Great Pan, the father of our peace and pleasure, Who giv'st us all this leisure, Hear what thy hallowed troop of herdsmen pray For this their holy-day, And how their vows to thee they in Lycaeum pay. So may our ewes receive the mounting rams, And we bring thee the earliest of our lambs: So may the first of all our fells be thine, And both the breastning of our goats and kine. As thou our folds dost still secure, And keep'st our fountains sweet and pure, Driv'st hence the wolf, the tod, the brock, Or other vermin from the flock. That we preserv'd by thee, and thou observ'd by us, May both live safe in shade of thy lov'd Maenalus. Comparing these strophes with the hymn in _Endymion_, we shall realize how the Elizabethan pastoral spirit, compounded as it was of native English love of country pleasures and Renaissance delight in classic poetry, emerged after near two centuries' occultation to reappear in the poetry of Keats, but wonderfully strengthened in imaginative reach and grasp, richer and more romantic both in the delighted sense of nature's blessings and activities and in the awed apprehension of a vast mystery behind them. The sense of such mystery is nowhere else expressed by Keats with such brooding inwardness and humbleness as where he invokes Pan no longer as a shepherd's god but as a symbol of the World-All. Wordsworth, when Keats at the request of friends read the piece to him, could see, or would own to seeing, nothing in it but a 'pretty piece of paganism,' though indeed in the more profoundly felt and imagined lines, such as those with which the first and fifth strophes open, the inspiration can be traced in great part to the influence of Wordsworth himself:-- O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness; Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken; And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken The dreary melody of bedded reeds-- In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth; Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx--do thou now, By thy love's milky brow! By all the trembling mazes that she ran, Hear us, great Pan!