Then the gracious veil, of fancy woven, Fell in folds about the fact uncouth; Through the universe life flowed in fullness, What we feel not now was felt in sooth: Man ascribed nobility to Nature, Rendered love unto the earth he trod, Everywhere his eye, illuminated, Saw the footprints of a God. * * * * * Lovely world, where art thou? Turn, oh, turn thee, Fairest blossom-tide of Nature's spring! Only in the poet's realm of wonder Liv'st thou, still,--a fable vanishing. Reft of life the meadows lie deserted; Ne'er a godhead can my fancy see: Ah, if only of those living colors Lingered yet the ghost with me![171] * * * * * It was the poem from which these stanzas are taken that provoked the well-known reply of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, contained in The Dead Pan. Her argument may be gathered from the following stanzas: 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 debonair romances Sound but dull beside the truth. Ph[oe]bus' chariot course is run! Look up, poets, to the sun! Pan, Pan is dead. =130. Stedman's Pan in Wall Street.=[172] That Pan, however, is not yet dead but alive even in the practical atmosphere of our western world, the poem here appended, written by one of our recently deceased American poets, would indicate. Just where the Treasury's marble front Looks over Wall Street's mingled nations; Where Jews and Gentiles most are wont To throng for trade and last quotations; Where, hour by hour, the rates of gold Outrival, in the ears of people, The quarter chimes, serenely tolled From Trinity's undaunted steeple,-- Even there I heard a strange, wild strain Sound high above the modern clamor, Above the cries of greed and gain, The curbstone war, the auction's hammer; And swift, on Music's misty ways, It led, from all this strife for millions, To ancient, sweet-do-nothing days Among the kirtle-robed Sicilians. [Illustration: FIG. 103. THE MUSIC LESSON] And as it still'd the multitude, And yet more joyous rose, and shriller, I saw the minstrel where he stood At ease against a Doric pillar: One hand a droning organ play'd, The other held a Pan's pipe (fashioned Like those of old) to lips that made The reeds give out that strain impassioned.