In the course of a day's walk, you see, there is much 
variance in the mood.  From the exhilaration of the start, to 
the happy phlegm of the arrival, the change is certainly 
great.  As the day goes on, the traveller moves from the one 
extreme towards the other.  He becomes more and more 
incorporated with the material landscape, and the open-air 
drunkenness grows upon him with great strides, until he posts 
along the road, and sees everything about him, as in a 
cheerful dream.  The first is certainly brighter, but the 
second stage is the more peaceful.  A man does not make so 
many articles towards the end, nor does he laugh aloud; but 
the purely animal pleasures, the sense of physical wellbeing, 
the delight of every inhalation, of every time the muscles 
tighten down the thigh, console him for the absence of the 
others, and bring him to his destination still content.

Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs.  You come to 
a milestone on a hill, or some place where deep ways meet 
under trees; and off goes the knapsack, and down you sit to 
smoke a pipe in the shade.  You sink into yourself, and the 
birds come round and look at you; and your smoke dissipates 
upon the afternoon under the blue dome of heaven; and the sun 
lies warm upon your feet, and the cool air visits your neck 
and turns aside your open shirt.  If you are not happy, you 
must have an evil conscience.  You may dally as long as you 
like by the roadside.  It is almost as if the millennium were 
arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and watches over the 
housetop, and remember time and seasons no more.  Not to keep 
hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live for ever.  
You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long 
is a summer's day, that you measure out only by hunger, and 
bring to an end only when you are drowsy.  I know a village 
where there are hardly any clocks, where no one knows more of 
the days of the week than by a sort of instinct for the fete 
on Sundays, and where only one person can tell you the day of 
the month, and she is generally wrong; and if people were 
aware how slow Time journeyed in that village, and what 
armfuls of spare hours he gives, over and above the bargain, 
to its wise inhabitants, I believe there would be a stampede 
out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a variety of large towns, 
where the clocks lose their heads, and shake the hours out 
each one faster than the other, as though they were all in a 
wager.  And all these foolish pilgrims would each bring his 
own misery along with him, in a watch-pocket!  It is to be 
noticed, there were no clocks and watches in the much-vaunted 
days before the flood.  It follows, of course, there were no 
appointments, and punctuality was not yet thought upon.  
"Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure," says 
Milton, "he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot deprive him of 
his covetousness."  And so I would say of a modern man of 
business, you may do what you will for him, put him in Eden, 
give him the elixir of life - he has still a flaw at heart, he 
still has his business habits.  Now, there is no time when 
business habits are more mitigated than on a walking tour.  
And so during these halts, as I say, you will feel almost 
free.

But it is at night, and after dinner, that the best hour 
comes.  There are no such pipes to be smoked as those that 
follow a good day's march; the flavour of the tobacco is a 
thing to be remembered, it is so dry and aromatic, so full and 
so fine.  If you wind up the evening with grog, you will own 
there was never such grog; at every sip a jocund tranquillity 
spreads about your limbs, and sits easily in your heart.  If 
you read a book - and you will never do so save by fits and 
starts - you find the language strangely racy and harmonious; 
words take a new meaning; single sentences possess the ear for 
half an hour together; and the writer endears himself to you, 
at every page, by the nicest coincidence of sentiment.  It 
seems as if it were a book you had written yourself in a 
dream.  To all we have read on such occasions we look back 
with special favour.  "It was on the 10th of April, 1798," 
says Hazlitt, with amorous precision, "that I sat down to a 
volume of the new HELOISE, at the Inn at Llangollen, over a 
bottle of sherry and a cold chicken."  I should wish to quote 
more, for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we 
cannot write like Hazlitt.  And, talking of that, a volume of 
Hazlitt's essays would be a capital pocket-book on such a 
journey; so would a volume of Heine's songs; and for TRISTRAM 
SHANDY I can pledge a fair experience.

If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better 
in life than to lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or 
lean over the parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds and 
the quick fishes.  It is then, if ever, that you taste 
Joviality to the full significance of that audacious word.  
Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean and so 
strong and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, 
whatever you do is done with pride and a kingly sort of 
pleasure.  You fall in talk with any one, wise or foolish, 
drunk or sober.  And it seems as if a hot walk purged you, 
more than of anything else, of all narrowness and pride, and 
left curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child or a man 
of science.  You lay aside all your own hobbies, to watch 
provincial humours develop themselves before you, now as a 
laughable farce, and now grave and beautiful like an old tale.

