are admitted by it to a world of beauty or romance or humor that without it we should not know; and with the thing gained goes, as in Alpine-climbing, the pleasure of the effort itself. Especially is this the case in poetry, where the artist's thought fashions for itself a manner more intimate and personal than in prose. George Meredith's poetry is still only the possession of a minority, even among those who form the poetic audience of a generation. There are many of us who have wanted much help, in regard to it, from others--the young and ardent--who are the natural initiates, the "Mystae" of the poetic world. But once let the strange and poignant magic of it, its music in discord, its sharp sweetness, touch the inward ear--thenceforward we shall follow its piping. Let me record another regret for another lost opportunity. In spite of common friends, and worlds that might have met, I never saw Robert Louis Stevenson--the writer who more, perhaps, than any other of his generation touched the feeling and won the affection of his time. And that by a double spell--of the life lived and the books written. Stevenson's hold both upon his contemporaries, and those who since his death have had only the printed word of his letters and tales whereby to approach him, has not been without some points of likeness--amid great difference--to the hold of the Brontës on their day and ours. The sense of an unsurpassable courage--against great odds--has been the same in both cases; and a great tenderness in the public mind for work so gallant, so defiant of ill fortune, so loyal to its own aims. In Stevenson's case, quite apart from the claims of his work as literature, there was also an added element which, with all their genius, the Brontës did not possess--the element of charm, the _petit carillon,_ to which Renan attributed his own success in literature: undefinable, always, this last!--but supreme.[1] There is scarcely a letter of Stevenson's that is without it, it plays about the slender volumes of essays or of travel that we know so well; but it is present not only in the lighter books and tales, not only in the enchanting fairy-tale, "Prince Otto," but in his most tragic, or his most intellectual work--in the fragment "Weir of Hermiston," or in that fine piece of penetrating psychology and admirable narrative, _The Master of Ballantrae_. It may, I think, be argued whether in the far future Stevenson will be more widely and actively remembered--whether he will enter into the daily pleasure of those who love literature--more as a letter-writer, or more as a writer of fiction. Whether, in other words, his own character and personality will not prove the enduring thing, rather than the characters he created. The volumes of letters, with their wonderful range and variety, their humor, their bravery, their _vision_--whether of persons or scenes--already mean to some of us more than his stories, dear to us as these are.