With zeal, as men study some stubborn art And leave no trace, but what I now designed After many years, And many changes, I returned; the name His dog was dead. His child had now become Received her father's friend; and, when I asked 574 this, Hunt MS. || his, Mrs. Shelley, 1824. The lady, who had left him, came again. Her mien had been imperious, but she now Looked meek-perhaps remorse had brought her low. Her coming made him better, and they stayed 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 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 |