Or perhaps you are left to your own company for the 
night, and surly weather imprisons you by the fire.  You may 
remember how Burns, numbering past pleasures, dwells upon the 
hours when he has been "happy thinking."  It is a phrase that 
may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every side by 
clocks and chimes, and haunted, even at night, by flaming 
dial-plates.  For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off 
projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into 
solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no 
time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the 
Hills of Vanity.  Changed times, indeed, when we must sit all 
night, beside the fire, with folded hands; and a changed world 
for most of us, when we find we can pass the hours without 
discontent and be happy thinking.  We are in such haste to be 
doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice 
audible a moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that we 
forget that one thing, of which these are but the parts - 
namely, to live.  We fall in love, we drink hard, we run to 
and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep.  And now you are 
to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would not have been 
better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking.  To 
sit still and contemplate, - to remember the faces of women 
without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men 
without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy, and 
yet content to remain where and what you are - is not this to 
know both wisdom and virtue, and to dwell with happiness?  
After all, it is not they who carry flags, but they who look 
upon it from a private chamber, who have the fun of the 
procession.  And once you are at that, you are in the very 
humour of all social heresy.  It is no time for shuffling, or 
for big, empty words.  If you ask yourself what you mean by 
fame, riches, or learning, the answer is far to seek; and you 
go back into that kingdom of light imaginations, which seem so 
vain in the eyes of Philistines perspiring after wealth, and 
so momentous to those who are stricken with the disproportions 
of the world, and, in the face of the gigantic stars, cannot 
stop to split differences between two degrees of the 
infinitesimally small, such as a tobacco pipe or the Roman 
Empire, a million of money or a fiddlestick's end.

You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking whitely 
into the darkness, your body full of delicious pains, 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.



CHAPTER 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 reject before it can get 
together the materials of a theory.  Dew and thunder, 
destroying Atilla 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 experience.  To 
certain smoke-dried spirits matter and motion and elastic 
aethers, and the hypothesis of this or that other spectacled 
professor, tell a speaking story; but for youth and all 
ductile and congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of all the 
classic hierarchy alone survives in triumph; goat-footed, with 
a gleeful and an angry look, the type of the shaggy world: and 
in every wood, if you go with a spirit properly prepared, you 
shall hear the note of his pipe.

For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with gardens; 
where the salt and tumbling sea receives clear rivers running 
from among reeds and lilies; fruitful and austere; a rustic 
world; sunshiny, lewd, and cruel.  What is it the birds sing 
among the trees in pairing-time?  What means the sound of the 
rain falling far and wide upon the leafy forest?  To what tune 
does the fisherman whistle, as he hauls in his net at morning, 
and the bright fish are heaped inside the boat?  These are all 
airs upon Pan's pipe; he it was who gave them breath in the 
exultation of his heart, and gleefully modulated their outflow 
with his lips and fingers.  The coarse mirth of herdsmen, 
shaking the dells with laughter and striking out high echoes 
from the rock; the tune of moving feet in the lamplit city, or 
on the smooth ballroom floor; the hooves of many horses, 
beating the wide pastures in alarm; the song of hurrying 
rivers; the colour of clear skies; and smiles and the live 
touch of hands; and the voice of things, and their significant 
look, and the renovating influence they breathe forth - these 
are his joyful measures, to which the whole earth treads in 
choral harmony.  To this music the young lambs bound as to a 
tabor, and the London shop-girl skips rudely in the dance.  
For it puts a spirit of gladness in all hearts; and to look on 
the happy side of nature is common, in their hours, to all 
created things.  Some are vocal under a good influence, are 
pleasing whenever they are pleased, and hand on their 
happiness to others, as a child who, looking upon lovely 
things, looks lovely.  Some leap to the strains with unapt 
foot, and make a halting figure in the universal 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.

