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Sierra Club Bulletin. 



tender memories. Much — perhaps most — of his best 

 work is really personal reminiscence taking shape long 

 after the events. And beyond the range of his own recol- 

 lection, he summons the help of history and tradition, 

 that he may reach ever farther and farther into that 

 romantic and stirring past which once sat enthroned 

 where now the prosy and vulgar present is driving its 

 sordid bargains. The light of other days is almost the 

 only sunshine which warms his canvas. This note it is 

 which gives the characteristic — almost feminine — ^touch 

 to so much of Stoddard's work. 



To Stevenson, California afforded no such background 

 of memories. Here he could write only of what he saw 

 immediately before him. In this he is like the painters, 

 who can put no yesterday and no to-morrow into their 

 pictures. But what a treasure of interest he found in the 

 passing moment ! How keen and sure was the vision of 

 those eyes, and how true the skill that recorded it ! How 

 unfailing the kindliness and good humor, the cheerful 

 courage, the unfeigned human interest in all that went on 

 about him! How surprising that the long torment of 

 his journey hither, added to the weakness and pain of 

 wasting disease, should have left no gloom in his heart 

 to dim the splendor of that sunrise on San Francisco Bay, 

 or the glory of that starlit drive on St. Helena, or the 

 witchery of the forest-aisles of Monterey where silence 

 becomes audible through the deep, thrilling, ever-present 

 murmur of the sea ! And then the kindly shrewdness and 

 quiet humor of the human types he has sketched: the 

 hunter's family, the children of Israel, the "brither Scot" 

 who remembered how when a child his father had put 

 him inside the grim mouth of Mons Meg, the Mexican, 

 the Indian,— and his grave concern as to the outcome for 

 these last in the presence of our aggressive American 

 civilization. 



Stevenson's writing on California was least in amount 

 of all the work we have been considering. It is scanty 

 indeed as compared with the total mass of his own writ- 



