Underwoods E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Seltzer Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 68

Beschreibung

Poetry. According to Wikipedia: "Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson ( 1850 - 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, and J. M. Barrie. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their definition of modernism. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the canon."

Leseprobe

UNDERWOODS BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA

established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books

Books and Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Across the Plains

The Art of Writing

Ballads

Black Arrow

The Bottle Imp

Catriona or David Balfour (sequel to Kidnapped)

A Child's Garden of Verses

The Ebb-Tide

Edinburgh

Essays

Essays of Travel

Fables

Familiar Studies of Men and Books

Father Damien

Footnote to History

In the South Seas

An Inland Voyage

Island Nights' Entertainments

Kidnapped

Lay Morals

Letters

Lodging for the Night

Markheim

Master of Ballantrae

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

Memories and Portraits

Merry Men

Moral Emblems

New Arabian Nights

New Poems

The Pavilion on the Links

Four Plays

The Pocket R. L. S.

Prayers Written at Vailima

Prince Otto

Records of a Family of Engineers

The Sea Fogs

The Silverado Squatters

Songs of Travel

St. Ives

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Tales and Fantasies

Thrawn Janet

Travels with a Donkey

Treasure Island

Underwoods

Vailima Letters

Virginibus Puerisque

The Waif Woman

Weir of Hermiston

The Wrecker

The Wrong Box

feedback welcome: [email protected]

visit us at samizdat.com

Of all my verse, like not a single line;

But like my title, for it is not mine.

That title from a better man I stole:

Ah, how much better, had I stol'n the whole!

DEDICATION

NOTE

BOOK I.  In English

BOOK II. - In Scots

DEDICATION

THERE are men and classes of men that stand above the  common herd: the soldier, the sailor and the shepherd not  unfrequently; the artist rarely; rarely still, the clergyman;  the physician almost as a rule.  He is the flower (such as it  is) of our civilisation; and when that stage of man is done  with, and only remembered to be marvelled at in history, he  will be thought to have shared as little as any in the defects  of the period, and most notably exhibited the virtues of the  race.  Generosity he has, such as is possible to those who  practise an art, never to those who drive a trade; discretion,  tested by a hundred secrets; tact, tried in a thousand  embarrassments; and what are more important, Heraclean  cheerfulness and courage.  So it is that he brings air and  cheer into the sickroom, and often enough, though not so often  as he wishes, brings healing.

Gratitude is but a lame sentiment; thanks, when they are  expressed, are often more embarrassing than welcome; and yet I  must set forth mine to a few out of many doctors who have  brought me comfort and help: to Dr. Willey of San Francisco,  whose kindness to a stranger it must be as grateful to him, as  it is touching to me, to remember; to Dr. Karl Ruedi of Davos,  the good genius of the English in his frosty mountains; to Dr.  Herbert of Paris, whom I knew only for a week, and to Dr.  Caissot of Montpellier, whom I knew only for ten days, and who  have yet written their names deeply in my memory; to Dr.  Brandt of Royat; to Dr. Wakefield of Nice; to Dr. Chepmell,  whose visits make it a pleasure to be ill; to Dr. Horace  Dobell, so wise in counsel; to Sir Andrew Clark, so unwearied  in kindness and to that wise youth, my uncle, Dr. Balfour.

I forget as many as I remember; and I ask both to pardon  me, these for silence, those for inadequate speech.  But one  name I have kept on purpose to the last, because it is a  household word with me, and because if I had not received  favours from so many hands and in so many quarters of the  world, it should have stood upon this page alone: that of my  friend Thomas Bodley Scott of Bournemouth.  Will he accept  this, although shared among so many, for a dedication to  himself? and when next my ill-fortune (which has thus its  pleasant side) brings him hurrying to me when he would fain  sit down to meat or lie down to rest, will he care to remember  that he takes this trouble for one who is not fool enough to  be ungrateful?

R. L. S.

SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH.

 NOTE

 THE human conscience has fled of late the troublesome  domain of conduct for what I should have supposed to be the  less congenial field of art: there she may now be said to  rage, and with special severity in all that touches dialect;  so that in every novel the letters of the alphabet are  tortured, and the reader wearied, to commemorate shades of  mis-pronunciation.  Now spelling is an art of great difficulty  in my eyes, and I am inclined to lean upon the printer, even  in common practice, rather than to venture abroad upon new  quests.  And the Scots tongue has an orthography of its own,  lacking neither "authority nor author."  Yet the temptation is  great to lend a little guidance to the bewildered Englishman.   Some simple phonetic artifice might defend your verses from  barbarous mishandling, and yet not injure any vested interest.   So it seems at first; but there are rocks ahead.  Thus, if I  wish the diphthong OU to have its proper value, I may write  OOR instead of OUR; many have done so and lived, and the  pillars of the universe remained unshaken.  But if I did so,  and came presently to DOUN, which is the classical Scots  spelling of the English DOWN, I should begin to feel uneasy;  and if I went on a little farther, and came to a classical  Scots word, like STOUR or DOUR or CLOUR, I should know  precisely where I was - that is to say, that I was out of  sight of land on those high seas of spelling reform in which  so many strong swimmers have toiled vainly.  To some the  situation is exhilarating; as for me, I give one bubbling cry  and sink.  The compromise at which I have arrived is  indefensible, and I have no thought of trying to defend it.   As I have stuck for the most part to the proper spelling, I  append a table of some common vowel sounds which no one need  consult; and just to prove that I belong to my age and have in  me the stuff of a reformer, I have used modification marks  throughout.  Thus I can tell myself, not without pride, that I  have added a fresh stumbling-block for English readers, and to  a page of print in my native tongue, have lent a new  uncouthness.  SED NON NOBIS.

I note again, that among our new dialecticians, the local  habitat of every dialect is given to the square mile.  I could  not emulate this nicety if I desired; for I simply wrote my  Scots as well as I was able, not caring if it hailed from  Lauderdale or Angus, from the Mearns or Galloway; if I had  ever heard a good word, I used it without shame; and when  Scots was lacking, or the rhyme jibbed, I was glad (like my  betters) to fall back on English.  For all that, I own to a  friendly feeling for the tongue of Fergusson and of Sir  Walter, both Edinburgh men; and I confess that Burns has  always sounded in my ear like something partly foreign.  And  indeed I am from the Lothians myself; it is there I heard the  language spoken about my childhood; and it is in the drawling  Lothian voice that I repeat it to myself.  Let the precisians  call my speech that of the Lothians.  And if it be not pure,  alas! what matters it?  The day draws near when this  illustrious and malleable tongue shall be quite forgotten; and  Burn's Ayrshire, and Dr. Macdonald's Aberdeen-awa', and  Scott's brave, metropolitan utterance will be all equally the  ghosts of speech.  Till then I would love to have my hour as a  native Maker, and be read by my own countryfolk in our own  dying language: an ambition surely rather of the heart than of  the head, so restricted as it is in prospect of endurance, so  parochial in bounds of space.

BOOK I.  In English

I - ENVOY

Go, little book, and wish to all

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!

II - A SONG OF THE ROAD

The gauger walked with willing foot,