It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

In a letter to Henley after the publication of Treasure Island Stevenson wrote "I will now make a confession: It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver. Among other services to literature it publiWilliam Ernest Henleyd Rudyard Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that he had not received the same thrill of poetry so intimate and so deep since George Meredith's "Joy of Earth" and "Love in the Valley".