FROM BOOK III., CANTO II.
"PAN is not dead, he lives for ever!
Mere and mountain, forest, seas,
Ocean, thunder, rippling river,
All are living Presences;
Yea, though alien language sever,
We hold communion with these!
Hail! ever young and fair Apollo !
Large-hearted, earth-enrapturing Sun!
Navigating night's blue hollow,
Cynthia, Artemis, O Moon,
Lady Earth you meekly follow,
Till your radiant race be run ;
Pan is not dead!
"Earth, Cybele, the crowned with towers,
Lion-haled, with many a breast,
Mother-Earth, dispensing powers
To every creature, doth invest
With life and strength, engendering showers
Health, wealth, beauty, or withholds;
Till at length she gently folds
Every child, and lays to rest!
Pan is not dead!
"Hearken! rhythmic ocean-thunder!
Wind, wild anthem in the pines!
When the lightning rends asunder
Heavens, to open gleaming mines,
Vasty tones with mountains under
Talk where ashy cloud inclines . . .
Over hoar brows of the heights;
Ware the swiftly flaming lights!
Pan is not dead!
"Whence the 'innumerable laughter,'
All the dancing, all the glees
Of blithely buoyant billowed seas,
If it be not a sweet wafture
From joy of Oceanides ?
Whence the dancing and the glees,
In the boughs of woodland trees,
When they clap their hands together,
Hold up flowers in the warm weather?
Gentle elfins of the fur,
Flowers, Venus' stomacher,
Grey doves who belong to her,
Singing birds, or peeping bud,
Lucid lives in limpid flood,
Fishes, shells, a rainbow brood,
If Pan be dead?
"Naiads of the willowy water!
Sylvans in the warbling wood!
Oreads, many a mountain daughter
Of the shadowy solitude!
Whence the silence of green leaves,
Where young zephyr only heaves
Sighs in a luxurious mood,
Or a delicate whisper fell
From light lips of Ariel,
If Pan be dead?
"Wave-illumined ocean palaces,
Musically waterpaven,
Whose are walls enchased like chalices;
Gemmed with living gems, a haven
For foamy, wandering emerald,
Where the waterlights are called
To mazy play upon the ceiling,
Thrills of some delicious feeling!
Sylph-like wonders here lie hid
In dim dome of Nereid;
Tender tinted, richly hued,
Fair sea-flowers disclose their feelers
With a pearly morn imbued,
While to bather's open lid
Water fairies float, revealers
Of all the marvels in the flood,
And Pan not dead!
"We are nourished upon science;
Will ye pay yourselves with words?
Gladly will we yield affiance
To what grand order she affords
For use, for wonder; yet she knows
No whit whence all the vision flows!
Ah! sister, brother, poets, ye
Thrill to a low minstrelsy,
Never any worldling heard,
Ye who cherish the password,
Allowing you, with babes, to go
Within the Presence-chamber so
Familiarly to meet your queen;
For she is of your kith and kin!
Ye are like him of old who heard
In convent garden the white bird;
A hundred years flew over him
Unheeding! All the world was dim ;
At length, unknown, he homeward came
To brethren, now no more the same;
Then, at evening of that day,
Two white birds heavenward flew away;
Pan is not dead!
"Spirit only talks with spirit,
Converse with the ordered whole,
However alien language blur it,
May only be of soul with soul.
In our image-moulding sense
We order varied influence
From the World-Intelligence;
And if Nature feed our frame,
She may nourish pride or shame,
Holy, or unholy flame;
Real forms the maniac sees,
Whom he cherisheth, or flees;
Real souls the sleeper kens
In dreamland's eerie shadowed glens.
Pan is not dead!
"Every star and every planet
Feed the fire of Destiny;
Or for good, or evil fan it,
Herè, Hermes, Hecate;
By ruling bias, and career,
To all hath been assigned a sphere,
In realms invisible and here,
Obedience, administration
For individual or nation.
Ceres, Pluto, Proserpine
Are the years' youth, and decline,
Seasonable oil or wine,
Phantasmagory yours or mine;
And if sense be fed by Nature,
With ne'er a show of usurpature
She may feed our spirit too,
And with hers our own imbue
Ruling influence from her,
Tallied with our character;
Dionysus, Fauns may move
To revel, or the lower love,
Unrisen Ariel control,
Undine of yet unopened soul,
Fallen ghost invite to fall;
Or She, who is the heart of all,
Uranian Aphrodite, whom
The world laid in a Syrian tomb
Under the name of Jesus, She
May dominate victoriously,
And Pan be dead!
"Whence are plague, fog, famine, fevers,
Blighting winds, and 'weather harms'?
Are sorceries malign the weavers,
Through inaudible ill charms?
Disease, confusion, haunting sadness,
Lust, delirium, murder, madness,
Cyclone, grim earthquake, accident,
In some witch-cauldron brewed and blent?
Now I see the open pit ;
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