Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwrecks.

This line is from Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay “A Gossip on Romance,” written during his mature period as a critic of fiction and a practitioner of adventure romance. In the essay Stevenson defends romance against strict realism, arguing that certain settings and objects carry an imaginative “charge” that seems to dictate the kinds of stories that belong to them. He evokes the way landscapes, houses, and coastlines can feel as if they come preloaded with narrative destiny—murder, haunting, shipwreck—reflecting both Victorian tastes for the Gothic and Stevenson’s own lifelong fascination with place as a generator of plot.

Stevenson suggests that environments are not neutral backdrops but active prompts to the storytelling mind. Some places, by their atmosphere and associations—dampness, age, isolation, danger—seem to “speak” and demand particular genres of event: crime in a shadowed garden, ghosts in an old house, disaster along a treacherous shore. The claim is less supernatural than aesthetic: it describes how readers and writers intuitively read meaning into setting, letting mood and cultural memory shape expectation. The passage also defends romance’s reliance on heightened, emblematic locales as a legitimate way to reach emotional truth.