accoupling with the Nymphs,
formed light-footed bands that roamed the woods together. Meantime I
spent a happy life, tasting at will the clusters of the wild grapes and
the lips of the laughing Faun-girls. I enjoyed deep and restful slumbers
amid the lush grass; and I would celebrate on my rustic flute Jupiter,
Saturn's successor, for it is of my nature to praise the gods, masters
of the world.

"Alas! and I am grown old, for I am but a god, and the centuries have
blanched the hairs of my head and of my bosom, and have extinguished the
fire of my reins. I was already heavily weighted with years when the
Great Pan died, and Jupiter, meeting the same lot he had laid upon
Saturn, was dethroned by the Galilean. Since then I have dragged out an
ever-flagging life, so feeble and languid that at last it fell out I
died, and was entombed. And verily I am now but the shadow of myself. If
I still exist a little, it is because nothing ever really perishes, and
none is suffered altogether to die out. Death must never be more perfect
and complete than life. Beings lost in the Ocean of Things are like the
waves you may watch, my child, rising and falling in the Adriatic Sea.
They have neither beginning nor end, they are born and die insensibly.
Insensibly as the waves, my soul passes. A faint far-off memory of the
satyr girls of the Golden Age yet brightens my eyes, and on my lips
float soundlessly the ancient hymns of praise."

This said, he fell silent. Fra Mino gazed at the old man, and knew him,
that he was a phantom and nothing more.

"Yes! you may indeed be a goat-foot," he told him gravely, "without
being a demon; 'tis not a thing wholly incredible. Such creatures as God
framed to have no part in Adam's heritage, these can no more be damned
than they can be saved. I can never believe that the Centaur Cheiron,
who was wiser than men are, is suffering eternal torments in the belly
of Leviathan. A traveller who penetrated once into Limbo, relates how he
saw him seated in a grassy spot and conversing with Rhipheus, the most
righteous man of all the Trojans. Others indeed affirm that Holy
Paradise itself has been opened to admit Rhipheus of Troy. Any way the
case Is one where doubt Is not unlawful. But you lied, old man, when you
told me you were a Saint, who are not so much even as a man."

The goat-foot made answer:

"My son, when I was young, I was no more used to lie than the sheep
whose milk I sucked or the he-goats with