'It's an owercome sooth for age and youth, And it brooks wi' nae denial, That the dearest friends are the auldest friends And the young are just on trial.
'There's a rival bauld wi' young an' auld, And it's him that has bereft me, For the surest friends are the auldest friends And the maist o' mine hae left me.'...
The last volume of verses, _Songs of Travel_, has a pathos all its own, for, like _St Ives_ and _Weir of Hermiston_, the author never saw it in print. The verses were sent home shortly before his death, and in the note appended to them Mr Sydney Colvin says they were to be finally printed as Book III. of _Underwoods_, but meantime were given to the world in their present form in 1896.
They were written at different periods, and they show their author in varying moods; but they incline rather to the sadder spirit of the last two years of his life, and have left something if not of the courage for the fight, at least of the gaiety of living behind them. Two of them are written to his wife, many of them to friends; some of them have the lilt and the brightness of songs, others, like _If this were Faith_ and _The Woodman_, are filled with the gravity of life and the bitterness of the whole world's struggle for existence.
In _The Vagabond_ he is still in love with the open air life and the freedom of the tramp. In his exile he longs to rest at last beside those he loves; he feels the weariness of life, he writes--
'I have trod the upward and the downward slope; I have endured and done in days before; I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope; And I have lived, and loved, and closed the door.'
After that one feels no surprise that he is waiting for the final summons, and one has only a sense of the eternal fitness of things when in the last words of the book he says--
'I hear the signal, Lord,--I understand The night at Thy command Comes. I will eat and sleep, and will not question more.'
[5] Mr Stevenson was very fond of this quotation, which appeals so truly to Caledonia's sons and daughters. He found it in an old volume of _Good Words_, and never knew its source. Like many other people he quoted it incorrectly. According to information kindly supplied by Mr W. Keith Leask, the lines, which have an interesting history, stand thus in the original--