The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 22: Juvenilia and Other PapersStevenson, Robert Louis
History
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 22: Juvenilia and Other Papers
Stevenson, Robert Louis
English literature -- 19th century
She reminded me of an old dog I once knew, who would never
suffer the master of the house to dance, out of an exaggerated sense of
the dignity of that master's place and carriage.
After the young people were gone there was but one more incident ere I
went to bed. I heard a party of children go up and down the dark street
for a while, singing together sweetly. And the mystery of this little
incident was so pleasant to me that I purposely refrained from asking
who they were, and wherefore they went singing at so late an hour. One
can rarely be in a pleasant place without meeting with some pleasant
accident. I have a conviction that these children would not have gone
singing before the inn unless the inn-parlour had been the delightful
place it was. At least, if I had been in the customary public room of
the modern hotel, with all its disproportions and discomforts, my ears
would have been dull, and there would have been some ugly temper or
other uppermost in my spirit, and so they would have wasted their songs
upon an unworthy hearer.
Next morning I went along to visit the church. It is a long-backed
red-and-white building, very much restored, and stands in a pleasant
graveyard among those great trees of which I have spoken already. The
sky was drowned in a mist. Now and again pulses of cold wind went about
the enclosure, and set the branches busy overhead, and the dead leaves
scurrying in to the angles of the church buttresses. Now and again,
also, I could hear the dull sudden fall of a chestnut among the
grass--the dog would bark before the rectory door--or there would come a
clinking of pails from the stable-yard behind. But in spite of these
occasional interruptions--in spite, also, of the continuous autumn
twittering that filled the trees--the chief impression somehow was one
as of utter silence, inasmuch that the little greenish bell that peeped
out of a window in the tower disquieted me with a sense of some possible
and more inharmonious disturbance. The grass was wet, as if with a
hoar-frost that had just been melted. I do not know that ever I saw a
morning more autumnal. As I went to and fro among the graves, I saw some
flowers set reverently before a recently erected tomb, and drawing near
was almost startled to find they lay on the grave of a man seventy-two
years old when he died. We are accustomed to strew flowers only over the
young, where love has been cut short untimely, and great possibilities
have been restrained by death. We strew them there in token that these
possibilities, in some deeper sense, shall yet be realised, and the
touch of our dead loves remain with us and guide us to the end. And yet
there was more significance, perhaps, and perhaps a greater consolation,
in this little nosegay on the grave of one who had died old. We are apt
to make so much of the tragedy of death, and think so little of the
enduring tragedy of some men's lives, that we see more to lament for in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account