On receiving a dedication

The Scottish novelist SR Crockett sent a copy of his newly-published set of short stories, The Stickit Minister, to Robert Louis Stevenson, who was by this time living in Samoa, with the inscription:

To Robert Louis Stevenson of Scotland and Samoa I dedicate these stories of that Grey Galloway land where about the Graves of the Martyrs the Whaups are crying – his heart remembers how.

Deeply moved, the homesick Stevenson wrote this poem, which he sent to Crockett:

To S. R. Crockett
On receiving a dedication

Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,

Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,
My heart remembers how!

Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,
Standing-stones on the vacant wine-red moor,
Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent vanished races,
And winds, austere and pure.

Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,
Hills of home! and to hear again the call;
Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying,
And hear no more at all.

Of course, he never did behold again the hills of home. He died in Samoa, which he also loved, in 1894.

Above: Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson by GP Nerli, Samoa,1892, Scottish National Portrait Gallery