Robert Louis Stevenson

Today, December 3, is the anniversary of the death of Robert Louis Stevenson in 1894, at the age of 44. He is remembered for works as varied as A Child's Garden of Verses, Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

When I was in elementary school, one of the teachers frequently read to us from A Child's Garden of Verses. Later I read a biography of him written for young people. I have one funny memory about that book. On the flyleaf it had a sort of outline of Stevenson's life, and it mentioned that he was admitted to the Bar in 1875 at the age of  25. I was puzzled as to why this was even mentioned, since you only had to be 21 to drink. It was much later that I realized this had to do with the practice of law.

Although I associated him mostly with books for young readers, he was a complex man. He wrote a spirited defense of Fr. Damien, the famous priest who cared for the lepers of Molokai, when that man was attacked. Damien is now recognized as a canonized saint by the Church that had been skeptical of him during his lifetime, and I took his name for my own confirmation name.

I was very moved by the stories of Stevenson's tuberculosis and his many travels seeking relief. When I used to visit the Carmelite nuns in Saranac Lake, New York, I would walk by the place he had stayed near them in 1887, because the area was noted for its many sanitoria. The nuns' own convent had at one time been a sanitorium for tuberculosis patients, although it had originally been a private residence. The nuns moved some years ago and the house is again a private home.

I was saddened by Stevenson's early death. The lines he had wanted on his tombstone have always moved me:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.