The puck-
noses have grown delicate, so that, with Plato's infatuated lover,
you may call them winsome, if you please; and no one would wish those
hairy little shanks away, with which one of the small Pans walks at
her side, grasping her skirt stoutly; while the other, the sick or
weary one, rides in the arms of Ceres herself, who in graceful
Italian dress, and decked airily with fruit and corn, steps across a
country of cut sheaves, pressing it closely to her, with a child's
peevish trouble in its face, and its small goat-legs and tiny hoofs
folded over together, precisely after the manner of a little child.
There is one element in the conception of Dionysus, which his
connexion with the satyrs, Marsyas being one of them, and with Pan,
from whom the flute passed to all the shepherds of Theocritus, alike
illustrates, his interest, namely, in one of the great species of
music. One form of that wilder vegetation, of which the Satyr race
is the soul made visible, is the reed, which [18] the creature plucks
and trims into musical pipes. And as Apollo inspires and rules over
all the music of strings, so Dionysus inspires and rules over all the
music of the reed, the water-plant, in which the ideas of water and
of vegetable life are brought close together, natural property,
therefore, of the spirit of life in the green sap.
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