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