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    Ballads
    Ballads
    Ballads
    Ebook80 pages1 hour

    Ballads

    By Robert Louis Stevenson

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 2001
    Ballads
    Author

    Robert Louis Stevenson

    Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, the only son of an engineer, Thomas Stevenson. Despite a lifetime of poor health, Stevenson was a keen traveller, and his first book An Inland Voyage (1878) recounted a canoe tour of France and Belgium. In 1880, he married an American divorcee, Fanny Osbourne, and there followed Stevenson's most productive period, in which he wrote, amongst other books, Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped (both 1886). In 1888, Stevenson left Britain in search of a more salubrious climate, settling in Samoa, where he died in 1894.

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      Book preview

      Ballads - Robert Louis Stevenson

      Ballads, by Robert Louis Stevenson

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ballads, by Robert Louis Stevenson

      (#16 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson)

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      **Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

      **eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

      *****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****

      Title: Ballads

      Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

      Release Date: January, 1996  [EBook #413]

      [This file was first posted on December 15, 1995]

      [Most recently updated: August 18, 2002]

      Edition: 10

      Language: English

      Transcribed from the 1895 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

      BALLADS BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

      Contents:

         The Song of Rahéro

            Dedication

            The Slaying of Támatéa

            The Venging of Támatéa

            Rahéro

            Notes

         The Feast of Famine

            The Priest’s Vigil

            The Lovers

            The Feast

            The Raid

            Notes

         Ticonderoga

            The Saying of the Name

            The Seeking of the Name

            The Place of the Name

            Notes

         Heather Ale

            Heather Ale

            Note

         Christmas At Sea

      THE SONG OF RAHÉRO

      A LEGEND OF TAHITI

      TO ORI A ORI

      Ori, my brother in the island mode,

      In every tongue and meaning much my friend,

      This story of your country and your clan,

      In your loved house, your too much honoured guest,

      I made in English.  Take it, being done;

      And let me sign it with the name you gave.

      TERIITERA.

      I. THE SLAYING OF TÁMATÉA

      It fell in the days of old, as the men of Taiárapu tell,

      A youth went forth to the fishing, and fortune favoured him well.

      Támatéa his name: gullible, simple, and kind,

      Comely of countenance, nimble of body, empty of mind,

      His mother ruled him and loved him beyond the wont of a wife,

      Serving the lad for eyes and living herself in his life.

      Alone from the sea and the fishing came Támatéa the fair,

      Urging his boat to the beach, and the mother awaited him there,

      - Long may you live! said she.  "Your fishing has sped to a wish.

      And now let us choose for the king the fairest of all your fish.

      For fear inhabits the palace and grudging grows in the land,

      Marked is the sluggardly foot and marked the niggardly hand,

      The hours and the miles are counted, the tributes numbered and weighed,

      And woe to him that comes short, and woe to him that delayed!"

      So spoke on the beach the mother, and counselled the wiser thing.

      For Rahéro stirred in the country and secretly mined the king.

      Nor were the signals wanting of how the leaven wrought,

      In the cords of obedience loosed and the tributes grudgingly brought.

      And when last to the temple of Oro the boat with the victim sped,

      And the priest uncovered the basket and looked on the face of the dead,

      Trembling fell upon all at sight of an ominous thing,

      For there was the aito {1a} dead, and he of the house of the king.

      So spake on the beach the mother, matter worthy of note,

      And wattled a basket well, and chose a fish from the boat;

      And Támatéa the pliable shouldered the basket and went,

      And travelled, and sang as he travelled, a lad that was well content.

      Still the way of his going was round by the roaring coast,

      Where the ring of the reef is broke and the trades run riot the most.

      On his left, with smoke as of battle, the billows battered the land;

      Unscalable, turreted mountains rose on the inner hand.

      And cape, and village, and river, and vale, and mountain above,

      Each had a name in the land for men to remember and love;

      And never the name of a place, but lo! a song in its praise:

      Ancient and unforgotten, songs of the earlier days,

      That the elders taught to the young, and at night, in the full of the moon,

      Garlanded boys and maidens sang together in tune.

      Támatéa the placable went with a lingering foot;

      He sang as loud as a bird, he whistled hoarse as a flute;

      He broiled in the sun, he breathed in the grateful shadow of trees,

      In the icy stream of the rivers he waded over the knees;

      And still in his empty mind crowded, a thousand-fold,

      The deeds of the strong and the songs of the cunning heroes of old.

      And now was he come to a place Taiárapu honoured the most,

      Where a silent valley of woods debouched on the noisy coast,

      Spewing a level river.  There was a haunt of Pai. {1b}

      There, in his potent youth, when his parents drove him to die,

      Honoura lived like a beast, lacking the lamp and the fire,

      Washed by the rains of the trade and clotting his hair in the mire;

      And there, so mighty his hands, he bent the tree to his foot -

      So keen the spur of

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