The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls

Back Forward Menu

 "There's a track across the deep,
  And a path across the sea,
  But for me there's nae return
  To my ain countree."

"When the smell of the good wet earth" came to him it came "with a kind
of Highland tone." A tropic shower found him in a "frame of mind and
body that belonged to Scotland." And when he turned to write the
chronicle of his grandfather's life and work, the beautiful words in
which he described the old gentleman's farewell to "Sumbraugh and the
wild crags of Skye" meant likewise his own farewell to those shores. No
more was he to "see the topaz and ruby interchange on the summit of Bell
Rock," no more to see "the castle on its hills," or the venerable city
which he always thought of as his home.

"Like Leyden," he wrote, "I have gone into a far land to die, not stayed
like Burns to mingle in the end with Scottish soil."