The Pocket | Page 9

looks lovely. Some leap to the
strains with unapt foot, and make a halting figure in the universal dance.
And some, like sour spectators at the play, receive the music into their
hearts with an unmoved countenance, and walk like strangers through
the general rejoicing. But let him feign never so carefully, there is not a
man but has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of ecstasy
and sets the world a-singing.
*
Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish; it is
all true; but what is it when compared to the reality of which it
discourses? where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes, and hills
totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the objects of
sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and Romance herself has
made her dwelling among men? So we come back to the old myth, and
hear the goat-footed piper making the music which is itself the charm
and terror of things; and when a glen invites our visiting footsteps,
fancy that Pan leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or when our
hearts quail at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves that he has
stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.
*
The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly stamping his
foot, so that armies were dispersed; now by the woodside on a summer
noon trolling on his pipe until he charmed the hearts of upland
ploughmen. And the Greeks, in so figuring, uttered the last word of
human experience. To certain smoke-dried spirits matter and motion
and elastic ethers, and the hypothesis of this or that other spectacled
professor, tell a speaking story; but for youth and all ductile and
congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of all the classic hierarchy alone
survives in triumph; goat-footed, with a gleeful and an angry look, the
type of the shaggy world: and in every wood, if you go with a spirit
properly prepared, you shall hear the note of his pipe.
*
To leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened with
novelties; but when years have come, it only casts a more endearing

light upon the past. As in those composite photographs of Mr. Galton's,
the image of each new sitter brings out but the more clearly the central
features of the race; when once youth has flown, each new impression
only deepens the sense of nationality and the desire of native places. So
may some cadet of Royal Ecossais or the Albany Regiment, as he
mounted guard about French citadels, so may some officer marching
his company of the Scots-Dutch among the polders, have felt the soft
rains of the Hebrides upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the
remembered aroma of peat-smoke. And the rivers of home are dear in
particular to all men. This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for
Abana and Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor country, for I know
one of Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers
about the hued lowland waters of that shire.
*
THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS
We travelled in the print of olden wars; Yet all the land was green; And
love we found, and peace, Where fire and war had been. They pass and
smile, the children of the sword-- No more the sword they wield; And
O, how deep the corn Along the battlefield!
*
To reckon dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat
that runs through all the winning music of the world, to hold back the
hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from life because of death:
this it is to be afraid of Pan. Highly respectable citizens who flee life's
pleasures and responsibilities and keep, with upright hat, upon the
midway of custom, avoiding the right hand and the left, the ecstasies
and the agonies, how surprised they would be if they could hear their
attitude mythologically expressed, and knew themselves as
tooth-chattering ones, who flee from Nature because they fear the hand
of Nature's God!
*
The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a kind of
contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in our lot, we
must continually face some other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a fall
whether in love or enmity. It is still by force of body, or power of
character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures.
*

Extreme BUSYNESS, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a
symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a
catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal