ns, your mind enthroned in the
seventh circle of content; when suddenly the mood changes, the
weather-cock goes about, and you ask yourself one question more:
whether, for the interval, you have been the wisest philosopher or the
most egregious of donkeys? Human experience is not yet able to reply;
but at least you have had a fine moment, and looked down upon all the
kingdoms of the earth. And whether it was wise or foolish, to-morrow's
travel will carry you, body and mind, into some different parish of the
infinite.

XI

PAN'S PIPES

The world in which we live has been variously said and sung by the most
ingenious poets and philosophers: these reducing it to formulae and
chemical ingredients, those striking the lyre in high-sounding measures
for the handiwork of God. What experience supplies is of a mingled
tissue, and the choosing mind has much to regret before it can get
together the materials of a theory. Dew and thunder, destroying Attila
and the Spring lambkins, belong to an order of contrasts which no
repetition can assimilate. There is an uncouth, outlandish strain
throughout the web of the world, as from a vexatious planet in the house
of life. Things are not congruous and wear strange disguises: the
consummate flower is fostered out of dung, and after nourishing itself
awhile with heaven's delicate distillations, decays again into
indistinguishable soil; and with Caesar's ashes, Hamlet tells us, the
urchins make dirt pies and filthily besmear their countenance. Nay, the
kindly shine of summer, when tracked 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
lighted 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 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 experie