O Time! whose verdicts mock our own,
    The only righteous judge art thou;
  That poor old exile, sad and lone,
    Is Latium’s other Virgil now: 
  Before his name the nations bow;
    His words are parcel of mankind,
  Deep in whose hearts, as on his brow,
    The marks have sunk of Dante’s mind.

T.W.  PARSONS.

Pan in Wall Street.

A.D. 1867.

  Just where the Treasury’s marble front
    Looks over Wall Street’s mingled nations;
  Where Jews and Gentiles most are wont
    To throng for trade and last quotations;
  Where, hour by hour, the rates of gold
    Outrival, in the ears of people,
  The quarter-chimes, serenely tolled
    From Trinity’s undaunted steeple,—­

  Even there I heard a strange, wild strain
    Sound high above the modern clamor,
  Above the cries of greed and gain,
    The curbstone war, the auction’s hammer;
  And swift, on Music’s misty ways,
    It led, from all this strife for millions,
  To ancient, sweet-do-nothing days
    Among the kirtle-robed Sicilians.

  And as it stilled the multitude,
    And yet more joyous rose, and shriller,
  I saw the minstrel, where he stood
   At ease against a Doric pillar: 
  One hand a droning organ played,
    The other held a Pan’s-pipe (fashioned
  Like those of old) to lips that made
    The reeds give out that strain impassioned.

  ’Twas 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 gnarled 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 AEgon, rough and merry,
  A Broadway Daphnis, on his tryst
    With Nais at the Brooklyn Ferry.