"Twas the hour when one in Sion

Hung for love's sake on a cross;
When his brow was chill with dying,
And his soul was faint with loss;

When his priestly blood dropped downward
And his kingly eyes looked throneward,
Then, Pan was dead.

By the love He stood alone in,

His sole Godhead stood complete;
And the false gods fell down moaning,
Each from off his golden seat.
All the false gods with a cry
Rendered up their deity.

Pan, Pan was dead.

Wailing wide across the islands,
They rent, vest-like, their Divine!
And a darkness and a silence

Quenched the light of every shrine;
And Dodona's oak swang lonely
Henceforth to the tempest only.
Pan, Pan was dead.

Pythia staggered, feeling o'er her

Her lost god's forsaking look!
Straight her eyeballs filled with horror,
And her crispy fillets shook;

And her lips gasped through their foam
For a word that did not come.

Pan, Pan was dead.

O ye vain false gods of Hellas,
Ye are silent evermore!

And I dash down this old chalice
Whence libations ran of yore.

See the wine crawls in the dust
Wormlike, as your glories must!
Since Pan is dead.

Get to dust, as common mortals,
By a common doom and track!
Let no Schiller* from the portals
Of that Hades call you back,
Or instruct us to weep all
At your antique funeral.

Pan, Pan is dead.

* These lines were occasioned by a poem of Schiller's, expressing regret for the overthrow of the beautiful mythology of the ancients.

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.

Earth outgrows the mythic fancies
Sung beside her in her youth;
And those debonnaire romances
Sound but dull beside the truth.
Phoebus' chariot course is run!
Look up, poets, to the sun!
Pan, Pan is dead.

What is true and just and honest,
What is lovely, what is pure;

All of praise that hath admonished, -
All of virtue, shall endure;

These are themes for poets' uses,

Stirring nobler than the Muses,

Ere Pan was dead.

O brave poets, keep back nothing;

Nor mix falsehood with the whole! Look up Godward! speak the truth in Worthy song from earnest soul. Hold, in high poetic duty,

Truest truth, the fairest beauty!

Pan, Pan is dead.

PROMETHEUS.

TITAN! to whose immortal eyes

The sufferings of mortality,

Seen in their sad reality,

Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?

A silent suffering, and intense ;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain;
All that the proud can feel of pain;

The agony they do not show;
The suffocating sense of woe.

Thy godlike crime was to be kind;
To render with thy precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,

And strengthen man with his own mind.
And, baffled as thou wert from high,
Still, in thy patient energy,

In the endurance and repulse

Of thine impenetrable spirit,

Which earth and heaven could not convulse,

A mighty lesson we inherit.

BYRON.

FROM THE ODE TO NAPOLEON.

LIKE the thief of fire from heaven
Wilt thou withstand the shock,
And share with him, the unforgiven,

His vulture and his rock?

BYRON.

PANDORA.

EVE COMPARED TO PANDORA.

MORE lovely than Pandora, whom the gods
Endowed with all their gifts; and O, too like
In sad event, when, to the unwiser son
Of Japhet brought by Hermes, she insnared
Mankind with her fair looks, to be avenged
On him who had stole Jove's authentic fire.

MILTON.