Humanity is no chained Titan of indomitable virtue. It is a weak and trembling thing." Is it not perhaps both? "To represent evil as external-the tyranny of a malignant God or fortune, or as an intellectual error-is to falsify the true conception of human progress. The progress which indeed concerns us is that which consists in working out the beast." May it not be that these two conceptions of evil-as external and as internal-are easily capable of reconciliation? Does not Mr. Dowden himself give us the cue, when he goes on to describe man's progress in the New Testament phrase as "a growing to the fulness of the stature of the perfect man?" "The advance of Faust is from error to truth, from weakness to strength," etc.-certainly. So is the advance of Prometheus, that is imagined to have taken three thousand years. Only Shelley constantly views this strength, this truth as already immanent in the weakness, in the error; as more real than they, if as yet unmanifest and externally inoperative. True, man appears a trembling thing and may at last grow strong, but if so, because all the "perfect man” which is to be evolved in due time is already involved in his present being. It is not, perhaps, so foolish after all to view the evil as external; it simply signifies your recognition of the good in you,―rudimentary and helpless though it be as that alone which has a right to exist and perpetuate itself. Not that we want to deceive ourselves into thinking that we have no sin. If you affirm the sin inheres in me, is it not that self I am 1 John, i., S. bound to deny,* to outlaw, which is dead with Christ? Is not my life -the only life I dare dignify as mine, because it is worthy of a child of heaven -"hid" as yet "with Christ in God."§ We know that, of course, it is not yet made manifest what we shall be, but we also know that we are even now the sons of God, ¶ and some time must therefore-not merely may be evidently all that such a vital intimacy of relation to God implies.** This, one may object, is mystical language. Why, so then is Shelley's. If it passes in the New Testament, let it pass in Prometheus Unbound, even if alloyed now and then with premature hazarded speculations. "Veil by veil, evil and error fall.”—(Act iii., scene ii., line 62.) "Foul masks, with which ill thoughts Hide that fair being whom we spirits call man." -(Act iii., scene iv., line 45.) And Shelley chooses to see as the spirits see; not with carnal eye. "Where is the beauty, love, and truth, we seek, But in our minds?-(Julian and Maddalo, line 174.) We will therefore do well to "search" for "hidden thoughts," "our unexhausted spirits,"†† for only there shall we find "the deep things of God." In brief, that is to Shelley revelation, which in Faust seems attainment. Shelley perceives the divine in * ȧnapvéoμai utterly to deny, disown, treat as if it were not, leave out of reckoning. Matt. xvi., 24; Mk. viii., 34; Lk. ix, 23. † 2 Cor. v., 14; 1 Cor. xv., 31; Gal., ii., 20. | 1 J. iii., 2, 3. **2 Pet. i., 4; 1 Cor. xiii., 12; J. xvii., 23. Col. iii., 3. ¶ 1 J. iii., 2. the human,* needing only the doffing of the human to be visible in holy splendor; Goethe observes the process-the center of his horizon in the human-and describes sanctification as a donning of the whole armor of God. Both points of view are taken in the New Testament; the vital and the mechanical lan guage are equally admissible to describe this same indescribable change from sinner to saint. But it would be surely a great mistake to suppose that Goethe viewed the matter thus mechanically. The fact is, since he chose to display in his Faust the progress of a soul, and that the source of growth is always hidden-all changes seem to be from without—it is only by taking the whole progress for granted, placing his drama at the moment when Prometheus has already" worked out the beast," that Shelley is able to make us see the growth in spirituality as a revelation of a divine principle, whose presence all along is always clearly discerned by the true seer. Whether or not Shelley grasped this New Testament mysticism, is not for us to debate. Only, if it can afford an explanation of the language of the Prometheus Unbound, would it not be pedantic fanaticism to insist on ruling it out? Mrs. Shelley was, it would seem, conscious of the kinship our poem has to the New Testament, and it seems strange that Mr. Bagehot should be so perplexed at finding, as a matter *To reveal His Son in me, Gal. i., 16. Because ye are sons, Gal. iv., 6. Now are we the sons of God, 1 J. iii., 2, etc, etc. † Put on the new man, Col. iii., 10. Put on the whole armor of God, Eph. vi., 11; Rom. xiii., 12; Rom. xiii., 14; Eph. iv., 24; 1 Thes. v., 8, etc. Literary Studies by Walter Bagehot, Vol. I, p. 115. of fact, that Shelley "took extreme delight in the Bible as a composition." If indeed "the least biblical of poets," he is, at all events, often in close sympathy with the utterances of the sermon on the mount, with St. John and St. Paul in their theological epistles; nor are their echoed phrases few in his verse. Men have built sometimes "wiser than they knew." Intuitively they have taken possession of what their intellect did not surmise existed. It is wonderful how little men are disposed to grant to Shelley great intellectual power, so utterly have they been stunned by his other gifts. And yet, had we nothing but his prefaces, we should surely marvel at his acuteness, sanity, and far-sighted judgment. Did he not understand the relations of art to civilization, and weigh with wonderful sagacity the connection of genius with its age? What of his auticipation of Mr. Taines' theory: "The mass of capabilities remains at every period the same; the circumstances which awaken it to action perpetually change?" * What of his perception of the power of literature to fashion, or rather indicate, the course of social history? "The great writers of our own age we have reason to suppose the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition. The equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring or is about to be restored." And all this at a time when critics took for granted that poetry was produced by rules; that gross insults and blatant slander, alternating with Shelley's Preface to Prometheus Unbound. Cf. Essay: Shelley and Sociology. E. Aveling and E. M. Aveling. Shelley Society Papers, Vol. I, p. 180. nauseous flattery in the quarterlies, could alter the current of literature; while statesmen fancied the policy of repression would change Englishmen into tame animals, harnessed to the chariot of their political greatness! As a poet, is it not probable that at times he outthought his Godwin-the good man by whom desire was calmly set down as a variety of opinion,-substituting desire (the hot desire after man's perfection) for cold opinion-and may not Shelley have thus overtaken other guides more glorious than his worthy father-in-law-some father in spirit of New Testament fame? And Shelley's "Plato," whom the early Christian thinkers of Alexandria loved so much, could not, surely, have made it impossible to accept half-consciously such guidance. 4. THE PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, AN ORGANIC WHOLE. It is our purpose now to study the Prometheus Unbound as a whole and make it yield its own interpretation; for none can be accepted as satisfactory which fails to take account of it as a whole. It would seem, therefore, that Mr. Wm. M. Rossetti has not altogether solved the difficulty. It was only after carefully considering what he had written that this paper was begun, though the materials had been gathered for some time. "This matter of the seeret which Prometheus can reveal for the preservation of Jupiter, as well as the cognate matter of the spousals of Jupiter and Thetis in Act III, appears to me to derive essentially from the Greek myth about Zeus and Prometheus, and not from the ideal system, according to which Shelley has reconstructed the myth; I at any |