A Book of Myths, by Jean Lang - Umnet

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