Earth outgrows the mythic fancies
Sung beside her in her youth;
And those debonair romances
Sound but dull beside the truth.
Phœbus' chariot course is run!
Look up, poets, to the sun!
Pan, Pan is dead.
130. Stedman's Pan in Wall Street.[172] That Pan, however, is not yet dead but alive even in the practical atmosphere of our western world, the poem here appended, written by one of our recently deceased American poets, would indicate.
Just where the Treasury's marble front
Looks over Wall Street's mingled nations;
Where Jews and Gentiles most are wont
To throng for trade and last quotations;
Where, hour by hour, the rates of gold
Outrival, in the ears of people,
The quarter chimes, serenely tolled
From Trinity's undaunted steeple,—
Even there I heard a strange, wild strain
Sound high above the modern clamor,
Above the cries of greed and gain,
The curbstone war, the auction's hammer;
And swift, on Music's misty ways,
It led, from all this strife for millions,
To ancient, sweet-do-nothing days
Among the kirtle-robed Sicilians.
Fig. 103. The Music Lesson
And as it still'd the multitude,
And yet more joyous rose, and shriller,
I saw the minstrel where he stood
At ease against a Doric pillar:
One hand a droning organ play'd,
The other held a Pan's pipe (fashioned
Like those of old) to lips that made
The reeds give out that strain impassioned.
'T was Pan himself had wandered here,
A-strolling through the sordid city,
And piping to the civic ear
The prelude of some pastoral ditty!
The demigod had cross'd the seas,—
From haunts of shepherd, nymph, and satyr,
And Syracusan times,—to these
Far shores and twenty centuries later.
A ragged cap was on his head:
But—hidden thus—there was no doubting
That, all with crispy locks o'erspread,
His gnarlèd horns were somewhere sprouting;
His club-feet, cased in rusty shoes,
Were cross'd, as on some frieze you see them.
And trousers, patched of divers hues,
Conceal'd his crooked shanks beneath them.