Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), born as Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, was a novelist, travel writer and poet. He was born in Edinburgh's New Town on November 13th 1850, and died 44 years later Stevenson of a brain haemorrhage, on December 3, 1894, on Vailima, a small Samoan island.
His father, Thomas Stevenson was a joint-engineer to the Board of Northern Lighthouses, and inventor of, among other things, the marine dynamometer, which measures the force of waves. His mother, Margaret Balfour, was the daughter of a Scottish clergyman. His grandfather, Robert Stevenson was Britain's most famous builder of lighthouses, whose achievements include the Bell Rock Lighthouse[1] His best known works are Treasure Island (1883) and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).[2] His best known poem is the epitaph he wrote for himself, Requiem:
- UNDER the wide and starry sky
- Dig the grave and let me lie:
- Glad did I live and gladly die,
- And I laid me down with a will.
- This be the verse you 'grave for me:
- Here he lies where he long'd to be;
- Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
- And the hunter home from the hill.