Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 11, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume III

PAN'S PIPES
home with the scientific spyglass, is found to issue
from the most portentous nightmare of the universe
— the great, conflagrant sun : a world of hell's squibs,
tumultuary, roaring aloud, inimical to life. The
sun itself is enough to disgust a human being of the
scene which he inhabits ; and you would not fancy
there was a green or habitable spot in a universe
thus awfully hghted up. And yet it is by the blaze
of such a conflagration, to which the fire of Rome
was but a spark, that we do all our fiddling, and
hold domestic tea-parties at the arbour door.
The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now
terribly stamping his foot, so that armies were dis-
persed ; 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 aethers, 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.
For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with
gardens ; where the salt and tumbhng sea receives
clear rivers running from among reeds and liHes ;
fruitful and austere ; a rustic world ; sunshiny, lewd,
and cruel. What is it the birds sing among the
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