The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (4.1895)

Mr. Stevenson’s Forerunner

By James Ashcroft Noble

For a long time—I can hardly give a number to its years—I
have been haunted by a spectre of duty. Of late the visita-
tions of the haunter have recurred with increasing frequency and
added persistence of appeal ; and though, like Hamlet, I have long
dallied with the ghostly behest, like him I am at last compelled to
obedience. Ghosts, I believe, have a habit of putting themselves
in evidence for the purpose of demanding justice, and my ghost
makes no display of originality : in this respect he follows the
time-honoured example of his tribe, and if peace of mind is to
return to me the exorcism of compliance must needs be uttered.

Emerson in one of his gnomic Couplets proclaims his conviction
that

“One accent of the Holy Ghost
This heedful world hath never lost ”—

a saying which, shorn of its imaginative wings and turned into a
pedestrian colloquialism, reads something like this—“ What de-
serves to live the world will not let die.” It is a comforting
belief, yet there are times when Tennyson’s vision of the “ fifty
seeds,” out of which Nature u often brings but one to bear,”
seerns nearer to the common truth of things ; and all the world’s

heedfulness