
Robert Louis Stevenson and His Friends - Thevet
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n10/andrew-o-hagan/bournemouth
======
zt
Apropos nothing really at all, I always found it interesting that Robert Louis
Stevenson's father
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Stevenson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Stevenson))
was a famous engineer that is mostly lost to modern history because his
inventions don't really matter to us today.

Which I learned from this obscure quote (not even anywhere on Google) I dug up
in the Brown University archives one summer:

The need of our country is not to lift marble to the fortieth story of some
new office building, but to lift the level of character; not to whiten the
seas with the sails of commerce, but to develop those simple fidelities and
homely virtues which are the cheap defense of nations. When Tennyson wrote
``The Crossing of the Bar,'' he did more for civilization than if he built any
ocean-liner or man-of-war. Thomas Stevenson did much for England when he built
the lighthouses which send their radiance each night over the tossing waters
of the Channel. But we owe far more to his son, Robert Louis Stevenson,
because he taught us how to kindle a light within, how to keep the soul serene
and steadfast in the face of pain and death. When Millet seized his brush and
painted the `Angelus' on the bit of canvas that cost him three francs, he did
more for labor and the laboring man than if he had seized a spade and worked
for fifty years in the fields in France. Not the men who add to out quantity
of materials, but the men who deepen the quality of our living, are the real
benefactors and educators of the world. In such endeavor our antagonisms
vanish, because we become workers together with god. -William H.P. Faunce,
President of Brown University

~~~
kwhitefoot
Thank you for that, it's uplifting.

It does appear to be available on the net, although in remarkably few places:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The%20need%20of%20our%20c...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The%20need%20of%20our%20country%20is%20not%20to%20lift%20marble%20to%20the%20fortieth%20story%22)

~~~
zt
I checked earlier but you're obviously correct. Thank you.

