Of others' sight familiar were to her's. And this the world calls phrenzy; but the wise Have a far deeper madness, and the glance Of melancholy is a fearful gift; A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.-- The beings which surrounded him were gone, 6 190 He fed on poisons, and they had no power, But were a kind of nutriment; he lived Through that which had been death to many men, He held his dialogues; and they did teach To him the book of Night was open wide, And voices from the deep abyss reveal'd 200 IX. My dream was past; it had no further change. Of these two creatures should be thus traced out Almost like a reality-the one To end in madness-both in misery. PROMETHEUS. I. TITAN! to whose immortal eyes The sufferings of mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise ; What was thy pity's recompense? A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh Until its voice is echoless. II. Titan! to thee the strife was given Between the suffering and the will, Which torture where they cannot kill; And the inexorable Heaven, And the deaf tyranny of Fate, The ruling principle of Hate, Which for its pleasure doth create The things it may annihilate, Refused thee even the boon to die: The wretched gift eternity Was thine-and thou hast borne it well. All that the Thunderer wrung from thee Was but the menace which flung back That in his hand the lightnings trembled. III. Thy Godlike crime was to be kind, To render with thy precepts less The sum of human wretchedness, And strengthen Man with his own mind; But baffled as thou wert from high, Still in thy patient energy, In the endurance, and repulse |