Pan is dead. In the old Hellenistic sense Pan is gone forever. Yet until Nature has ceased to be, the thing we call Pan must remain a living entity. Some there be who call his music, when he makes all humanity dance to his piping, "_Joie de vivre_," and De Musset speaks of "_Le vin de la jeunesse_" which ferments "_dans les veines de Dieu_." It is Pan who inspires Seumas, the old islander, of whom Fiona Macleod writes, and who, looking towards the sea at sunrise, says, "Every morning like this I take my hat off to the beauty of the world." Half of the flesh and half of the spirit is Pan. There are some who have never come into contact with him, who know him only as the emblem of Paganism, a cruel thing, more beast than man, trampling, with goat's feet, on the gentlest flowers of spring. They know not the meaning of "the Green Fire of Life," nor have they ever known Pan's moods of tender sadness. Never to them has come in the forest, where the great grey trunks of the beeches rise from a carpet of primroses and blue hyacinths, and the slender silver beeches are the guardian angels of the starry wood-anemones, and the sunbeams slant through the oak and beech leaves of tender green and play on the dead amber leaves of a year that is gone, the whisper of little feet that cannot be seen, the piercing sweet music from very far away, that fills the heart with gladness and yet with a strange pain--the ache of the _Weltschmerz_--the echo of the pipes of Pan. "... Oftenest in the dark woods I hear him sing Dim, half-remembered things, where the old mosses cling To the old trees, and the faint wandering eddies bring The phantom echoes of a phantom spring." Fiona Macleod. LORELEI "Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten, Dass ich so traurig bin; Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten, Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn. * * * * * Die schönste Jungfrau sitzet Dort oben wunderbar, Ihr gold'nes Geschmeide blitzet, Sie kämmt ihr gold'nes Haar. Sie kämmt es mit gold'nem Kamme, Und singt ein Lied dabei; Das hat eine wundersame, Gewaltige Melodei." Heine. In every land, North and South, East and West, from sea to sea, myth and legend hand down to us as cruel and malignant creatures, who ceaselessly seek to slay man's body and to destroy his soul, the half-human children of the restless sea and of the fiercely running streams. In Scotland and in Australia, in every part of Europe, we have tales of horrible formless things which frequent lonely rivers and lochs and marshes, and to meet which must mean Death. And equal in malignity with them, and infinitely more dangerous, are the beautiful beings who would seem to claim descent from Lilith, the soulless wife of Adam.