to W. B. Yeats

Vailima, Samoa, April 14, 1894.

DEAR SIR,—Long since when I was a boy I remember the emotions with which I repeated Swinburne’s poems and ballads.  Some ten years ago, a similar spell was cast upon me by Meredith’s Love in the Valley; the stanzas beginning ‘When her mother tends her’ haunted me and made me drunk like wine; and I remember waking with them all the echoes of the hills about Hyères.  It may interest you to hear that I have a third time fallen in slavery: this is to your poem called the Lake Isle of Innisfrae.  It is so quaint and airy, simple, artful, and eloquent to the heart—but I seek words in vain.  Enough that ‘always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds on the shore,’ and am, yours gratefully,

Robert Louis Stevenson.