died as a malefactor, on the cross—"And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness all over the earth"—Thamus, an Egyptian pilot, was guiding a ship near the islands of Paxse in the Ionian Sea; and to him came a great voice, saying, "Go! make everywhere the proclamation. Great Pan is dead!"
And from the poop of his ship, when, in great heaviness of heart, because for him the joy of the world seemed to have passed away, Thamus had reached Palodes, he shouted aloud the words that he had been told. Then, from all the earth there arose a sound of great lamentation, and the sea and the trees, the hills, and all the creatures of Pan sighed in sobbing unison an echo of the pilot's words—"Pan is dead—Pan is dead."
"The lonely mountains o'er
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale
Edg'd with poplar pale,
The parting genius is with sighing sent;
With flow'r-inwoven tresses torn,
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn."
Pan was dead, and the gods died with him.
"Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas,
Can ye listen in your silence?
Can your mystic voices tell us
Where ye hide? In floating islands.
With a wind that evermore
Keeps you out of sight of shore?
Pan, Pan is dead.
