Excerpt from Poems and Ballads

They counted themselves lucky, who, thirty to forty years ago, were able to make first acquaintance with the poetry of the still-living Robert Louis Stevenson even at the cost of tracking it through various volumes, or a series of intermittent "Occ. Verses" in the old Pall Mall Gazette. There was never any illusion among the collectors that the reputation of the prose romancer was likely to be overwhelmed by the fugitive bard, but his verse was recognised by them as completing the evidence of his manifold gifts as a literary artist, and it was rarely that it disappointed. A Child"s Garden of Verses, that imaginative realisation of the make-believe of childhood, had charmed in an unmistakable fashion, and indeed was recognised as a tour-de-force never likely to be bettered in its own way by any one else. Yet it was not exactly all that was expected from a quite grown-up gentleman whose name was becoming associated with that of Walter Scott.

Underwoods - in its Scottish parts - was more like the thing; here was verse that could be imposed on the more innocent 25th of January celebrants as the veritable work of Burns. Followed the Ballads of the South Seas, which alarmed by the suggestion that Stevenson had "lost the place" again and did not know wherein his strength lay. But the subsequent Songs of Travel restored our faith in him and our affection.

It was a considerable time after Stevenson"s death that his poetical "remains," as the ambiguous old word has it, were procurable in one volume. Readers of the present edition are well-off to be able, in a single book, to read every poem of his worth re-printing.

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