Suppose he 1 Cp. Tennyson's famous figure, Ulysses, 19-21. 2 Echoed from Keats's Endymion, 1. *Spanish: The Gilded, or Golden. The name was originally given to a fabulous king of a wealthy city supposed to exist somewhere in South America, the object of much search in the 16th century. It was later applied to the city, and has now become a name for the object of any visionary quest. The essay is from Virginibus Puerisque, 1881, and is reprinted, along with the selections that follow, by permission of Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, who hold the copyright.

There is only one wish realisable on the earth; only one thing that can be perfectly attained: Death. And from a variety of circumstances we have no one to tell us whether it be worth attaining.

could take one meal so compact and comprehen- "Of making books there is no end,'' comsive that he should never hunger any more; plained the Preacher; and did not perceive suppose him, at a glance, to take in all the how highly he was praising letters as an occufeatures of the world and allay the desire for pation. There is no end, indeed, to making knowledge; suppose him to do the like in any books or experiments, or to travel, or to gatherprovince of experience-would not that man ing wealth. Problem gives rise to problem. We be in a poor way for amusement ever after? may study for ever, and we are never as learned One who goes touring on foot with a single as we would. We have never made a statue volume in his knapsack reads with circumspec- worthy of our dreams. And when we have distion, pausing often to reflect, and often lay- covered a continent, or crossed a chain of ing the book down to contemplate the landscape mountains, it is only to find another ocean or or the prints in the inn parlour; for he fears another plain upon the further side. In the to come to an end of his entertainment, and be infinite universe there is room for our swiftest left companionless on the last stages of his diligence and to spare. It is not like the works journey. A young fellow recently finished the of Carlyle, which can be read to an end. Even works of Thomas Carlyle, winding up, if we in a corner of it, in a private park, or in the remember aright, with the ten note-books upon neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the weather Frederick the Great. "What!" cried the and the seasons keep so deftly changing that young fellow, in consternation, "is there no although we walk there for a lifetime there will more Carlyle? Am I left to the daily papers?'' be always something new to startle and deA more celebrated instance is that of Alex-light us. ander, who wept bitterly because he had no more worlds to subdue. And when Gibbon had finished the Decline and Fall,3 he had only a few moments of joy; and it was with a "sober melancholy" that he parted from his labours. Happily we all shoot at the moon with in- A strange picture we make on our way to our effectual arrows; our hopes are set on inac-chimæras, ceaselessly marching, grudging ourcessible El Dorado; we come to an end of nothing here below. Interests are only plucked up to sow themselves again, like mustard. You would think, when the child was born, there would be an end to trouble; and yet it is only the beginning of fresh anxieties; and when you have seen it through its teething and its education, and at last its marriage, alas! it is only to have new fears, new quivering sensibilities, with every day; and the health of your children's children grows as touching a concern as that of your own. Again, when you have married your wife, you would think you were got upon a hilltop, and might begin to go downward by an easy slope. But you have only ended courting to begin marriage. Falling in love and winning love are often difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits; but to keep in love is also a business of some importance, to which both man and wife must bring kindness and goodwill. The true love story commences at the altar, when there lies before the married pair a most beautiful contest of wisdom and generosity, and a life-long struggle towards an unattainable ideal. Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable, from the very fact that they are two instead of one.

3 A twenty-four years' labor. See Eng. Lit., p. 213.

selves the time for rest; indefatigable, adventurous pioneers. It is true that we shall never reach the goal; it is even more than probable that there is no such place; and if we lived for centuries and were endowed with the powers of a god, we should find ourselves not much nearer what we wanted at the end. O toiling hands of mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.

THE MAROON*

written. I remember waking about three, to Of the beauties of Anaho books might be find the air temperate and scented. The long swell brimmed into the bay, and seemed to fill

4 Ecclesiastes, xii, 12.

*A maroon is one who has been "marooned," or abandoned on an island. This chapter is taken from In the South Seas, 1891. Stevenson made a cruise among the South Sea Islands in the yacht Casco, which he chartered at San Francisco in 1888. Anaho is a native village of Nuka-hiva, the chief island of the Marquesas. Kanaka, properly a SandwichIslander, is a general name for a South Seg Islander or his speech.

it full and then subside. Gently, deeply, and | Que le jour me dure2 repeated endlessly. Or silently the Casco rolled; only at times a block1 piped like a bird. Oceanward, the heaven was bright with stars and the sea with their reflections. If I looked to that side, I might have sung with the Hawaiian poet:

Ua maomao ka lani, ua kahaea luna,
Ua pipi ka maka o ka hoku.

