The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river."

E. B. Browning.

Were we to take the whole of that immense construction of fable that
was once the religion of Greece, and treat it as a vast play in which
there were many thousands of actors, we should find that one of these
actors appeared again and again. In one scene, then in another, in
connection with one character, then with another, unexpectedly
slipping out from the shadows of the trees from the first act even to
the last, we should see Pan--so young and yet so old, so heedlessly
gay, yet so infinitely sad.

If, rather, we were to regard the mythology of Greece as a colossal
and wonderful piece of music, where the thunders of Jupiter and the
harsh hoof-beats of the fierce black steeds of Pluto, the king whose
coming none can stay, made way for the limpid melodies of Orpheus and
the rustling whisper of the footfall of nymphs and of fauns on the
leaves, through it all we should have an ever-recurring _motif_--the
clear, magical fluting of the pipes of Pan.

We have the stories of Pan and of Echo, of Pan and of Midas, of Pan
and Syrinx, of Pan and Selene, of Pan and Pitys, of Pan and Pomona.
Pan it was who taught Apollo how to make music. It was Pan who spoke
what he deemed to be comfort to the distraught Psyche; Pan who gave
Diana her hounds. The other gods had their own special parts in the
great play that at one time would have Olympus for stage, at another
the earth. Pan was Nature incarnate. He was the Earth itself.

Many are the stories of his genealogy, but the one that is given in
one of the Homeric hymns is that Hermes, the swift-footed young god,
wedded Dryope, the beautiful daughter of a shepherd in Arcadia, and
to them was born, under the greenwood tree, the infant, Pan. When
Dryope first looked on her child, she was smitten with horror, and
fled away from him. The deserted baby roared lustily, and when his
father, Hermes, examined him he found a rosy-cheeked thing with prick
ears and tiny horns that grew amongst his thick curls, and with the
dappled furry chest of a faun, while instead of dimpled baby legs he