“If it were spent waiting at a railway junction” ...  Here, with his instinct for the perfect phrase, Stevenson has pointed a finger at the one experience which is commonly accepted as the acme of imaginable dulness.  This man, who could be happy at a railway junction, could not have found a prouder way of boasting to posterity that he had never “faltered more or less in his great task of happiness.”

It is because railway junctions are the most unpopular places in the world that they have been singled out for praise in THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW.  Poor places, lonely and forlorn, cursed by so many, celebrated by so few,—­surely they have waited over-long for an apologist....  But first of all, in order to be fair, we must consider the customary view of these points of punctuation in the text of travel.

Far up in Vermont, at a point vaguely to the east of Burlington, there is a place called Essex Junction.  It consists of a dismal shed of a station, a bewildering wilderness of tracks, and an adjacent cemetery, thickly populated (according to a local legend) with the bodies of people who have died of old age while waiting for their trains.  This elegiac locality was visited, many years ago, by the Honorable E.J.  Phelps, once ambassador of the United States to the court of St. James’s.  He was allotted several hours for the contemplation of the cemetery; and his consequent meditations moved him to the composition of a poem, in four stanzas, which is a little classic of its kind.  Space is lacking for a quotation of more than the initial stanza; but the taste of a poem, as of a pie, may conveniently be judged from a quadrant of the whole.—­

  With saddened face and battered hat
    And eye that told of blank despair,
  On wooden bench the traveller sat,
    Cursing the fate that brought him there. 
  “Nine hours,” he cried, “we’ve lingered here
    With thoughts intent on distant homes,
  Waiting for that delusive train
    That, always coming, never comes: 
      Till weary, worn,
      Distressed, forlorn,
  And paralyzed in every function! 
      I hope in hell
      His soul may dwell
  Who first invented Essex Junction!”

It was apparently the purpose of the writer to convey the impression that his period of waiting had been passed without pleasure; but yet we may easily confute him with another quotation from The Lantern-Bearers.  “One pleasure at least,” says Stevenson, “he tasted to the full—­his work is there to prove it—­the keen pleasure of successful literary composition.”  Was this honorable author ever moved to such eloquence by an audience with Queen Victoria?  Never; so far as we know.  Was not Essex Junction, therefore, a more inspiring spot than Buckingham Palace?  Undeniably.  Then, why complain of Essex Junction?