(The heavens were fair, they stretched above, Many were the eyes of the stars.)

And then I turned shoreward, and high squalls were overhead; the mountains loomed up black; and I could have fancied I had slipped ten thousand miles away and was anchored in a Highland loch; that when the day came, it would show pine, and heather, and green fern, and roofs of turf sending up the smoke of peats; and the alien speech that should next greet my ears must be Gaelic, not Kanaka. And day, when it came, brought other sights and thoughts. I have watched the morning break in many quarters of the world; it has been certainly one of the chief joys of my existence, and the dawn that I saw with most emotion shone upon the bay of Anaho. The mountains abruptly overhang the port with every variety of surface and of inclination, lawn, and cliff, and forest. Not one of these but wore its proper tint of saffron, of sulphur, of the clove, and of the rose. The lustre was like that of satin; on the lighter hues there seemed to float an efflorescence; a solemn bloom appeared on the more dark. The light itself was the ordinary light of morning, colourless and clean; and on this ground of jewels, pencilled out the least detail of drawing. Meanwhile, around the hamlet, under the palms, where the blue shadow lingered, the red coals of cocoa-husk and the light trails of smoke betrayed the awakening business of the day; along the beach men and women, lads and lasses, were returning from the bath in bright raiment, red and blue and green, such as we delighted to see in the coloured little pictures of our childhood; and presently the sun had cleared the eastern hill, and the glow of the day was over all.

The glow continued and increased, the business, from the main part, ceased before it had begun. Twice in the day there was a certain stir of shepherding along the seaward hills. At times a canoe went out to fish. At times a woman or two languidly filled a basket in the cotton patch. At times a pipe would sound out of the shadow of a house, ringing the changes on its three notes, with an effect like 1 pulley

at times, across a corner of the bay, two natives might communicate in the Marquesan manner with conventional whistlings. All else was sleep and silence. The surf broke and shone around the shores; a species of black crane fished in the broken water; the black pigs were continually galloping by on some affair; but the people might never have awaked, or they might all be dead.

My favourite haunt was opposite the hamlet, where was a landing in a cove under a lianaed3 cliff. The beach was lined with palms and a tree called the purao, something between the fig and mulberry in growth, and bearing a flower like a great yellow poppy with a maroon heart. In places rocks encroached upon the sand; the beach would be all submerged; and the surf would bubble warmly as high as to my knees, and play with cocoa-nut husks as our more homely ocean plays with wreck and wrack and bottles. As the reflux drew down, marvels of colour and design streamed between my feet; which I would grasp at, miss, or seize: now to find them what they promised, shells to grace a cabinet or be set in gold upon a lady's finger; now to catch only mayat of coloured sand, pounded fragments and pebbles, that, as soon as they were dry, became as dull and homely as the flints upon a garden path. I have toiled at this childish pleasure for hours in the strong sun, conscious of my incurable ignorance; but too keenly pleased to be ashamed. Meanwhile, the blackbird (or his tropical understudy) would be fluting in the thickets overhead.

A little further, in the turn of the bay, a streamlet trickled in the bottom of a den,5 thence spilling down a stair of rock into the sea. The draught of air drew down under the foliage in the very bottom of the den, which was a perfect arbour for coolness. In front it stood open on the blue bay and the Casco lying there under her awning and her cheerful colours. Overhead was a thatch of puraos, and over these again palms brandished their bright fans, as I have seen a conjurer make himself a halo out of naked swords. For in this spot, over a neck of low land at the foot of the mountains, the trade-wind streams into Anaho Bay in a flood of almost constant volume and velocity, and of a heavenly coolness.

