He will allow no mistake as to the purpose of his existence. He cares not what may lie beyond the portals of an undreaded death, but this bright, present existence is for manful struggle; a struggle not maintained in hope of future, or terror of punishment, but because he loves not only "Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, A bin of wine, a spice of wit, A house with lawns enclosing it, A living river by the door, A nightingale in the sycamore"-- but loves also to "---- Climb Where no undubbed civilian dares, In my war-harness, the loud stairs Of honour ----" Nothing so moves his scorn as the lazy maggot who shuts himself into the snug nut of his religion and concern himself only to save his own poor, unimportant little soul. Hear the call of his "Lady of the Snows" to the pallid monks uttering prayers and _memento mori_. And Stevenson speaks as does he who knows. It is easy enough for those sitting cozily at home to talk loudly of war and danger, but this was a man who literally fought with death daily. An extract from one of his private letters, written shortly before the end, says: "For fourteen years, I have not had a day's real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness; and for so long, it seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my glove. I am better now, have been, rightly speaking, since first I came to the Pacific; and still, few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on--ill or well, is a trifle; so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle. At least I have not failed, but I would have preferred a place of trumpetings and the open air over my head." And after a desperate illness, when he rose gasping from the waters of extinction, his first cry on feeling the earth beneath his feet once more were those brave verses "Not Yet my Soul." He was not upborne by any of that so amazing sense of superiority to the rest of the universe which has aided vain humanity to minimize its defeats. He knew how small was his place in what Carlyle calls "the centre of immensities, the conflux of eternities." Hear him paint what he calls his "Portrait," and he reiterated that his noblest impulses were akin to "a similar point of honour which sways the elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of whom we know so little." Finally, in the famous Christmas Sermon he sums up in prose the thoughts that breathe through all the varying cadence of his verse--