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Robert Louis Stevenson
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Literary FiguresLiterary CriticismFiction Anthologies
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Publisher: Toridreams
Pages: 126
Weight: 0.39
Height: 0.27 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
HEREDITY AND ANTECEDENTS
'T
hese are thy works, O father, these thy crown, Whether on high the air
be pure they shine Along the yellowing sunset, and all night Among
the unnumbered stars of God they shine. Or whether fogs arise, and far and
wide The low sea-level drown-each finds a tongue, And all night long the
tolling bell resounds. So shine so toll till night be overpast, Till the stars
vanish, till the sun return, And in the haven rides the fleet at last.' -R. L.
STEVENSON.
In no country in the world is heredity more respected than in Scotland, and
her hard-working sons freely acknowledge the debt they owe, for the suc-
cesses of to-day, to the brave struggle with sterner conditions of life their
ancestors waged from generation to generation. We of the present are 'the
heirs of all the ages'; but we are also in no small degree the clay from the
potter's hands, moulded and kneaded by the natures, physical and mental,
of those who have gone before us, and whose lives and circumstances have
made us what we are.
3 MARGARET MOYES BLACK
Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson-for so thewriterwhom theworld knows as
Robert Louis Stevenson, was baptised-valued greatly this doctrine of hered-
ity, and always bore enthusiastic testimony to the influence his ancestry and
antecedents had exercised in moulding his temperament and character. He
was proud of that ancestry, with no foolish pride, but rather with that ap-
preciation of all that was noble and worthy in his forefathers, which made
him desire to be, in his own widely differing life-work, as good a man as they.
... 'And I-can I be base?'-he says; 'I must arise, O father, and to port Some
lost complaining seaman pilot home.'
He had reason to think highly of the honourable name which he received
from his father's family. Britain and the whole world has much for which to
thank the Stevensons; not only all along our rough north coasts, but in every
part of the world where the mariner rejoices to see their beacon's blaze have
the firm, who are consulting engineers to the Indian, the New Zealand, and
the Japanese Lighthouse Boards, lit those lights of which Rudyard Kipling
in his 'Songs of the English, ' sings-
'Our brows are bound with spindrift, and the weed is on our knees; Our
loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas; From reef and
rock and skerry, over headland, ness, and voe, The coastguard lights of Eng-
land watch the ships of England go.'
Wild and wind-swept are the isles and headlands of the northern half of the
sister kingdoms, but from their dreariest points the lights that have been kin-
dled by Robert Stevenson, the hero of Bell Rock fame, and his descendants
flash and flame across the sea, and make the name of Stevenson
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