"Upon scorners," he "retorts their scorn" (1. 150); for Zeus he can fancy no fall worse than one "lower than patience" (1. 1091), and in himself strengthens his pride with a fierce spirit of defiance, so that he himself may endure the unendurable. His comfort is in the absoluteness of Fate:

"Necessity doth front the universe

With an invincible gesture," (1. 117),

which, though "stronger than his art" (1. 582), is stronger also than his foe, whose fall he foresees, gloating over the thought that

"Zeus

Precipitated thus, shall learn at length

The difference betwixt rule and servitude." (1. 1101.) Hence, by anticipation, he shouts to the pusillanimous chorus:

"Reverence thou,

Adore thou, flatter thou, whomever reigns,
Whenever reigning! But for me, your Zeus

Is less than nothing." (1.1113.)

However, contempt for Jupiter, and stoic superiority to torture, do not prevent his desiring a covenant with his foe. He speaks of a time when Zeus, humbled,

"shall rush on in fear to meet with me Who rush to meet with him in agony,

To issues of harmonious covenant." (1. 231.)

He will keep his fatal secret, because,

"By that same secret kept

I 'scape this chain's dishonor and its woe." (1. 593.)

And he assures Hermes :

"No tortures from his hand

Nor any machination in the world

Shall force mine utterance, ere he loose himself
These cankerous fetters from me" (1. 1174),

implying a willingness to speak the words Zeus wants to hear, and which can alone confirm him in his celestial tyranny, if thus personally released and restored to honor. Of course, since he owes no service,―any possible debt to Zeus being more than canceled by ingratitude and extreme cruelty, as he ironically remarks to Hermes,-he will, of course, not "supplicate him with feminine upliftings of . hands, to break these chains." (1.1192.)

The picture of Zeus is sufficiently lurid. As a "new-made king," he is declared by Hephæstus to be "cruel." (1. 39.) He "metes his justice by his will" (1. 227), is Prometheus' judgment. Oceanus speaks of him as "reigning by cruelty, instead of right." (1. 381.) The chorus considers him "stern and cold," "whose law is taken from his breast" (1. 467), and Hermes assures Prometheus that he is wont to persuade by force:

Unless my words persuade thee, what a blast

And whirlwind of inevitable woe

Must sweep persuasion through thee" (1. 1202),

and as his authorized mouthpiece and messenger declares the fortitude of Prometheus mere obstinacy and indulgence of "self-will." (1. 1227.) Strength, the willing slave of Zeus, warus Hephæstos of the danger of sympathizing with the victim of the tyrant's wrath:

"Beware lest thine own pity find thee out; (1. 75.) whilst Hermes considers such sympathy nothing short of "madness." (1. 1273.)

One wonders how an orthodox Athenean could endure for one minute such a lively portraiture of the Olympian Father!

Is it surprising that Shelley "shrank from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the champion with the oppressor of mankind?”

6. SHELLEY'S PHILOSOPHY.

Let us now proceed to give ourselves some account of that" system of ideas," as Mr. Rossetti happily puts it, which Shelley held to be true at this period of his life. He was a thorough-going subjective idealist. From the first two speeches of Ahasuerus, in the lyrical drama "Hellas," we can cull words which will accurately define his position:

THOUGHT is its cradle and its grave, nor less

The future and the past are idle shadows

Of THOUGHT's eternal flight-they have no being;
Nought is but that IT feels itself to be."

To do with time or place, or circumstance?"

That this philosophy was also held at the time of the composition of the Prometheus, apart from the general spirit and tendency of the poem, such lines as these suffice to prove:

"THOUGHT. . is the measure of the universe."

-(Act II, sc. iv, 1. 72.)

The mind of the beholder is viewed as the source of the objective being of things:

From this it results, of course, that in the strictest philosophical view of Shelley the whole drama of human salvation takes place both in its subjective and in its ostensibly objective parts within the mind of man, which is Prometheus; so that all the dramatis personae of the poem are really moods or activities of Prometheus, projected upon the blank screen of the unknowable, and his semi-personal relations to these projections represent everlasting facts of his own abysmal being.

Now, let us deduce an ethic from this metaphysic, assuming it to be true for the nonce. Thought -and its living elements, will, passion, reason, imagination-is the framer and orderer and sustainer of the universe; what thought feels itself to be alone is; then surely evil, in every sense, is not necessarily real to the individual, much less to the race. And here it is well to observe that Shelley utterly destroys the basis of both egoism and altruism :

"Talk no more

Of thee and me,

But look on that which can not change, the One,
The unborn and the undying."

"All is contained in each.” *

It is absorption in this One, or more correctlysince the cessation of consciousness were the cessation of being, according to Shelley; and Adonais, for instance, is said still to be, though now absorbed, and "doth bear his part, while the One Spirit's plastic stress sweeps through the dull sense world;" (Ado nais, st. 43.)-it is conscious union and spontaneous

*Speech of Ahasuerus, "Hellas."

co-operation with this One which constitutes the goal of being.*

"The One remains, the many change and pass."—(Adonais, št. 52.)

The true course for man is therefore to anticipate, while yet in the flesh, this conscious union with "all," (whereby they cease to be "many," and so exposed to the evils of change and chance), by a living energetic sympathy, which Shelley calls "true love," to distinguish it from sensual or sentimental affections that "profane" the "word." For true love is not merely "The desire of the moth for the star,

Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar

From the sphere of our sorrow;

-(To -.)

but also, or rather, the power that produces, accord-
ing to eternal laws, a "kingdom of heaven on earth."
"If you divide suffering and dross, you may
Diminish till it is consumed away;

If you divide pleasure and love and thought,
Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not
How much, while any yet remains unshared,
Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared."

-(Epipsychidion, 1. 181.)

Now, if evil can for the mere individual, exposed to change and chance and death, by an attitude of his single mind, refusing to recognize evil, by an authoritative denial, a destructive lightning bolt of wholesome will, be annihilated for him, how much more certainly can all evil be overcome by the joint fiat of mankind creating a new world of ideal beauty? No wonder, then, we find in Prometheus such lines as

* See Appendix, for a discussion on the meaning of "Annihilation" in Shelley's poetry."