Robert Louis Stevenson's short story "Will o'the Mill" was first published in the January 1878 issue of The Cornhill Magazine (vol. 37, issue 217, pp. 41–60). Some years later, on January 2, 1886, Stevenson wrote a letter to his friend Will Hicok Low thanking him for the gift of a copy of Keats's Lamia with illustrations by Low. Low had dedicated these illustrations to Stevenson. Along with the letter, Stevenson included a copy of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and, as a postscript, a poem inspired by Low's illustrations. He characterized the poem as "damned bad lines in return for a beautiful book." Stevenson included a slightly revised version of this poem in his 1887 collection Underwoods. The same year also saw the publication of Stevenson's The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables wherein "Will o'the Mill" was published for the first time in book form (pp. 77–116).
The poem to Low is about the futile pursuit of unattainable beauty, a reference perhaps to Hermes's search for a beautiful nymph in Keats's poem. By contrast, the eponymous Will o'the Mill recognizes the fruitlessness of such a quest, and decides instead to remain content with his life as a miller and innkeeper in a small village. It is certainly possible to read the poem as extending the message of the short story: both suggest that the pursuit of ideals leads to restlessness rather than happiness. Yet Stevenson does not reference "Will o'the Mill" at all in his letter to Low. And this particular theme is a recurrent one in Stevenson's works: Jekyll and Hyde, among others, also shows the dangers of pursuing joys outside one's usual purview. So in the absence of any explicit link made by Stevenson or Low between "Will o'the Mill" and the poem to Low, the appearance of both in book form within the same year as well as the repetition of the name "Will" seem to be coincidence. Certainly the facts of Low's life (or for that matter Stevenson's) have little in common with the confined existence Will o'the Mill chooses for himself.
However, a stand-alone edition of "Will o'the Mill" published in 1901, seven years after Stevenson's death, includes the first two verses of "To Will H. Low" as a dedicatory poem. This edition, handsomely published by Elbert Hubbard at the Roycroft Shop in East Aurora, NY, is the only one I have come across where the poem is linked to the short story. I have been unable to track down any further information about this volume. Was this an authorized edition? Why is the copyright given as Hubbard's rather than Stevenson's? What were the relevant laws in 1901? Did Stevenson give any indication during his lifetime that the poem and the story were linked, or was this an unsupported idea of Hubbard's? And if the linkage was Stevenson's own, then why did he find it appropriate? Apart from the somewhat tenuous thematic connection (by contrast) between the poem and the story, what is the relevance of Will H. Low to the story of "Will o'the Mill"?
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