Alas if that were all!  But oftentimes the air is 
changed; and in the screech of the night wind, chasing navies, 
subverting the tall ships and the rooted cedar of the hills; 
in the random deadly levin or the fury of headlong floods, we 
recognise the "dread foundation" of life and the anger in 
Pan's heart.  Earth wages open war against her children, and 
under her softest touch hides treacherous claws.  The cool 
waters invite us in to drown; the domestic hearth burns up in 
the hour of sleep, and makes an end of all.  Everything is 
good or bad, helpful or deadly, not in itself, but by its 
circumstances.  For a few bright days in England the hurricane 
must break forth and the North Sea pay a toll of populous 
ships.  And when the universal music has led lovers into the 
paths of dalliance, confident of Nature's sympathy, suddenly 
the air shifts into a minor, and death makes a clutch from his 
ambuscade below the bed of marriage.  For death is given in a 
kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, 
where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes 
its entrance from the mother's corpse.  It is no wonder, with 
so traitorous a scheme of things, if the wise people who 
created for us the idea of Pan thought that of all fears the 
fear of him was the most terrible, since it embraces all.  And 
still we preserve the phrase: a panic terror.  To reckon 
dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat 
that runs through all the winning music of the world, to hold 
back the hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from 
life because of death: this it is to be afraid of Pan.  Highly 
respectable citizens who flee life's pleasures and 
responsibilities and keep, with upright hat, upon the midway 
of custom, avoiding the right hand and the left, the ecstasies 
and the agonies, how surprised they would be if they could 
hear their attitude mythologically expressed, and knew 
themselves as tooth-chattering ones, who flee from Nature 
because they fear the hand of Nature's God!  Shrilly sound 
Pan's pipes; and behold the banker instantly concealed in the 
bank parlour!  For to distrust one's impulses is to be 
recreant to Pan.

There are moments when the mind refuses to be satisfied 
with evolution, and demands a ruddier presentation of the sum 
of man's experience.  Sometimes the mood is brought about by 
laughter at the humorous side of life, as when, abstracting 
ourselves from earth, we imagine people plodding on foot, or 
seated in ships and speedy trains, with the planet all the 
while whirling in the opposite direction, so that, for all 
their hurry, they travel back-foremost through the universe of 
space.  Sometimes it comes by the spirit of delight, and 
sometimes by the spirit of terror.  At least, there will 
always be hours when we refuse to be put off by the feint of 
explanation, nicknamed science; and demand instead some 
palpitating image of our estate, that shall represent the 
troubled and uncertain element in which we dwell, and satisfy 
reason by the means of art.  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.



CHAPTER XII - A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS



CITIES given, the problem was to light them.  How to 
conduct individual citizens about the burgess-warren, when 
once heaven had withdrawn its leading luminary? or - since we 
live in a scientific age - when once our spinning planet has 
turned its back upon the sun?  The moon, from time to time, 
was doubtless very helpful; the stars had a cheery look among 
the chimney-pots; and a cresset here and there, on church or 
citadel, produced a fine pictorial effect, and, in places 
where the ground lay unevenly, held out the right hand of 
conduct to the benighted.  But sun, moon, and stars abstracted 
or concealed, the night-faring inhabitant had to fall back - 
we speak on the authority of old prints - upon stable 
lanthorns two stories in height.  Many holes, drilled in the 
conical turret-roof of this vagabond Pharos, let up spouts of 
dazzlement into the bearer's eyes; and as he paced forth in 
the ghostly darkness, carrying his own sun by a ring about his 
finger, day and night swung to and fro and up and down about 
his footsteps.  Blackness haunted his path; he was beleaguered 
by goblins as he went; and, curfew being struck, he found no 
light but that he travelled in throughout the township.

Closely following on this epoch of migratory lanthorns in 
a world of extinction, came the era of oil-lights, hard to 
kindle, easy to extinguish, pale and wavering in the hour of 
their endurance.  Rudely puffed the winds of heaven; roguishly 
clomb up the all-destructive urchin; and, lo! in a moment 
night re-established her void empire, and the cit groped along 
the wall, suppered but bedless, occult from guidance, and 
sorrily wading in the kennels.  As if gamesome winds and 
gamesome youths were not sufficient, it was the habit to sling 
these feeble luminaries from house to house above the fairway.  
There, on invisible cordage, let them swing!  And suppose some 
crane-necked general to go speeding by on a tall charger, 
spurring the destiny of nations, red-hot in expedition, there 
would indubitably be some effusion of military blood, and 
oaths, and a certain crash of glass; and while the chieftain 
rode forward with a purple coxcomb, the street would be left 
to original darkness, unpiloted, unvoyageable, a province of 
the desert night.

