or this reason that the Roman legionaries on the Great Wall so
often reared altars in that lonely land of moor and mountain where so
many of them fought and died--

"_To Pan, and to the Sylvan deities_"?

For surely Pan was there, where the curlew cried and the pewit
mourned, and sometimes the waiting soldiers must almost have imagined
his mocking laughter borne in the winds that swept across the bleak
hills of their exiled solitude.

He who was surely one of the bravest of mankind, one who always, in
his own words, "clung to his paddle," writes of such a fear when he
escaped death by drowning from the Oise in flood.

"The devouring element in the universe had leaped out against me, in
this green valley quickened by a running stream. The bells were all
very pretty in their way, but I had heard some of the hollow notes of
Pan's 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."

So speaks the _