Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river?

II.

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river.
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,

And the dragon-fly had fled away,

Ere he brought it out of the river.

III.

High on the shore sate the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river,

And hacked and hewed as a great god can
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.

IV.

He cut it short, did the great god Pan, (How tall it stood in the river!)

Then drew the pith like the heart of a man

Steadily from the outside ring,

Then notched the poor, dry, empty thing

In holes as he sate by the river.

V.

"This is the way," laughed the great god Pan, (Laughed while he sate by the river!)

"The only way since gods began

To make sweet music, they could succeed."

Then dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,

He blew in power by the river!

VI.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan,

Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!

The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.

VII.

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man.

The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain
For the reed that grows never more again
As a reed with the reeds of the river.

The musical instrument most used by the Greeks was the lyre, to which frequent allusions are made by all poets. The origin of this famous instrument is of course mythical, and is very prettily told by James Russell Lowell in the following poem:

THE FINDING OF THE LYRE.

There lay upon the ocean's shore
What once a tortoise served to cover.

A year and more, with rush and roar,

The surf had rolled it over,

Had played with it, and flung it by,
As wind and weather might decide it,
Then tossed it high where sand-drifts dry
Cheap burial might provide it.

It rested there to bleach or tan,

The rains had soaked, the suns had burned it;

With many a ban the fisherman

Had stumbled o'er and spurned it;

And there the fisher-girl would stay,
Conjecturing with her brother

How in their play the poor estray
Might serve some use or other.

So there it lay, through wet and dry,

As empty as the last new sonnet,
Till by and by came Mercury,

And having mused upon it,

66

Why, here," cried he, "the thing of things,

In shape, material, and dimension !

Give it but strings, and lo, it sings,

A wonderful invention !"

So said, so done; the cords he strained,
And, as his fingers o'er them hovered,
The shell disdained a soul had gained,
The lyre had been discovered.

O empty world that round us lies,
Dead shell, of soul and thought forsaken,
Brought we but eyes like Mercury's,
In thee what songs should waken!

Compare this poem with the following

THE ORIGIN OF THE HARP.

THOMAS MOORE.

'Tis believed that this Harp, which I now wake for thee, Was a Siren of old, who sung under the sea,

And who often at eve, through the bright waters roved, To meet on the green shore a youth whom she loved.