But
after he left school, his mood changed. He had been completely
sheltered from rebuffs, so, when he stood in the "palace porch of
life," and the peculiar accents of his mind were jeered at, he, who
had never tasted of a whipping, felt the smart of humankind, and
suffered sorely from "maladies incident to only sons." In the
"coiled perplexities of youth" he "sorrowed, sobbed, and feared"
alone. Blackford's uncultured breast had been meet nurse for Sir
Walter when he roamed a truant boy, but further south of the
becastled capital, topmost Allermuir or steep Caerketton became the
cradle of the next poet and master of Romance that Edinburgh reared.
There, in woody folds of the hills, he found, as he said, "bright is
the ring of words," and there he taught himself to be the right man
to ring them. When Swanston became the Stevensons' summer home, the
undisciplined Robert kicked with his fullest vigour against what he
called the Bastille of Civilisation and the bowing down before "the
bestial Goddesses, Comfort and Respectability.
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