Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/121

PAN IN WALL STREET 'T was Pan himself had wandered here

A-strolling through this sordid city,

And piping to the civic ear

The prelude of some pastoral ditty!

The demigod had crossed the seas,—

From haunts of shepherd, nymph, and satyr,

And Syracusan times,—to these

Far shores and twenty centuries later.

A ragged cap was on his head;

But—hidden thus—there was no doubting

That, all with crispy locks o'erspread,

His gnarlèd horns were somewhere sprouting;

His club-feet, cased in rusty shoes,

Were crossed, as on some frieze you see them,

And trousers, patched of divers hues,

Concealed his crooked shanks beneath them.

He filled the quivering reeds with sound,

And o'er his mouth their changes shifted,

And with his goat's-eyes looked around

Where'er the passing current drifted;

And soon, as on Trinacrian hills

The nymphs and herdsmen ran to hear him,

Even now the tradesmen from their tills,

With clerks and porters, crowded near him.

The bulls and bears together drew

From Jauncey Court and New Street Alley,

As erst, if pastorals be true,

Came beasts from every wooded valley;

The random passers stayed to list,—

A boxer Ægon, rough and merry,

A Broadway Daphnis, on his tryst

With Nais at the Brooklyn Ferry.

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