where is this from:
"and yours is not less noble because no drum beats before you...
when you go out into your daily battlefields.
And no crowds shout about your coming...
when you return from your daily victory or defeat."

It was in a Funky Winkerbean comic strip by Tom Batiuk in the Chicago
Tribune on 11-15-98. It was attributed there to Robert Louis Stevenson
but that has not been confirmed, nor any complete text found, in local
libraries or online.
I have seen it with the line before it, "We must all be ready to
suffer, to die." I tried Kingfeatures.com, the agent(?)
I stuffed the strip in the back of my drawer for years, obviously, and
I still want to know!

The quotation is indeed from Robert Louis Stevenson, but it isn't from
one of his poems. This stirring quote comes from a letter that
Stevenson wrote to his editor.

From "Letters Home: Advice from the Wisest Men and Women of the Ages
to Their Friends and Loved Ones" by George Grant and Karen Grant (Page
42):

"ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON TO HIS EDITOR PATE HAMILTON...
The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to
toil, to suffer, to die. And yours is not the less noble because no
drum beats before you when you go out into your daily battlefields,
and no crowds shout about your coming when you return from your daily
victory or defeat."

If you are registered at Amazon, you can view the page cited above:

Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1888952482/ref=sib_aps_pg/104-8922027-1452718?%5Fencoding=UTF8&keywords=when%20you%20go%20out%20into%20your%20daily%20battlefields&p=S018&checkSum=FYgP6ivlLFezPVsQOZknwMAZpqw97pHWAqonX3rDKnQ%253D

I hope this is helpful! If anything is unclear or incomplete, please
request clarification; I'll be glad to offer further assistance before
you rate my answer.

Best regards,
pinkfreud

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Request for Answer Clarification by andiep-ga on 25 Oct 2004 13:34 PDT

Is there no context available, is it not part of a longer "stirring
quote"? I can accept this but I'm a little disappointed that there
isn't more to it. (Which is not your fault if the rest doesn't exist
anymore.)

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Clarification of Answer by pinkfreud-ga on 25 Oct 2004 13:54 PDT

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any version of the quote
which is longer than the one mentioned above. Since this was an
excerpt of a rather obscure letter from an author to his editor, it
seems likely that the rest of the missive may have consisted of
mundane matters related to publishing and proofreading.

Very prompt answer and it did clear up the author. I hoped for more
but it's not the fault of the researcher if there isn't anything else
to be found.