From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
And bosom beating with a heart renew'd.
Thy cheek begins to redden thro' the gloom,
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,
And shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.

"Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful In silence, then before thine answer given Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.

"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 seest 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."

§ 115. Memnon, the son of Aurora and Tithonus, was king of the Æthiopians. 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 Æsepus, in Mysia. In the evening, Aurora, accompanied by the House 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 dew-drops

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 harp-string 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. Homer, Od. 4: 188; 11:522. Pindar, Pyth. 6: 30. 2 Pausanias, I, 42, § 2.

3 Darwin's Botanic Garden.

CHAPTER XV.

MYTHS OF THE LESSER DIVINITIES OF EARTH, AND THE UNDERWORLD.

It was

a

§ 116. Pan, and the Personification of Nature. 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;

1 His name is not derived from the Greek pānall, but from the root på to

feed, to pasture (i.e. the flocks and herds).

With flower-enwoven tresses torn,

The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.'

"1

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. Indeed, it is only a false Christianity that fails to recognize God's presence in the birds of the air and the lilies of the field as well as in man. True Christianity is not selfish.

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. It was this poem that provoked the well-known reply of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, contained in "The Dead Pan." Her argument may be gathered from the following stanzas:

True enough from the philosophical point of view, but hardly from the poetic. Phoebus' chariot course shall not be finished so long as there is a sun, or a poet to gaze upon it. And that Pan

1 Milton, Hymn to the Nativity.

2 § 54.

is not yet dead, but alive even in the practical atmosphere of our western world, the exquisite poem here appended would indicate:

Just where the Treasury's marble front 1.
Looks over Wall Street's mingled nations, —
Where Jews and Gentiles most are wont