He found after an extraordinarily adventurous quest the treasure island, the climatic paradise that met, that enhanced his possibilities; and with this discovery was ushered in his completely full and rich period, the time in which—as the wondrous whimsicality and spontaneity of his correspondence testify—his genius and his character most overflowed. He had done as well for himself in his appropriation of Samoa as if he had done it for the hero of a novel, only with the complications and braveries actual and palpable. “I have no more hope in anything”—and this in the midst of magnificent production—“than a dead frog; I go into everything with a composed despair, and don’t mind—just as I always go to sea with the conviction I am to be drowned, and like it before all other pleasures.” He could go to sea as often as he liked and not be spared such hours as one of these pages vividly evokes—those of the joy of fictive composition in an otherwise prostrating storm, amid the crash of the elements and with his grasp of his subject but too needfully sacrificed, it might have appeared, to his clutch of seat and ink-stand. “If only I could secure a violent death, what a fine success! I wish to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse—aye, to be hanged rather than pass again through that slow dissolution.” He speaks in one of the “Vailima Letters,” Mr. Colvin’s publication of 1895, to which it is an office of these volumes promptly to make us return, of one of his fictions as a “long tough yarn with some pictures of the manners of to-day in the greater world—not the shoddy sham world of cities, clubs and colleges, but the world where men still live a man’s life.” That is distinct, and in the same letter he throws off a summary of all that in his final phase satisfied and bribed him which is as significant as it is racy. His correspondent, as was inevitable now and then for his friends at home, appears to have indulged in one of those harmless pointings of the moral—as to the distant dangers he _would_ court—by which we all were more or less moved to relieve ourselves of the depressed consciousness that he could do beautifully without us and that our collective tameness was far (which indeed was distinctly the case) from forming his proper element. There is no romantic life for which something amiable has not to be sweepingly sacrificed, and of _us_ in our inevitable category the sweep practically was clean.