It chanced one day that I was ashore in the cove with Mrs. Stevenson and the ship's cook. 2 "How heavy hangs the day on me!" 3 Covered with lianas, or tropical vines. 4 illusion (Hindu philosophy) 5 glen, dingle

carried there indeed, and see the modern town of Honolulu brisk with traffic, and the palace with its guards, and the great hotel, and Mr. Berger's band with their uniforms and out

to see the brown faces grown so few and the white so many; and his father's land sold for planting sugar, and his father's house quite perished, or perhaps the last of them struck leprous and immured between the surf and the cliffs on Molokai. So simply, even in South Sea Islands, and so sadly, the changes come.

Except for the Casco lying outside, and a crane or two, and the ever-busy wind and sea, the face of the world was of a prehistoric emptiness; life appeared to stand stockstill, and the sense of isolation was profound and refreshing. | landish instruments; or what he would think On a sudden, the trade-wind, coming in a gust over the isthmus, struck and scattered the fans of the palms above the den; and, behold! in two of the tops there sat a native, motionless as an idol, and watching us, you would have said, without a wink. The next moment the tree closed, and the glimpse was gone. This discovery of human presences latent overhead in a place where we had supposed ourselves alone, the immobility of our tree-top spies, and the thought that perhaps at all hours we were similarly supervised, struck us with a chill. Talk languished on the beach. As for the cook (whose conscience was not clear), he never afterwards set foot on shore, and twice, when the Casco appeared to be driving on the rocks, it was amusing to observe that man's alacrity; death, he was persuaded, awaiting him upon the beach. It was more than a year later, in the Gilberts, that the explanation dawned upon myself. The natives were drawing palm-tree wine, a thing forbidden by law; and when the wind thus suddenly revealed them, they were doubtless more troubled than ourselves.

Tari was poor, and poorly lodged. His house was a wooden frame, run up by Europeans; it was indeed his official residence, for Tari was the shepherd of the promontory sheep. I can give a perfect inventory of its contents: three kegs, a tin biscuit-box, an iron sauce-pan, several cocoa-shell cups, a lantern, and three bottles, probably containing oil; while the clothes of the family and a few mats were thrown across the open rafters. Upon my first meeting with this exile he had conceived for me one of the baseless island friendships, had given me nuts to drink, and carried me up the den "to see my house"-the only entertainment that he had to offer. He liked the "Amelican," he said, and the "Inglisman," but the "Flessman'' was his abhorrence; and he was careful to explain that if he had thought us "Fless," we should have had none of his nuts, and never a sight of his house. His distaste for the French I can partly understand, but not at all his toleration of the Anglo-Saxon. The next day he brought me a pig, and some days later one of our party going ashore found him in act to bring a second. We were still strange to the islands; we were pained by the poor man's generosity, which he could ill afford; and by a natural enough but quite unpardonable blunder, we refused the pig. Had Tari been a Marquesan we should have seen him no more; being what he was, the most mild, long-suffering, melancholy man, he took a revenge a hundred times more painful. Scarce had the canoe with the nine villagers put off from their farewell before the Casco was boarded from the other side. It was Tari; coming thus late because he had no canoe of his own, and had found it hard to borrow one; coming thus solitary (as indeed we always saw him), because he was a stranger in the land, and the dreariest of company. The rest of my

At the top of the den there dwelt an old, melancholy, grizzled man of the name of Tari (Charlie) Coffin. He was a native of Oahu, in the Sandwich Islands; and had gone to sea in his youth in the American whalers; a circumstance to which he owed his name, his English, his down-east twang, and the misfortune of his innocent life. For one captain, sailing out of New Bedford, carried him to Nuka-hiva and marooned him there among the cannibals. The motive for this act was inconceivably small; poor Tari's wages, which were thus economised, would scarce have shook the credit of the New Bedford owners. And the act itself was simply murder. Tari's life must have hung in the beginning by a hair. In the grief and terror of that time, it is not unlikely he went mad, an infirmity to which he was still liable; or perhaps a child may have taken a fancy to him and ordained him to be spared. He escaped at least alive, married in the island, and when I knew him was a widower with a married son and a granddaughter. But the thought of Oahu haunted him; its praise was for ever on his lips; he beheld it, looking back, as a place | family basely fled from the encounter. I must of ceaseless feasting, song and dance; and in his dreams I dare say he revisits it with joy. I wonder what he would think if he could be

1 An island on which the lepers are isolated, a little to the southeast of Oahu.

2 The farewell visit of the natives, mentioned in a preceding chapter.

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