References

I was reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes this week (recommended, by the way—his travel writing is very entertaining). These travels took place during the time after he and Fanny had met and fallen in love, but when she'd gone back to America to divorce her awful husband and his family were meanwhile trying to persuade him out of the relationship; this context isn't explained in the book, but it's clearly enough there in the background. Anyway, imagine my feelings on suddenly coming upon this passage—in which RLS is camping in the mountains, sleeping outside alone:

And yet even while I was exulting in my solitude I became aware of a strange lack. I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect. And to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free.

Right? ♥

(McArthur is totally right, by the way; it really is something that he wrote that and then wrote the 'only one coat' bit in Kidnapped.)