Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (494 page)

HISTORICAL ASSOCIATIONS

Dear Uncle Jim, this garden ground

That now you smoke your pipe around.

Has seen immortal actions done

And valiant battles lost and won.

Here we had best on tip-toe tread,

While I for safety march ahead,

For this is that enchanted ground

Where all who loiter slumber sound.

Here is the sea, here is the sand,

Here is simple Shepherd’s Land,

Here are the fairy hollyhocks,

And there are Ali Baba’s rocks.

But yonder, see! apart and high,

Frozen Siberia lies; where I,

With Robert Bruce and William Tell,

Was bound by an enchanter’s spell.

ENVOYS

TO WILLIE AND HENRIETTA

If two may read aright

These rhymes of old delight

And house and garden play,

You too, my cousins, and you only, may.

You in a garden green

With me were king and queen,

Were hunter, soldier, tar,

And all the thousand things that children are.

Now in the elders’ seat

We rest with quiet feet,

And from the window-bay

We watch the children, our successors, play.

“Time was,” the golden head

Irrevocably said;

But time which none can bind,

While flowing fast away, leaves love behind.

TO MY MOTHER

You too, my mother, read my rhymes

For love of unforgotten times,

And you may chance to hear once more

The little feet along the floor.

TO AUNTIE

Chief of our aunts
— not only I,

But all your dozen of nurselings cry —

What did the other children do?

And what were childhood, wanting you?

TO AUNTIE

TO MINNIE

The red room with the giant bed

Where none but elders laid their head;

The little room where you and I

Did for awhile together lie

And, simple suitor, I your hand

In decent marriage did demand;

The great day nursery, best of all,

With pictures pasted on the wall

And leaves upon the blind

A pleasant room wherein to wake

And hear the leafy garden shake

And rustle in the wind —

And pleasant there to lie in bed

And see the pictures overhead —

The wars about Sebastopol,

The grinning guns along the wall,

The daring escalade,

The plunging ships, the bleating sheep,

The happy children ankle-deep

And laughing as they wade;

All these are vanished clean away,

And the old manse is changed to-day;

It wears an altered face

And shields a stranger race.

The river, on from mill to mill,

Flows past our childhood’s garden still;

But ah! we children never more

Shall watch it from the water-door.

Below the yew — it still is there —

Our phantom voices haunt the air

As we were still at play,

And I can hear them call and say:

“
How far is it to Babylon?
”

Ah, far enough, my dear,

Far, far enough from here —

Yet you have farther gone!

“
Can I get there by candlelight?
”

So goes the old refrain.

I do not know — perchance you might —

But only, children, hear it right,

Ah, never to return again!

The eternal dawn, beyond a doubt,

Shall break on hill and plain,

And put all stars and candles out

Ere we be young again.

To you in distant India, these

I send across the seas,

Nor count it far across.

For which of us forgets

The Indian cabinets,

The bones of antelope, the wings of albatross,

The pied and painted birds and beans,

The junks and bangles, beads and screens,

The gods and sacred bells,

And the loud-humming, twisting shells!

The level of the parlour floor

Was honest, homely, Scottish shore;

But when we climbed upon a chair,

Behold the gorgeous East was there!

Be this a fable; and behold

Me in the parlour as of old,

And Minnie just above me set

In the quaint Indian cabinet!

Smiling and kind, you grace a shelf

Too high for me to reach myself.

Reach down a hand, my dear, and take

These rhymes for old acquaintance’ sake!

TO MY NAME-CHILD

1

Some day soon this rhyming volume, if you learn with proper speed,

Little Louis Sanchez, will be given you to read.

Then shall you discover, that your name was printed down

By the English printers, long before, in London town.

In the great and busy city where the East and West are met,

All the little letters did the English printer set;

While you thought of nothing, and were still too young to play,

Foreign people thought of you in places far away.

Ay, and while you slept, a baby, over all the English lands

Other little children took the volume in their hands;

Other children questioned, in their homes across the seas:

Who was little Louis, won’t you tell us, mother, please?

2

Now that you have spelt your lesson, lay it down and go and play,

Seeking shells and seaweed on the sands of Monterey,

Watching all the mighty whalebones, lying buried by the breeze,

Tiny sandpipers, and the huge Pacific seas.

And remember in your playing, as the sea-fog rolls to you,

Long ere you could read it, how I told you what to do;

And that while you thought of no one, nearly half the world away

Some one thought of Louis on the beach of Monterey!