144

PROMETHEUS BOUND.

Ἐσορᾷς μ' ὡς ἔκδικα πάσχω.

Thou seest what wrongs I suffer!

ÆSCHYLUS.

I HAD a vision of reality:

Such as arise upon the eyes of Mind,

Intently fixed upon the past-the Past,
The Prophet of the Future; shadowing

From deeds or thoughts of those who suffered here,
Lessons and prescience of the things to come.

A waste, interminable, icy plain,

Stretched onward without limit, until lost

In the infinity of distance, where

The Sky, arched downwards, made a boundary,
Apparent only. That wild, desolate waste,
Was levelled, Ocean like, and broken up

In fissures; black ravines, down whose steep sides
Lay the striped snows: or in low ridges swelling,
Like undulations of the heaving Sea,

Stopped in its full pulsation; even, while moving,
Transmuted into stone, with semblance still
Of living motion which was petrified !

Earth's beautiful and all familiar face;

Her eyes that are the liquid streams; her veins,

The azure fountains; her rich hair, the leaves,
And pendant Woods; her Voice, the winds, and waves,
And thunder in its mightier intonations,
Were not-extinct as they had never been.
A lifeless, pulseless, soundless Wilderness!
Where even Air was breathless, petrified,
And frozen as the ground. There, Echo died;
That laughing and elastic Spirit, haunting

Else desolate solitudes to mimic life,

Which only hath departed to return,

Was not the respirating breath withheld,

On which she lived. On that blind, lifeless surface

Was nothing left to welcome her, responding

That she was heard; no fowl of air—no mute

Or creeping thing that lives and dies in darkness ;

The Void of Nature-or her womb-or grave.

L

SILENCE was there presiding Deity:

The Unreality became a Form;

Her reign was felt, imparting mystery,

And awe, and fear: yea, even a thrilling dread

To nothingness; her power was on the heart,
Which peopled unsubstantial Vacancy

With Spiritual essence of its own.

One solitary ridge of crag shot up

From that illimitable plain: abrupt

In isolation; no communion held it

With the dead Earth, save where its base reposed. Such rocks the elder Titan might have piled

To scale the heavens, urged on by that ambition
Whose human cravings are unsatisfied.

It rose in its Sky-cleaving altitude,
Not lonely; its mysterious communions

Were with the rising and the setting Sun:

With the Winds rushing round it, answering back,

While welcoming their fury; with the fine

And subtle motions of the Summer airs;
The soundless, luminiferous Ether! filling
The impalpable Ocean of the living Space ;—
With the Clouds folding round its giant sides:
With touches of ethereal Moonlight, coming,

And vanishing like Spirits; with the Stars,
Those everlasting Watchers of the Heavens :
Looking down in their brightness on that mass
Of ponderous Life, enduring as their own!

One human being lived and suffered there.
To suffer is to live; upon himself

The common burthen of Humanity,

All it can feel-think-hope-believe-endure:
All which it can aspire to-and dream,
Whose aspirations, waking, are despair;

All which it doth exult in-and lament;
And its severer tests of trial-all

Which it can prove of active agony,

The pang that maddens-prostrates-the suspense Of hope-whose death is hopelessness-was borne Concentrated within that lonely breast.

Upon that open plain, the Arena spread
Before him and the watching heavens, his Spirit,
From effort of fixed will and stern resolve,

The discipline of self; from pride, not born
Of air-blown weakness-Wisdom's mockery,

Nor from the inflated mask of Vanity,
Hiding the impotence which it reveals,

Now, disembodied from its earthlier part,
Watched there the sufferings it felt no more.
The Ordeal was over: suffering had become
A sense familiar; like despair, and hope,
Subjected to the Mind's supremacy:
Proving in its unaided faculties,

How nearly it approacheth the divine.

Midway, that solitary Form was bound:
A human form-man, as he walked on earth,
In his first growth developed; when the Tree
Of life shot up and flourished: ere disease
Had sapped, time seared, or stormy passions shorn
Its first magnificent dimensions; breathing

The living soul of Him who planted it:

The elemental energies which made him ;

Their power--and strength-and energy—and calm!
His limbs were bound against that precipice,

As if he were its marble part: as fixed,
And as immovable. His outstretched arms,
Arched o'er his head, showed his extended hands
Chained to the rock with links of adamant;
His feet no footstool had-nailed to the cliff.
Recumbent rest, which strengthens helplessness,

And nerves the body, was unknown to him.