Syd Barrett named Pink Floyd's first album, 1967's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, after a chapter in Kenneth Grahame's children's classic The Wind in the Willows. In Grahame's book, two animals, Mole and Rat, are led by a haunting sound to encounter a vision suffused with an almost religious splendor. A piper Mr. Barrett certainly was, and with his band -- the greatest to emerge from London during the psychedelic Sixties -- he too created a sound, to quote Grahame, "so beautiful and strange and new."

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, almost entirely written by Mr. Barrett, with his lead guitar and vocals, is a wondrous masterpiece, an album that itself has become the subject of books. But just like the vision in Grahame's children's story, Mr. Barrett's own dream-song ended abruptly, leaving an unfulfilled longing. At the peak of his fame, with Pink Floyd in its ascendancy and Mr. Barrett as its guiding genius, he walked away from it all. After two remarkable solo albums, he vanished entirely -- becoming a recluse who lived in the basement of his mother's home in Cambridge, England.

Mr. Barrett became one of rock music's most famous casualties. Pink Floyd paid tribute to their lost leader with the song Shine On You Crazy Diamond and many other musicians, including David Bowie, cited him as a major influence. But there was to be no reunion, no comeback. He had vanished. It was widely speculated that Mr. Barrett suffered from mental illness, his problems compounded by LSD use during the late Sixties. Mr. Barrett never emerged from his refuge to explain his absence, and with his death last Friday at age 60, we may never know the truth. All we have left is the music. As Rat said, it is perhaps enough "just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever."