Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

MEN AND BOOKS
teaching on all essential points, and yet preserve a
measure of his spirit :
' This is what you shall do,' he says in the one, ' love the
earth, and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every
one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your
income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning
God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off
your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or
number of men ; go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
and with the young, and mothers of families, read these leaves
[his own works] in the open air every season of every year of
your life; re-examine all you have been told at school or
church, or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own
soul.""
' The prudence of the greatest poet,' he adds in the other—
and the greatest poet is, of course, himself—' knows that the
yomig man who composedly perilled his life and lost it, has
done exceeding well for himself; while the man who has not
perilled his life, and retains it to old age in riches and ease,
has perhaps achieved nothing for himself worth mentioning ;
and that only that person has no great prudence to learn, who
has learnt to prefer real long-lived things, and favours body and
soul the same, and perceives the indirect surely following the
direct, and what evil or good he does leaping onward and
waiting to meet him again, and who in his spirit, in any
emergency whatever, neither hurries nor avoids death.'
There is much that is Christian in these extracts,
starthngly Christian. Any reader who bears in mind
Whitman's own advice and 'dismisses whatever
insults his own soul ' will find plenty that is bracing,
brightening, and chastening to reward him for a
little patience at first It seems hardly possible
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