In all which was served up to him, until
Like to the Pontic monarch of old days, (11)
He fed on poisons, and they had no power,
But were a kind of nutriment; he lived

190

Through that which had been death to many men,
And made him friends of mountains: with the stars
And the quick Spirit of the Universe

He held his dialogues; and they did teach
To him the magic of their mysteries;

To him the book of Night was open'd wide,
And voices from the deep abyss reveal'd
A marvel and a secret-Be it so.

IX.

My dream was past; it had no further change.
It was of a strange order, that the doom

Of these two creatures should be thus traced out
Almost like a reality-the one

To end in madness-both in misery.

200

PROMETHEUS.

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,
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.

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,

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

Was thine—and thou hast borne it well.
All that the Thunderer wrung from thee
Was but the menace which flung back
On him the torments of thy rack;
The fate thou didst so well foresee,
But would not to appease him tell;
And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
And in his Soul a vain repentance,

And evil dread so ill dissembled

That in his hand the lightnings trembled.

III.

Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
To render with thy precepts less

The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind;
But baffled as thou wert from high,

Still in thy patient energy,

In the endurance, and repulse

Of thine impenetrable Spirit,

Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse, A mighty lesson we inherit:

Thou art a symbol and a sign

To Mortals of their fate and force; Like thee, Man is in part divine,

A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;

His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself—an equal to all woes,

And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter'd recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory

VOL. V.

S