The Annotated 'Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes'/Dedication
My Dear Sidney Colvin,[1]
The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world[2]—all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.
Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? And so, my dear Sidney Colvin, it is with pride that I sign myself affectionately yours,
R. L. S.
Notes[edit]
- ↑ Sidney Colvin .. Sir Sidney Colvin (1845-1927) an established "man of letters" and friend who helped the young Stevenson with introductions to editors, “who were glad, of course,” notes that gentleman, “to welcome so promising a recruit.” At the time Stevenson was thrilled to have an important literary person to help and guide him, but Sidney today is probably most famous as the friend of RLS.
- ↑ wilderness of this world .. The opening sentence to Puritan writer John Bunyan's (1628-1688) The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) "As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where there was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep". The poem is an allegorical journey walking past temptations of the material world to find salvation in the spiritual.