A Book of Myths, by Jean Lang - Umnet

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