<P> The Dead Pan Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas, Can ye listen in your silence? Can your mystic voices tell us Where ye hide? In floating islands, With a wind that evermore Keeps you out of sight of shore? Pan, Pan is dead.--Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806--61) </P> <P> Later Victorian and Edwardian writers lamented the death of paganism and its replacement by Christianity as the passing of a former Golden Age of physical beauty and sexual and political freedom, which they contrasted with what they saw as the sexual and political repressiveness and crass materialism of the modern era, as in Oscar Wilde's invocation of Pan: </P> <P> Πάν Pan O goat - foot God of Arcady! This modern world is gray and old, And what remains to us of thee?...Then blow some trumpet loud and free, And give thine oaten pipe away, Ah, leave the hills of Arcady! This modern world hath need of thee!--Oscar Wilde (1854--1900) </P> <P> While Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote: </P>

What type of source is this western civilization through the ages