Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

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But another of Henley’s poems about Stevenson, ‘Ballade, R.L.S.’, not published until 1974, gives a rather more intimate portrait of

An Ariel quick through all his veins

With sex and temperament and style;

All eloquence and balls and brains;

Heroic and also infantile.

The affectionately bantering tone carries right through the poem to ‘Wise, passionate, swaggering, puerile’ in the last stanza. The forthright, critical spirit that Henley displays here was the very thing that attracted Stevenson to him. Opinionated, quarrelsome, with his huge laugh and super-sized vitality, Henley was like a sharper and more inventive Baxter, a boon companion whose restless intelligence was a match for Stevenson’s own.

The friendship was cemented by Stevenson’s inspired plan to take Henley out of hospital on a couple of occasions in a carriage (probably the swanky Stevenson barouche, of which Thomas was very proud). To a passer-by it must have been peculiar to see the stick-thin, boyish Stevenson carrying a burly, bearded one-legged man down the long staircase of the Infirmary and staggering out to where the vehicle waited. They drove out of the city to see the new spring greenery and the cherry blossom, stopping on bridges ‘to let him enjoy the great cry of green that goes up to Heaven out of the river beds’:

he asked (more than once) ‘What noise is that?’ – ‘The water.’ – ‘O’ almost incredulously; and then quite a long while after: ‘Do you know the noise of the water astonished me very much.’

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Henley remembered these drives all his life with intense happiness, and celebrated them in the last poem of his ‘In Hospital’ sequence, ‘Discharged’:

Carry me out

Into the wind and the sunshine,

Into the beautiful world.

O, the wonder, the spell of the streets!

The stature and strength of the horses,