Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 193 pages of information about Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 193 pages of information about Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson.

[Note 1:  It is a difficult matter, etc.  The appreciation of nature is a quite modern taste, for although people have always loved the scenery which reminds them of home, it was not at all fashionable in England to love nature for its own sake before 1740.  Thomas Gray was the first person in Europe who seems to have exhibited a real love of mountains (see his Letters).  A study of the development of the appreciation of nature before and after Wordsworth (England’s greatest nature poet) is exceedingly interesting.  See Myra Reynolds, The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry between Pope and Wordsworth (1896).]

[Note 2:  This discipline in scenery. Note what is said on this subject in Browning’s extraordinary poem, Fra Lippo Lippi, vs. 300-302.

  “For, don’t you mark?  We’re made so that we love
  First when we see them painted, things we have passed
  Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.”]

[Note 3:  Brantome quaintly tells us, “fait des discours en soi pour se soutenir en chemin." Freely translated, “the traveller talks to himself to keep up his courage on the road.”  Pierre de Bourdeille, Abbe de Brantome, (cir. 1534-1614), travelled all over Europe.  His works were not published till long after his death, in 1665.  Several complete editions of his writings in numerous volumes have appeared in the nineteenth century, one edited by the famous writer, Prosper Merimee.]

[Note 4:  We are provocative of beauty. Compare again, Fra Lippo Lippi, vs. 215 et seq.

  “Or say there’s beauty with no soul at all—­
  (I never saw it—­put the case the same—­)
  If you get simple beauty and nought else,
  You get about the best thing God invents: 
  That’s somewhat:  and you’ll find the soul you have missed,
  Within yourself, when you return him thanks.”]

[Note 5:  Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul Brill. Jacques Callot was an eminent French artist of the XVII century, born at Nancy in 1592, died 1635.  Matthaeus and Paul Brill were two celebrated Dutch painters.  Paul, the younger brother of Matthaeus, was born about 1555, and died in 1626.  His development in landscape-painting was remarkable.  Gilles Sadeler, born at Antwerp 1570, died at Prague 1629, a famous artist, and nephew of two well-known engravers.  He was called the “Phoenix of Engraving.”]

[Note 6:  Dick Turpin.  Dick Turpin was born in Essex, England, and was originally a butcher.  Afterwards he became a notorious highwayman, and was finally executed for horse-stealing, 10 April 1739.  He and his steed Black Bess are well described in W. H. Ainsworth’s Rookwood, and in his Ballads.]

[Note 7:  The Trossachs.  The word means literally, “bristling country.”  A beautifully romantic tract, beginning immediately to the east of Loch Katrine in Perth, Scotland.  Stevenson’s statement, “if a man of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled it for them with harmonious figures,” refers to Walter Scott, and more particularly to the Lady of the Lake (1810).]

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Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.