music. Would the wicked river drag me down by the heels, indeed? and look so beautiful all the time? Nature's good humour was only skin-deep, after all."
And of the reeds he writes: "Pan once played upon their forefathers; and so, by the hands of his river, he still plays upon these later generations down all the valley of the Oise; and plays the same air, both sweet and shrill, to tell us of the beauty and the terror of the world."
"The Beauty and the terror of the world"—was not this what Pan stood for to the Greeks of long ago?
The gladness of living, the terror of living—the exquisite joy and the infinite pain—that has been the possession of Pan—for we have not yet found a more fitting title—since ever time began. And because Pan is as he is, from him has evolved a higher Pantheism. We have done away with his goat's feet and his horns, although these were handed on from him to Satan when Christianity broke down the altars of Paganism.
"Nature, which is the Time-vesture of God and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish," writes Carlyle. Pan is Nature, and Nature is not the ugly thing that the Calvinists would once have had us believe it to be. Nature is capable of being made the garment of God.
"In Being's floods, in Action's storm,
"I walk and work, above, beneath,
"Work and weave in endless motion!
Birth and Death,
An infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving
The fire of Living;
"'Tis thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply.
"And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by."
