Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
"The gods themselves cannot recall their gifts."

Ay me! ay me! with what another heart
In days far-off, and with what other eyes
I used to watch - if I be he that watched
The lucid outline forming round thee; saw
The dim curls kindle into sunny rings;

Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood
Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all
Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.

Yet hold me not forever in thine East:
How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground;
Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave:
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.

128. Memnon, the son of Aurora and Tithonus, was king of the Ethiopians. He went with warriors to assist his kindred in the Trojan War, and was received by King Priam with honor. He fought bravely, slew Antilochus, the brave son of Nestor, and held the Greeks at bay until Achilles appeared. Before that hero he fell. Then Aurora, seeing her son's fate, directed his brothers, the Winds, to convey his body to the banks of the river sepus in Mysia. In the evening Aurora, accompanied by the Hours and

the Pleiads, bewept her son. Night spread the heaven with clouds ; all nature mourned for the offspring of the Dawn. The Æthiopians raised his tomb on the banks of the stream in the grove of

the Nymphs, and Jupiter caused the sparks and cinders of his funeral pile to be turned into birds, which, dividing into two flocks, fought over the pile till they fell into the flame. Every year at the anniversary of his death they celebrated his obsequies in like manner. Aurora remained inconsolable. The dewdrops are her tears.1

The kinship of Memnon to the Dawn is certified even after his death.

On the banks of the Nile are two colossal statues, one of which is called Memnon's; and it was said that when the first rays of morning fell upon this statue, a sound like the snapping of a harpstring issued therefrom.2

So to the sacred Sun in Memnon's fane
Spontaneous concords choired the matin strain;
Touched by his orient beam responsive rings
The living lyre and vibrates all its strings;
Accordant aisles the tender tones prolong,
And holy echoes swell the adoring song.3

1 Ovid, Metam. 13, 622, etc. Odyssey, 4, 188; 11, 522. Pindar, Pyth. 6, 30.
2 Pausanias, 1, 42, § 2.

8 Darwin, Botanic Garden.

CHAPTER XII

MYTHS OF THE LESSER DIVINITIES OF EARTH, ETC.

129. Pan, and the Personification of Nature. It was a pleasing trait in the old paganism that it loved to trace in every operation of nature the agency of deity. The imagination of the Greeks peopled the regions of earth and sea with divinities, to whose agency it attributed the phenomena that our philosophy ascribes to the operation of natural law. So Pan, the god of woods and fields,1 whose name seemed to signify all, came to be considered a symbol of the universe and a personification of Nature. "Universal Pan," says Milton in his description of the creation :

Universal Pan,

Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance,

Led on the eternal Spring.

Later, Pan came to be regarded as a representative of all the Greek gods and of paganism itself. Indeed, according to an early Christian tradition, when the heavenly host announced to the shepherds the birth of Christ, a deep groan, heard through the isles of Greece, told that great Pan was dead, that the dynasty of Olympus was dethroned, and the several deities sent wandering in cold and darkness.

The lonely mountains o'er,

And the resounding shore,

A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;

From haunted spring and dale,

Edged with poplar pale,

The parting Genius is with sighing sent;

With flower-inwoven tresses torn,

The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.2

1 His name is not derived from the Greek pan, all, but from the root pă, to feed, to pasture (i.e. the flocks and herds).

2 Milton, Hymn on the Nativity.

Many a poet has lamented the change. For even if the head did profit for a time by the revolt against the divine prerogative of nature, it is more than possible that the heart lost in due proportion.

His sorrow at this loss of imaginative sympathy among the moderns Wordsworth expresses in the sonnet, already cited, beginning "The world is too much with us." Schiller, also, by his poem, The Gods of Greece, has immortalized his sorrow for the decadence of the ancient mythology.

Lovely world, where art thou? Turn, oh, turn thee,

Fairest blossom-tide of Nature's spring!

Only in the poet's realm of wonder

Liv'st thou, still, a fable vanishing.

Reft of life the meadows lie deserted;

Ne'er a godhead can my fancy see:
Ah, if only of those living colors

Lingered yet the ghost with me!1

It was the poem from which these stanzas are taken that provoked the well-known reply of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

1 Translated by C. M. Gayley.

contained in The Dead Pan. Her argument may be gathered

from the following stanzas:

By your beauty which confesses
Some chief Beauty conquering you,
By our grand heroic guesses
Through your falsehood at the True,
We will weep not! earth shall roll
Heir to each god's aureole,

And Pan is dead.

Earth outgrows the mythic fancies
Sung beside her in her youth;
And those debonair romances
Sound but dull beside the truth.
Phoebus' chariot course is run!
Look up, poets, to the sun!

Pan, Pan is dead.

130. Stedman's Pan in Wall Street.1 That Pan, however, is not yet dead but alive even in the practical atmosphere of our western world, the poem here appended, written by one of our recently deceased American poets, would indicate.

Just where the Treasury's marble front

Looks over Wall Street's mingled nations;
Where Jews and Gentiles most are wont

To throng for trade and last quotations;
Where, hour by hour, the rates of gold
Outrival, in the ears of people,
The quarter chimes, serenely tolled
From Trinity's undaunted steeple,

Even there I heard a strange, wild strain

Sound high above the modern clamor,

Above the cries of greed and gain,

The curbstone war, the auction's hammer;

And swift, on Music's misty ways,

It led, from all this strife for millions,

To ancient, sweet-do-nothing days
Among the kirtle-robed Sicilians.

1 By Edmund Clarence Stedman.