The lonely mountains o'er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale,
Edged with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
With flower-inwoven tresses torn,
The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.[170]
Many a poet has lamented the change. For even if the head did profit for a time by the revolt against the divine prerogative of nature, it is more than possible that the heart lost in due proportion.
His sorrow at this loss of imaginative sympathy among the moderns Wordsworth expresses in the sonnet, already cited, beginning "The world is too much with us." Schiller, also, by his poem, The Gods of Greece, has immortalized his sorrow for the decadence of the ancient mythology.
Fig. 102. Pan Blowing His Pipe, Echo Answering
Ah, the beauteous world while yet ye ruled it,—
Yet—by gladsome touches of the hand;
Ah, the joyous hearts that still ye governed,
Gods of Beauty, ye, of Fable-land!
Then, ah, then, the mysteries resplendent
Triumphed.—Other was it then, I ween,
When thy shrines were odorous with garlands,
Thou, of Amathus the queen.
Then the gracious veil, of fancy woven,
Fell in folds about the fact uncouth;
Through the universe life flowed in fullness,
What we feel not now was felt in sooth:
Man ascribed nobility to Nature,
Rendered love unto the earth he trod,
Everywhere his eye, illuminated,
Saw the footprints of a God.
* * * * *
Lovely world, where art thou? Turn, oh, turn thee,
Fairest blossom-tide of Nature's spring!
Only in the poet's realm of wonder
Liv'st thou, still,—a fable vanishing.
Reft of life the meadows lie deserted;
Ne'er a godhead can my fancy see:
Ah, if only of those living colors
Lingered yet the ghost with me![171]
* * * * *
It was the poem from which these stanzas are taken that provoked the well-known reply of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, contained in The Dead Pan. Her argument may be gathered from the following stanzas:
By your beauty which confesses
Some chief Beauty conquering you,
By our grand heroic guesses
Through your falsehood at the True,
We will weep not! earth shall roll
Heir to each god's aureole,
And Pan is dead.