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The Classic Myths in English Literature and in Art (2nd ed.) (1911)
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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.[170 - 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.
Fig. 102. Pan Blowing His Pipe, Echo Answering
Ah, the beauteous world while yet ye ruled it, —
Yet – by gladsome touches of the hand;
Ah, the joyous hearts that still ye governed,
Gods of Beauty, ye, of Fable-land!
Then, ah, then, the mysteries resplendent
Triumphed. – Other was it then, I ween,
When thy shrines were odorous with garlands,
Thou, of Amathus the queen.
Then the gracious veil, of fancy woven,
Fell in folds about the fact uncouth;
Through the universe life flowed in fullness,
What we feel not now was felt in sooth:
Man ascribed nobility to Nature,
Rendered love unto the earth he trod,
Everywhere his eye, illuminated,
Saw the footprints of a God.
* * * * *
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![171 - Translated by C. M. Gayley.]
* * * * *
It was the poem from which these stanzas are taken that provoked the well-known reply of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 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.
Phœbus' chariot course is run!
Look up, poets, to the sun!
Pan, Pan is dead.
130. Stedman's Pan in Wall Street.[172 - By Edmund Clarence Stedman.] 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.
Fig. 103. The Music Lesson
And as it still'd the multitude,
And yet more joyous rose, and shriller,
I saw the minstrel where he stood
At ease against a Doric pillar:
One hand a droning organ play'd,
The other held a Pan's pipe (fashioned
Like those of old) to lips that made
The reeds give out that strain impassioned.
'T was Pan himself had wandered here,
A-strolling through the sordid city,
And piping to the civic ear
The prelude of some pastoral ditty!
The demigod had cross'd the seas, —
From haunts of shepherd, nymph, and satyr,
And Syracusan times, – to these
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.[170 - 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.
Fig. 102. Pan Blowing His Pipe, Echo Answering
Ah, the beauteous world while yet ye ruled it, —
Yet – by gladsome touches of the hand;
Ah, the joyous hearts that still ye governed,
Gods of Beauty, ye, of Fable-land!
Then, ah, then, the mysteries resplendent
Triumphed. – Other was it then, I ween,
When thy shrines were odorous with garlands,
Thou, of Amathus the queen.
Then the gracious veil, of fancy woven,
Fell in folds about the fact uncouth;
Through the universe life flowed in fullness,
What we feel not now was felt in sooth:
Man ascribed nobility to Nature,
Rendered love unto the earth he trod,
Everywhere his eye, illuminated,
Saw the footprints of a God.
* * * * *
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![171 - Translated by C. M. Gayley.]
* * * * *
It was the poem from which these stanzas are taken that provoked the well-known reply of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 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.
Phœbus' chariot course is run!
Look up, poets, to the sun!
Pan, Pan is dead.
130. Stedman's Pan in Wall Street.[172 - By Edmund Clarence Stedman.] 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.
Fig. 103. The Music Lesson
And as it still'd the multitude,
And yet more joyous rose, and shriller,
I saw the minstrel where he stood
At ease against a Doric pillar:
One hand a droning organ play'd,
The other held a Pan's pipe (fashioned
Like those of old) to lips that made
The reeds give out that strain impassioned.
'T was Pan himself had wandered here,
A-strolling through the sordid city,
And piping to the civic ear
The prelude of some pastoral ditty!
The demigod had cross'd the seas, —
From haunts of shepherd, nymph, and satyr,
And Syracusan times, – to these
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