JUDGE. Art thou not guilty of thy father's death? BEATRICE. Or wilt thou rather tax high-judging God But that which thou hast call'd my father's death? And so an end of all. Now do your will; Such as our country gossips sing and spin, SONG. False friend, wilt thou smile or weep What is this whisper low? Have I confess'd? Is it all over now? No hope! No refuge! O, weak, wicked tongue SCENE IV. A Hall of the Prison. Enter CAMILLO and BERNARDO. CAMILLO. The Pope is stern; not to be moved or bent. And threw behind, muttering with hoarse, harsh voice; Which among ye defended their old father Kill'd in his sleep?" Then to another: "Thou [Covers his face and weeps. Dost this in virtue of thy place; 'tis well." He turn'd to me then, looking deprecation, O, my child! And said these three words, coldly: "They must die." LUCRETIA. To what a dreadful end are we all come! BEATRICE. What 't was weak to do, "Tis weaker to lament, once being done; Take cheer! The God who knew my wrong, and made Our speedy act the angel of his wrath, BERNARDO. And yet you left him not? CAMILLO. I urged him still; Pleading, as I could guess, the devilish wrong And he replied, "Paolo Santa Croce Which prompted your unnatural parent's death: Murder'd his mother yester-evening, And he is fled. Parricide grows so rife That soon, for some just cause no doubt, the young Will strangle us all, dozing in our chairs. Authority, and power, and hoary hair Are grown crimes capital. You are my nephew, You come to ask their pardon; stay a moment; Here is their sentence; never see me more Till, to the letter, it be all fulfill'd." BERNARDO. O, God, not so! I did believe indeed My God! Can it be possible I have No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world; On Earth, and ever present? even though dead, I am cut off from the only world I know, I hope I do trust in him. In whom else GIACOMO. Know you not, Mother-Sister, know you not? LUCRETIA. Child, perhaps It will be granted. We may all then live To make these woes a tale for distant years: O, what a thought! It gushes to my heart Like the warm blood. BEATRICE. Yet both will soon be cold. With famine, or wind-walking Pestilence, BERNARDO rushes in. BERNARDO. Oh, horrible! That tears, that looks, that hope pour'd forth in prayer, Give yourself no unnecessary pain, My dear Lord Cardinal. Here, mother, tie Though wrapt in a strange cloud of crime and In any simple knot; ay, that does well. shame, Lived ever holy and unstain'd. And though Ill tongues shall wound me, and our common name And yours I see is coming down. How often Prometheus Unbound; A LYRICAL DRAMA, IN FOUR ACTS. Audisne hæc, Amphiarae, sub terram abdite? PREFACE. sary. The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgment, a more poetical character than Satan, THE Greek tragic writers, in selecting as their subject because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm any portion of their national history or mythology, and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susemployed in their treatment of it a certain arbitrary ceptible of being described as exempt from the taints discretion. They by no means conceived themselves of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal Found to adhere to the common interpretation, or to aggrandizement, which, in the Hero of Paradise Lost, imitate in story as in title their rivals and predeces-interfere with the interest. The character of Satan sors. Such a system would have amounted to a engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry, which resignation of those claims to preference over their leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to competitors which incited the composition. The excuse the former because the latter exceed all meaAgamemnonian story was exhibited on the Athenian theatre with as many variations as dramas. sure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling, it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends. I have presumed to employ a similar license. The "Prometheus Unbound" of schylus supposed the reconciliation of Jupiter with his victim as the price of the disclosure of the danger threatened to his empire by the consummation of his marriage with This Poem was chiefly written upon the mountain Thetis. Thetis, according to this view of the subject, ous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the was given in marriage to Peleus, and Prometheus, flowery glades, and thickets of odoriferous blossomby the permission of Jupiter, delivered frem his cap-ing trees, which are extended in ever-winding labytivity by Hercules. Had I framed my story on this rinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches model, I should have done no more than have at- suspended in the air. The bright blue sky of Rome, tempted to restore the lost drama of Aschylus; an ambition, which, if my preference to this mode of treating the subject had incited me to cherish, the recollection of the high comparison such an attempt would challenge might well abate. But, in truth, 1 The imagery which I have employed will be was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of found, in many instances, to have been drawn from reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of man- the operations of the human mind, or from those exkind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so ternal actions by which they are expressed. This is powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance unusual in modern poetry, although Dante and Shakof Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could speare are full of instances of the same kind: Dante conceive of him as unsaying his high language and indeed more than any other poet, and with greater quailing before his successful and perfidious adver-success. But the Greek poets, as writers to whom no and the effect of the vigorous awakening spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama.. resource of awakening the sympathy of their con- the mirror of all that is lovely in the visible universe, temporaries was unknown, were in the habitual use as exclude from his contemplation the beautiful which of this power; and it is the study of their works exists in the writings of a great contemporary. The (since a higher merit would probably be denied me), pretence of doing it would be a presumption in any to which I am willing that my readers should impute but the greatest; the effect, even in him, would be this singularity. strained, unnatural, and ineffectual. A poet is the One word is due in candor to the degree in which combined product of such internal powers as modify the study of contemporary writings may have tinged the nature of others; and of such external influences my composition, for such has been a topic of censure as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one, with