Breathing of remote nature, the sense of which [16] is so profound in
the Homeric hymn to Pan, the pines, the foldings of the hills, the
leaping streams, the strange echoings and dying of sound on the
heights, "the bird, which among the petals of many-flowered spring,
pouring out a dirge, sends forth her honey-voiced song," "the crocus
and the hyacinth disorderly mixed in the deep grass"+--things which
the religion of Dionysus loves--Pan joins the company of the Satyrs.
Amongst them, they give their names to insolence and mockery, and the
finer sorts of malice, to unmeaning and ridiculous fear. But the
best spirits have found in them also a certain human pathos, as in
displaced beings, coming even nearer to most men, in their very
roughness, than the noble and delicate person of the vine; dubious
creatures, half-way between the animal and human kinds, speculating
wistfully on their being, because not wholly understanding themselves
and their place in nature; as the animals seem always to have this
expression to some noticeable degree in the presence of man. In the
later school of Attic sculpture they are treated with more and more
of refinement, till in some happy moment Praxiteles conceived a
model, often repeated, which concentrates this sentiment of true
humour concerning them; a model of dainty natural ease in posture,
but with the legs slightly crossed, as only lowly-bred gods are used
to carry them, and with some puzzled trouble of youth, you might wish
for a moment [17] to smoothe away, puckering the forehead a little,
between the pointed ears, on which the goodly hair of his animal
strength grows low. Little by little, the signs of brute nature are
subordinated, or disappear; and at last, Robetta, a humble Italian
engraver of the fifteenth century, entering into the Greek fancy
because it belongs to all ages, has expressed it in its most
exquisite form, in a design of Ceres and her children, of whom their
mother is no longer afraid, as in the Homeric hymn to Pan. The puck-