The parting genius is with sighing sent;
With flow'r-inwoven tresses torn,
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn."

Milton.

Pan was dead, and the gods died with him.

"Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas,
Can ye listen in your silence?
Can your mystic voices tell us
Where ye hide? In floating islands,
With a wind that evermore
Keeps you out of sight of shore?
Pan, Pan is dead.

* * * * *

Gods! we vainly do adjure you,--
Ye return nor voice nor sign!
Not a votary could secure you
Even a grave for your Divine!
Not a grave to show thereby,
'_Here these grey old gods do lie,_'
Pan, Pan is dead."

E. B. Browning.

Pan is dead. In the old Hellenistic sense Pan is gone forever. Yet
until Nature has ceased to be, the thing we call Pan must remain a
living entity. Some there be who call his music, when he makes all
humanity dance to his piping, "_Joie de vivre_," and De Musset speaks
of "_Le vin de la jeunesse_" which ferments "_dans les veines de
Dieu_." It is Pan who inspires Seumas, the old islander, of whom Fiona
Macleod writes, and who, looking towards the sea at sunrise, says,
"Every morning like this I take my hat off to the beauty of the
world."

Half of the flesh and half of the spirit is Pan. There are some who
have never come into contact with him, who know him only as the emblem
of Paganism, a cruel thing, more beast than man, trampling, with
goat's feet, on the gentlest flowers of spring. They know not the
meaning of "the Green Fire of Life," nor have they ever known Pan's
moods of tender sadness. Never to them has come in the forest, where
the great grey trunks of the beeches rise from a carpet of primroses
and blue hyacinths, and the slender silver beeches are the guardian
angels of the starry wood-anemones, and the sunbeams slant through the
oak and beech leaves of tender green and play on the dead amber leaves
of a year that is gone, the whisper of little feet that cannot be
seen, the piercing sweet music from very far away, that fills the
heart with gladness and yet with a strange pain--the ache of the
_Weltschmerz_--the echo of the pipes of Pan.

"... Oftenest in the dark woods I hear him sing
Dim, half-remembered things, where the old mosses cling
To the old trees, and the faint wandering eddies bring
The phantom echoes of a phantom spring."