The conservative, looking before and after, draws from 
each contemplation the matter for content.  Out of the age of 
gas lamps he glances back slightingly at the mirk and glimmer 
in which his ancestors wandered; his heart waxes jocund at the 
contrast; nor do his lips refrain from a stave, in the highest 
style of poetry, lauding progress and the golden mean.  When 
gas first spread along a city, mapping it forth about evenfall 
for the eye of observant birds, a new age had begun for 
sociality and corporate pleasure-seeking, and begun with 
proper circumstance, becoming its own birthright.  The work of 
Prometheus had advanced by another stride.  Mankind and its 
supper parties were no longer at the mercy of a few miles of 
sea-fog; sundown no longer emptied the promenade; and the day 
was lengthened out to every man's fancy.  The city-folk had 
stars of their own; biddable, domesticated stars.

It is true that these were not so steady, nor yet so 
clear, as their originals; nor indeed was their lustre so 
elegant as that of the best wax candles.  But then the gas 
stars, being nearer at hand, were more practically efficacious 
than Jupiter himself.  It is true, again, that they did not 
unfold their rays with the appropriate spontaneity of the 
planets, coming out along the firmament one after another, as 
the need arises. But the lamplighters took to their heels 
every evening, and ran with a good heart. It was pretty to see 
man thus emulating the punctuality of heaven's orbs; and 
though perfection was not absolutely reached, and now and then 
an individual may have been knocked on the head by the ladder 
of the flying functionary, yet people commended his zeal in a 
proverb, and taught their children to say, "God bless the 
lamplighter!"  And since his passage was a piece of the day's 
programme, the children were well pleased to repeat the 
benediction, not, of course, in so many words, which would 
have been improper, but in some chaste circumlocution, 
suitable for infant lips.

God bless him, indeed!  For the term of his twilight 
diligence is near at hand; and for not much longer shall we 
watch him speeding up the street and, at measured intervals, 
knocking another luminous hole into the dusk.  The Greeks 
would have made a noble myth of such an one; how he 
distributed starlight, and, as soon as the need was over, re-
collected it; and the little bull's-eye, which was his 
instrument, and held enough fire to kindle a whole parish, 
would have been fitly commemorated in the legend.  Now, like 
all heroic tasks, his labours draw towards apotheosis, and in 
the light of victory himself shall disappear.  For another 
advance has been effected.  Our tame stars are to come out in 
future, not one by one, but all in a body and at once.  A 
sedate electrician somewhere in a back office touches a spring 
- and behold! from one end to another of the city, from east 
to west, from the Alexandra to the Crystal Palace, there is 
light!  FIAT LUX, says the sedate electrician.  What a 
spectacle, on some clear, dark nightfall, from the edge of 
Hampstead Hill, when in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, 
the design of the monstrous city flashes into vision - a 
glittering hieroglyph many square miles in extent; and when, 
to borrow and debase an image, all the evening street-lamps 
burst together into song!  Such is the spectacle of the 
future, preluded the other day by the experiment in Pall Mall.  
Star-rise by electricity, the most romantic flight of 
civilisation; the compensatory benefit for an innumerable 
array of factories and bankers' clerks.  To the artistic 
spirit exercised about Thirlmere, here is a crumb of 
consolation; consolatory, at least, to such of them as look 
out upon the world through seeing eyes, and contentedly accept 
beauty where it comes.

But the conservative, while lauding progress, is ever 
timid of innovation; his is the hand upheld to counsel pause; 
his is the signal advising slow advance.  The word ELECTRICITY 
now sounds the note of danger.  In Paris, at the mouth of the 
Passage des Princes, in the place before the Opera portico, 
and in the Rue Drouot at the FIGARO office, a new sort of 
urban star now shines out nightly, horrible, unearthly, 
obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare!  Such a 
light as this should shine only on murders and public crime, 
or along the corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to 
heighten horror.  To look at it only once is to fall in love 
with gas, which gives a warm domestic radiance fit to eat by.  
Mankind, you would have thought, might have remained content 
with what Prometheus stole for them and not gone fishing the 
profound heaven with kites to catch and domesticate the 
wildfire of the storm.  Yet here we have the levin brand at 
our doors, and it is proposed that we should henceforward take 
our walks abroad in the glare of permanent lightning.  A man 
need not be very superstitious if he scruple to follow his 
pleasures by the light of the Terror that Flieth, nor very 
epicurean if he prefer to see the face of beauty more 
becomingly displayed.  That ugly blinding glare may not 
improperly advertise the home of slanderous FIGARO, which is a 
backshop to the infernal regions; but where soft joys prevail, 
where people are convoked to pleasure and the philosopher 
looks on smiling and silent, where love and laughter and 
deifying wine abound, there, at least, let the old mild lustre 
shine upon the ways of man.