Erdgeist_ in Goethe's _Faust_, and yet another of the
greatest of the poets writes:

"The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains--
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?

* * * * *

And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;
But if we could see and hear, this Vision--were it not He?"

Tennyson.

Carlyle says that "The whole universe is the Garment of God," and he
who lives very close to Nature must, at least once in a lifetime,
come, in the solitude of the lonely mountain tops, upon that bush that
burns and is not yet consumed, and out of the midst of which speaks
the voice of the Eternal.

The immortal soul--the human body--united, yet ever in conflict--that
is Pan. The sighing and longing for things that must endure
everlastingly--the riotous enjoyment of the beauty of life--the
perfect appreciation of the things that are. Life is so real, so
strong, so full of joyousness and of beauty,--and on the other side of
a dark stream, cold, menacing, cruel, stands Death. Yet Life and Death
make up the sum of existence, and until we, who live our paltry little
lives here on earth in the hope of a Beyond, can realise what is the
true air that is played on those pipes of Pan, there is no hope for us
of even a vague comprehension of the illimitable Immortality.

It is a very old tale that tells us of the passing of Pan. In the
reign of Tiberius, on that day when, on the hill of Calvary, at
Jerusalem in Syria, Jesus Christ died as a malefactor, on the
cross--"And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness all
over the earth"--Thamus, an Egyptian pilot, was guiding a ship near
the islands of Paxae in the Ionian Sea; and to him came a great voice,
saying, "Go! make everywhere the proclamation, _Great Pan is dead!_"

And from the poop of his ship, when, in great heaviness of heart,
because for him the joy of the world seemed to have passed away,
Thamus had reached Palodes, he shouted aloud the words that he had
been told. Then, from all the earth there arose a sound of great
lamentation, and the sea and the trees, the hills, and all the
creatures of Pan sighed in sobbing unison an echo of the pilot's
words--"_Pan is dead--Pan is dead._"

"The lonely mountains o'er
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale
Edg'd with poplar pale,