Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/109

Rh Another remarkable and still more powerful poem is "The Dead Pan," with which the collection concludes. In its beauties and, it must be acknowledged, in its faults, this piece is thoroughly idiosyncratic of its author. The poem, says Elizabeth Barrett, was partly inspired by Schiller's Götter Griechenlands, and partly by the tradition recorded by Plutarch, that at the moment of Christ's death on the cross a cry was heard sweeping across the sea, "Great Pan is dead!" and that then and forever all the oracles of heathendom ceased. "It is in all veneration to the memory of the deathless Schiller," says the poetess, "that I oppose a doctrine still more dishonouring to poetry than to Christianity."

To John Kenyon, whose "graceful and harmonious paraphrase of the German poem was the first occasion of the turning" of her thoughts towards the theme, she inscribed "The Dead Pan." Thoroughly typical of her style is the opening invocation:—

Of the many peculiar rhymes which Miss Barrett—sometimes "without rhyme or reason"—persistently made use of in this and other of her poems, the quoted stanza does not present an unfair example. Her correspondence with Horne on the subject is not only amusing, but also characteristic of her unchangeableness of will when she believed in her own ideas. She had forwarded Horne the manuscript of her poem,