entitled, with a kind of classical elegance then in vogue, "Pan's Pipes" and "Aes Triplex."
Read what he says about "tearing divines reducing life to the dimensions of a funeral procession" and about "melancholy unbelievers yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far away." Consider his glowing young pagan preference of those dwellers on the sides of the volcano who give themselves to life as to a bride—give themselves "to the appetites, to honor, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature and the pride of our nimble bodies." Read again his contempt of the "tooth-chattering ones who flee from Nature because they fear the hand of Nature's God," and his contempt of "respectable citizens" who, in order to keep their hats on in the midway of custom, flee life's pleasures and its responsibilities, its ecstasies and its agonies. Consider again his stunning characterization of this fertile earth—"sunshiny, lewd and cruel!" Through all the "winning music" of the world he heard a "threat," yet that music, that Panic music, "is itself the charm and terror of things." These are, he declares, at the very heart of all true romance—the charm and the terror, one and inseparable.
Where one is not the other is not. Do you understand? And is that, I ask you, the way the matter is set forth in Sabbath school?
If you wish a brief and candid expression of Stevenson's response from his early years till his death—his response to the Panic music—I commend to your attention one of the "new poems," called "Stormy Nights." He had a way, you remember, of writing poems and then of fulfilling them with his life. The famous "Requiem," for example, he wrote on a sickbed
