your sweet errors,

75 Reflect but rapture - not least though last.

85

What is 't but chaining
Hearts which, once waning,

Beat 'gainst their prison?

Time can but cloy love,
And use destroy love:
The winged boy, Love,

Is but for boys

You'll find it torture

Though sharper, shorter,

90 To wean, and not wear out your joys.

DARKNESS.

Jeffrey remarks on this poem, which originally was called "A Dream," it " is a grand and gloomy sketch of the supposed consequences of the final extinction of the sun and the heavenly bodies; executed, undoubtedly, with great and fearful force, but

with something of German exaggeration, and a fantastical solution of incidents. The very conception is terrible above all conception of known calamity, and is too oppressive to the imagination to be contemplated with pleasure, even in the faint reflection of poetry."

I HAD a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

5 Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. Morn came and went and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light.

10 And they did live by watchfires-and the thrones,
The palaces of crownèd kings - the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons ; cities were consumed,
And men were gather'd round their blazing homes
15 To look once more into each other's face :
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanoes and their mountain-torch.
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire but hour by hour
20 They fell and faded - and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash- and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits

The flashes fell upon them; some lay down

25 And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled; And others hurried to and fro, and fed

Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up

With mad disquietude on the dull sky,

30 The pall of a past world; and then again With curses cast them down upon the dust,

And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd. The wild birds shriek'd,

And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,

And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes 35 Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd And twined themselves among the multitude, Hissing, but stingless - they were slain for food. And War, which for a moment was no more, Did glut himself again; - a meal was bought 40 With blood, and each sate sullenly apart Gorging himself in gloom : no love was left; All earth was but one thought—and that was death,

Immediate and inglorious; and the pang

Of famine fed upon all entrails men

45 Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh.
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd:
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
50 Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,

And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress he died.
55 The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,

And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place

Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things

60 For an unholy usage; they raked up,

And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton

hands

The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath

Blew for a little life, and made a flame

Which was a mockery; then they lifted up 65 Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld

Each other's aspects saw, and shriek'd, and

died

Even of their mutual hideousness they died, Unknowing who he was upon whose brow Famine had written Fiend. The world was void, 70 The populous and the powerful was a lump, Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless — A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay. The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still, And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths; 75 Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropp'd,

They slept on the abyss without a surge

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;

80 The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air, And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need Of aid from them She was the Universe.

PROMETHEUS.

The story of the Titan Prometheus, or Forethought, has been a favorite subject for poets both in ancient and modern times. The myth relates how Prometheus was the creator of man, and ascended to heaven, lighted his torch at the chariot of the sun, and brought the fire down for the use of man. For this, the Olympian Zeus chained him to a rock on Mount Caucasus, where he was to be forever exposed to the attack of a vulture. The

great tragedy of Prometheus Bound by Eschylus has been translated by Augusta Webster, Plumptre, Mrs. Browning, and others. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound was based on it, and besides Byron, Longfellow and Lowell have taken Prometheus for the subject of poems.

I.

TITAN! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,

Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;

The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
10 The suffocating sense of woe,

Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.

II.

15 Titan! to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,
And the deaf tyranny of Fate,

20 The ruling principle of Hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create
The things it may annihilate,
Refused thee even the boon to die:
The wretched gift eternity

25 Was thine

and thou hast borne it well. All that the Thunderer wrung from thee