“Common lilies, Pan; not like mine.”
“You are wrong. The lilies of Elysium—asphodels as they call them there—are as immortal as the Elysians themselves. I have seen them in Proserpine’s hair at Jupiter’s entertainment; they were as fresh as she was. There is no doubt you might gather them by handfuls—at least if you had any hands—and wear them to your heart’s content, if you had but a heart.”
“That’s just what perplexes me, Pan. It is not the dying I mind, it’s the living. How am I to live without anything alive about me? If you take away my hands, and my heart, and my brains, and my eyes, and my ears, and above all my tongue, what is left me to live in Elysium?”
As the maiden spake a petal detached itself from the emaciated lily, and she pressed her hand to her brow with a responsive cry of pain.
“Poor child!” said Pan compassionately, “you will feel no more pain by-and-by.”
“I suppose not, Pan, since you say so. But if I can feel no pain, how can I feel any pleasure?
“In an incomprehensible manner,” said Pan.
“How can I feel, if I have no feeling? and what am I to do without it?”
“You can think!” replied Pan. “Thinking (not that I am greatly given to it myself) is a much finer thing than feeling; no right-minded person doubts that. Feeling, as I have heard Minerva say, is a property of matter, and matter, except, of course, that appertaining to myself and the other happy gods, is vile and perishable—quite immaterial, in fact. Thought alone is transcendent, incorruptible, and undying!”
“But, Pan, how can any one think thoughts without something to think them with? I never thought of anything that I have not seen, or touched, or smelt, or tasted, or heard about from some one else. If I think with nothing, and about nothing, is that thinking, do you think?”