as
he stood, the savagery of the beast faded from his eyes that were
fathomless as dark mountain tarns where the sun-rays seldom come, and
there came into them a man's unutterable woe. At the reeds by the
river he gazed, and sighed a great sigh, the sigh that comes from the
heart of a god who thinks of the pain of the world. Like a gentle
zephyr the sigh breathed through the reeds, and from the reeds there
came a sound as of the sobbing sorrow of the world's desire. Then Pan
drew his sharp knife, and with it he cut seven of the reeds that grew
by the murmuring river.

"Thus shalt thou still be mine, my Syrinx," he said.

Deftly he bound them together, cut them into unequal lengths, and
fashioned for himself an instrument, that to this day is called the
Syrinx, or Pan's Pipes.

So did the god make music.

And all that night he sat by the swift-flowing river, and the music
from his pipe of reeds was so sweet and yet so passing sad, that it
seemed as though the very heart of the earth itself were telling of
its sadness. Thus Syrinx still lives--still dies:

"A note of music by its own breath slain,
Blown tenderly from the frail heart of a reed,"

and as the evening light comes down on silent places and the trembling
shadows fall on the water, we can hear her mournful whisper through
the swaying reeds, brown and silvery-golden, that grow by lonely
lochan and lake and river.

THE DEATH OF ADONIS

"The fairest youth that ever maiden's dream conceived."

Lewis Morris.

The ideally beautiful woman, a subject throughout the centuries for
all the greatest powers of sculptor's and painter's art, is Venus, or
Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and of love. And he who shares with her
an unending supremacy of perfection of form is not one of the gods,
her equals, but a mortal lad, who was the son of a king.

As Aphrodite sported one day with Eros, the little god of love, by
accident she wounded herself with one of his arrows. And straightway
there came into her heart a strange longing and an ache such as the
mortal victims of the bow of Eros knew well. While still the ache
remained, she heard, in a forest of Cyprus, the baying of hounds and
the shouts of those who urged them on in the chase. For her the chase
possessed no charms, and she stood aside while the quarry burst
through the branches and thick undergrowth of the wood, and the hounds
followed in hot pursuit. But she drew her breath sharply