(1875.) We have all heard the wonderful story, recounted by Plutarch in his treatise on the Cessation of the Oracles, how, in the reign of Tiberius C?sar, a ship sailing from Greece to Italy was becalmed for the night at the islet-rock of Paxus in the Ionian Sea, between the Echinades and Ithaca, when a loud and terrible voice from the land called Thamous the pilot. And he having responded at the third appeal, “I am here; what would you with me?” the voice, grown yet louder and more terrible, commanded him to announce on arriving at Palodes that Pan the Great was dead. Accordingly, when the vessel reached this place, whose site I believe the learned have not yet fixed, Thamous stood on the prow and lifting his voice shoreward cried, “Pan the Great is dead!”—whereon were heard great moanings and lamentations, mysterious and multitudinous. Not having Plutarch at hand, I have refreshed my memory from Rabelais, who repeats this well-authenticated story by the mouth of Pantagruel, in the twenty-eighth chapter of the fourth book of his inestimable work, following soon on that tempest of all tempests wherein Friar John and Panurge so variously distinguished themselves. The good Pantagruel goes on to expound the story after his own manner, thinking that it referred not to the heathen god Pan, but to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, “ignominiously put to death by the envy and iniquity of the pontiffs, doctors, presbyters, and monks of the Mosaic dispensation....”
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 an............