regard to poems far more popular, and indeed but both. Every man's mind is, in this respect, more deservedly popular, than mine. It is impossible modified by all the objects of nature and art; by that any one who inhabits the same age with such every word and every suggestion which he ever adwriters as those who stand in the foremost ranks of mitted to act upon his consciousness; it is the mirror our own, can conscientiously assure himself that his upon which all forms are reflected, and in which language and tone of thought may not have been they compose one form. Poets, not otherwise than modified by the study of the productions of those ex-philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, traordinary intellects. It is true, that, not the spirit in one sense, the creators, and in another, the creof their genius, but the forms in which it has mani-ations, of their age. From this subjection the lothest fested itself, are due less to the peculiarities of their do not escape. There is a similarity between Homer own minds than to the peculiarity of the moral and and Hesiod, between Eschylus and Euripides, be intellectual condition of the minds among which they tween Virgil and Horace, between Dante and Pehave been produced. Thus a number of writers trarch, between Shakspeare and Fletcher, between possess the form, whilst they want the spirit of those Dryden and Pope; each has a generic resemblance whom, it is alleged, they imitate; because the former under which their specific distinctions are arranged. is the endowment of the age in which they live, and If this similarity be the result of imitation, I am willthe latter must be the uncommunicated lightning of ing to confess that I have imitated. their own mind. Let this opportunity be conceded to me of ac The peculiar style of intense and comprehensive knowledging that I have, what a Scotch philosopher imagery which distinguishes the modern literature characteristically terms, " a passion for reforming the of England, has not been, as a general power, the world:" what passion incited him to write and pub product of the imitation of any particular writer. lish his book, he omits to explain. For my part, I The mass of capabilities remains at every period had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon, materially the same; the circumstances which awaken than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus. But it it to action perpetually change. If England were is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical divided into forty republics, each equal in population compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reand extent to Athens, there is no reason to suppose form, or that I consider them in any degree as conbut that, under institutions not more perfect than taining a reasoned system on the theory of human those of Athens, each would produce philosophers life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can and poets equal to those who (if we except Shak- be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious speare) have never been surpassed. We owe the and supererogatory in verse. My purpose has hitherto great writers of the golden age of our literature to been simply to familiarize the highly refined imag that fervid awakening of the public mind which nation of the more select classes of poetical readers shook to dust the oldest and most oppressive form of with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware the Christian religion. We owe Milton to the pro- that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust. gress and development of the same spirit: the sacred and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a republican, conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of lite. and a bold inquirer into morals and religion. The which the unconscious passenger tramples into dest great writers of our own age are, we have reason although they would bear the harvest of his happ to suppose, the companions and forerunners of someness. Should I live to accomplish what I purpose. unimagined change in our social condition or the that is, produce a systematical history of what ap opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is pear to me to be the genuine elements of human sodischarging its collected lightning, and the equilib-ciety, let not the advocates of injustice and superrium between institutions and opinions is now re- stition flatter themselves that I should take Eschylus storing, or is about to be restored. rather than Plato as my model. As to imitation, poetry is a mimetic art. It creates, The having spoken of myself with unaffected freebut it creates by combination and representation. dom will need little apology with the candid; and Poetical abstractions are beautiful and new, not be- let the uncandid consider that they injure me less cause the portions of which they are composed had than their own hearts and minds by misrepresentsno previous existence in the mind of man or in nature, tion. Whatever talents a person may possess to but because the whole produced by their combination amuse and instruct others, be they ever so inconsider has some intelligible and beautiful analogy with those able, he is yet bound to exert them: if his attempí sources of emotion and thought, and with the con- be ineffectual, let the punishment of an unaccom temporary condition of them: one great poet is a plished purpose have been sufficient; let none trouble masterpiece of nature, which another not only ought themselves to heap the dust of oblivion upon to study but must study. He might as wisely and as efforts; the pile they raise will betray his grave, easily determine that his mind should no longer be which might otherwise have been unknown. his DRAMATIS PERSONE. Eat with their burning cold into my bones. MONARCH of Gods and Demons, and all Spirits No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure. The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears Heaven's winged hound, polluting from thy lips My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by, As then, ere misery made me wise. The curse FIRST VOICE: FROM THE MOUNTAINS. Thrice three hundred thousand years O'er the Earthquake's couch we stood: Oft, as men convulsed with fears, We trembled in our multitude. SECOND VOICE: FROM THE SPRINGS. Thunderbolts had parch'd our water, We had been stain'd with bitter blood, And had run mute, 'mid shrieks of slaughter, Through a city and a solitude. THIRD VOICE: FROM THE AIR. I had clothed, since Earth uprose, Been cloven by many a rending groan. FOURTH VOICE: FROM THE WHIRLWINDS. We had soar'd beneath these mountains Unresting ages; nor had thunder, Nor yon volcano's flaming fountains, Nor any power above or under Ever made us mute with wonder. |