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With zeal, as men study some stubborn art
For their own good, and could by patience find
An entrance to the caverns of his mind,
I might reclaim him from this dark estate.
In friendships I had been most fortunate,
Yet never saw I one whom I would call
More willingly my friend; and this was all
Accomplished not; such dreams of baseless good
Oft come and go in crowds and solitude

And leave no trace, but what I now designed
Made, for long years, impression on my mind.
The following morning, urged by my affairs,
I left bright Venice.

After many years,

And many changes, I returned; the name
Of Venice, and its aspect, was the same;
But Maddalo was travelling far away
Among the mountains of Armenia.

His dog was dead. His child had now become
A woman; such as it has been my doom
To meet with few, a wonder of this earth,
Where there is little of transcendent worth,
Like one of Shakespeare's women. Kindly she,
And with a manner beyond courtesy,

Received her father's friend; and, when I asked
Of the lorn maniac, she her memory tasked,
And told, as she had heard, the mournful tale:
"That the poor sufferer's health began to fail
Two years from my departure, but that then

574 this, Hunt MS. || his, Mrs. Shelley, 1824.
579 crowds and, Hunt MS. || or, Mrs. Shelley, 1824.
584 changes, wanderings, Hunt MS. cancelled.

The lady, who had left him, came again.

Her mien had been imperious, but she now

Looked meek-perhaps remorse had brought her

low.

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Her coming made him better, and they stayed
Together at my father's for I played
As I remember with the lady's shawl;
I might be six years old - but after all
She left him."

tough.

66

'Why, her heart must have been

How did it end?" "And was not this enough? They met they parted." "Child, is there no

66

more?"

Something within that interval which bore The stamp of why they parted, how they met; Yet if thine aged eyes disdain to wet

Those wrinkled cheeks with youth's remembered tears,

Ask me no more, but let the silent years

Be closed and cered over their memory,

As

yon mute marble where their corpses lie." I urged and questioned still; she told me how All happened - but the cold world shall not know. 611 Yet || But, Hunt MS. cancelled.

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

A LYRICAL DRAMA

IN FOUR ACTS

AUDISNE HÆC, AMPHIARAE, SUB TERRAM ABDITE?

Prometheus Unbound was published, with Shelley's name, at London in the summer of 1820, under the imprint of Marchant, for C. & J. Ollier. The drama was begun in the summer-house of his garden at Este about September, 1818, and the first Act had been finished as early as October 8; it was apparently laid aside, and again taken up at Rome in the spring of 1819, where, under the circumstances described in the preface, the second and third Acts were added, and the work, in its first form, was thus completed by April 6. The fourth Act was an afterthought, and was composed at Florence toward the end of the year. The text of 1820 is modified by Mrs. Shelley's text, 18391, in preparing which she used Shelley's list of errors in the original edition, and also by a MS. in the possession of the Shelley family, partly described by Miss Blind in the Westminster Review, July, 1870.

PREFACE

THE Greek tragic writers, in selecting as their subject any portion of their national history or mythology, employed in their treatment of it a certain arbitrary discretion. They by no means conceived themselves bound to adhere to the common interpretation or to imitate in story as in title their rivals and predecessors. Such a system would have amounted to a resignation of those claims to preference over their competitors which incited the composition. The Agamemnonian story was exhibited on the Athenian theatre with as many variations as dramas.

I have presumed to employ a similar license. The Prometheus Unbound of Eschylus 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 Thetis. Thetis, according to this view of the subject, was given in marriage to Peleus, and Prometheus, by the permission of Jupiter, delivered from his captivity by Hercules. Had I framed my story on this model, I should have done no more than have attempted to restore the lost drama of Eschylus ; 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, I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary. The only imaginary being, resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgment, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in

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