3-034-856 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Pan's Wand, by R. Garnett, 1871. Illustration to a short story. 'From her birth the fate of Iridion had been associated with that of a flower of unusual loveliness - a stately, candid lily, endowed with a charmed life, like its possessor...Pan grasped a wand that leaned against the wall of his grot, and with it touched the maiden and the flower. O strange metamorphosis! Where the latter had been pining in its vase a lovely girl, the image of Iridion, lay along the ground, with dishevelled hair, clammy brow, and features slightly distorted by the last struggles of death. On the ferny couch stood an earthen vase, from which rose a magnificent lily, stately, with unfractured stem, and with no stain or wrinkle on its numerous petals...There was a glory and a splendour in the flower such as had never until then been beheld in any earthly lily'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.