In 1895 Bliss Carman published _A Seamark_[1] (sub-titled _A Threnody for Robert Louis Stevenson_). It is a poem of thirty-eight stanzas in rimed iambic tetrameter. It is all in the inimitable lyric manner of Carman, and commemorates Stevenson as ‘the master of the roving kind.’ Altiloquence is never a quality of Carman’s poetry, as it is of Roberts.’ Subtlety in simplicity is the formula of Carman’s genius. And he will color all his homely or simple images with the most apt felicity of phrase and the most insinuating verbal melody. For this reason, some miss the high spiritual, mystical, and religious note in poems which are even more sublimated, though less grandiloquent, than Roberts’ verse. On the face of _A Seamark_, it seems as if Carman, in commemorating the death of Stevenson ‘as the master of the roving kind,’ composed a colorful musical lyric, but not a highly spiritualized poem. How simple or homely, and yet how felicitous and colorful, are the images in Carman’s musical lines, announcing the death of Stevenson on the island of Vailima:— Our restless loved adventurer, On secret orders come to him, Has slipped his cable, cleared the reef, And melted on the white sea-rim. The hasty reader does not suspect or surmise the deeper meaning that is to come. But Carman and Stevenson were kin of mind and heart, and their kinship was a kinship of the love of searching out the haunts and ways of the joy and beauty that are on the face and in the heart of Nature. So that these master rovers are not careless, irresponsible vagabonds, but are spiritual nomads with a spiritual function and bent on a divine errand. Thus does Carman magnify their office:— O all you hearts about the world In whom the truant gypsy blood, Under the frost of this pale time, Sleeps like the daring sap and flood That dream of April and reprieve! You whom the haunted vision drives, Incredulous of home and ease, _Perfection’s lovers_ all your lives! What it was given to Carman to discern in the universe was the eternal meaning of youth and to hear the ever-young voice of earth singing in the heart of man and in the earth, in everything, and to be himself the lyric voice of the world. Stevenson was also such a lyric voice of earth. Carman, then, does highly spiritualize his subject when he first presents Stevenson in the manner of the outward aspect by which he was commonly conceived, a restless loved adventurer, who when he died was laid down, as Carman puts it in novel and arresting paradox:— Beyond the turmoil of renown, and, next, discloses the inner meaning of the ‘wander-biddings’ that were in the soul of Stevenson who, even in death, still kept The journey-wonder on his face. For when Stevenson died, men sorrowed and surmised not why they grieved. But Carman in _A Seamark_ reveals why. Men thought a prince of joy had passed forever. But Carman discloses the higher spiritual truth:—