For with good right may he in the Greek tongue be called Pan, seeing
that he is our All; all we are, all we live, all we have, all we hope,
is him, in him, of him, by him. He is the good Pan, the great
Shepherd.... at whose death were moanings, sighs, trepidations and
lamentations in all the machine of the universe, heavens, earth, sea,
hells. With this my interpretation the time agrees. For that most good,
most great Pan, our only Savior, died at Jerusalem, reigning in Rome
Tiberius Caesar.—Pantagruel, these words said, rested in silence and
profound contemplation. A little while after we saw the tears rolling
from his eyes, large as ostrich eggs. I give myself to God if I lie in a
single word.” Notwithstanding the thrilling pathos of this close, and my
deep reverence for Rabelais, with whom no commentator in holy orders
known to me can be compared, except Dean Swift, I am inclined on this
point to follow the ordinary opinion that Pan the great god whose death
was thus miraculously announced was the Pan of the heathen Greeks.
Christ had died, but only _pro tem_; had descended into Hell, but with a
return ticket, and simply to harry that realm of Old Harry; in three
days he had risen from the dead, in forty more ascended into Heaven; his
reign had begun and the reign of the old gods was ended; the spirit was
exalted ana the flesh brought low, this world and life were contemned
for the life and world to come; Nature, the All, the great Pan, was
annulled, and the Supernatural Nothing throned supreme. The poets have
chanted this momentous revolution according to their religion, their
phantasy, or their mood. Milton in his Hymn on the Nativity shouts harsh
Puritanical scorn on the oracles stricken dumb, and the deities
overthrown. Shelley in a magnificent chorus of “Hellas,” “Worlds on
worlds are rolling ever,” contests not the justice of their doom, while
in the final chorus he predicts the same doom for their conqueror in his
turn, In our own day Mr. Swinburne in the “Hymn to Proserpine,” and
elsewhere, has bewailed the dead immortals, with nothing but aversion
and contempt for the pale Galilean, the “ghastly glories of saints, dead
limbs of gibbeted gods.” Leopardi an early poem “To Spring,” beautiful
but not of his deepest, regrets the banished divinities, and since the
halls of Olympus are void, appeals to Nature to restore to his spirit
its first fire, if she indeed lives. Schiller in his “Gods of Greece”
passionately laments them; and Mrs. Browning more passionately answers
him, crying, “God himself is the best Poet, and the Real is his song and
the Real we accept perforce in its fulness, but discern not how it can
derive from an unreal God. Novalis in his “Hymns to the Night” laments
with Schiller the unsouling of Nature, “bound in iron chains by arid
number and rigorous rule;” but goes on to celebrate the resurrection of
Humanity in Christ. Heine in his. “Gods of Greece,” after declaring in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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