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 back-shop 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.

END OF VOL. II

PRINTED BY

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAGE

LONDON, E.C.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson -
Swanston Edition, by Robert Louis Stevenson

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKS OF R. L. STEVENSON (2/25) ***

***** This file should be named 30527.txt or 30527.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.org/3/0/5/2/30527/

Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Marius Borror and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public dom