"Well-a-way! this mournful measure
Is other than the song of pleasure,-
Other than the song of ours,

Chanted in Love's perfumed bowers.
Sadly now the lay we sing
Floateth upon viewless wing:
Gladly then each silver sound
Breath'd the lustral Bath around,-
Gladly then the lay we sang
In the Bridal chamber rang,
When with gifts all cost above,
Thou hadst won our Sister's love,
And bade our sweet Hesione depart,

To be the Lady of thy house and heart."

And here we bid farewell to these most femininely beautiful creations of the poet's brain. The action is now suspended from one victim of the tyrant's hate we turn to contemplate another. Poor Io! the world's wanderer-still retaining in her countenance traces of her former beauty, but bearing on her head the disfigurement of heifer's horns-approaches the Dungeon of Rock. Bereft of reason, tortured by the Oestrus, and haunted by the ghost of her former keeper, with his hundred wild unnatural eyes for ever fixed on her with intense regard, the unhappy sufferer thus opens her complaint:

The Dead whom Earth shrouds not is gliding by.

Me-even me-a child of woe,

Is he hunting to and fro,

With a giant bound like some mighty hound,

From the kingdom of shades below.

Look! over the thirsty sand

Of the green sea-shore,

The Hind of the spectral Band

Is wandering evermore!

And ever and ever the waxen reed,

With a wailing sound on the ancient mead,

Is flinging its treasures of slumberous song,

On the wings of the winds as they sweep along."

Poor Io at length obtains a brief respite from her tortures, and holds long and strange commune with Prometheus. Her persecutions however shortly recommence, and, once more bereft of her reason, and stung to madness by the gadfly, she takes leave of the suffering hero and the gentle sea-nymphs, uplifting her voice in this wild and mournful chant:

“Well-a-day,—ah! well-a-day!
Woe is me! I must away.

Fever, Frenzy, Pain, and Spasm,
Rack and pinch and torture me!
And my brain is as a chasm,
Where the shapes of Fury be.

Lo! the Brize his spear hath brought!
'Tis a spear by flame unwrought,—

Ah, it scorches me again!

Fear within my heart has risen,—
Ah, it knocks, it knocks in pain,
At the portal of its prison !—
Lo! mine eyes, in circles whirling,
Wildly, dizzily are twirling-
Now with mad leap am I torn
From my track;-I cannot stay,
By the Frenzy-fiend I'm borne
Forward, onward, far away!
Oh! I'm mad!-I rave-I rave!
Senseless are my words and rash,
And on Ruin's stormy wave,
Dolefully and darkly dash !"

We come now to the third part of the tragedy, and enter the vestibule of an awful catastrophe. Hermes, "the world-wandering herald," commissioned by Zeus to compel Prometheus to disclose the secret, known only to him of living beings, by which he should lose "the sceptre of wide heaven," now confronts the champion, or the Thief of Fire, as he insolently calls him. Prometheus replies to him in language befitting his nobility of soul.-We give a portion of his speech :

"Ye know ye are but youngling Emperors,

And that your sway has but an infant's growth;
And yet most lame conclusion-ye imagine
That ye shall lead a life unstained with grief,
Within the gold metropolis of heaven!
Have I not seen contention in the skies?
Have I not seen from its crystalline towers
Two princely leaders fall? and shall I not

Behold a third ?—Yes, there shall be for him
Whose sceptre now sways the wide universe,
Ruin and rout, and speediest disgrace!"

Hermes now counsels submission; but Prometheus replies

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Submission, thou dost know, I cannot try!"

He next threatens him with an eternity of torture-but "the Titan is unvanquished still." There is something beyond measure awful and mysterious in the lines marked with italics, in the following denunciation of the Herald of the gods :

"The Father, first, shall rend this rough ravine
With thunder and the flame of the red lightning,
And hide thee in a cleft, and the grey rock
Shall clasp thee in its cold and cruel arms.
Long time shall pass, and passing see thee die ;
But after endless ages thou shalt visit

The sun's sweet light, and view green earth again;
And then the winged hound of the Almighty,
The hungry eagle ravening for thy life-blood,
Shall strip the flesh in mighty fragments from thee,
And creeping uninvited, every day,

An everlasting reveller shall banquet
Upon the clotted gore of thy black liver.-
Hope then for no conclusion to thy woe,
Until some God will be thy friend, and bear
For thee those fearful sufferings, willingly,
Journeying unto the sunless, starless land,

And to the hell of thick and solid darkness.”

And now that the patience and the goodness and the greatness of the champion should be rendered infinitely conspicuous, the very sea-nymphs-his own familiar friends-advise him to obey the will of the almighty tyrant. He hardly hears their words, but, filled with the sense of the great mission which he has taken upon him, and rising superior to all the evils which surround him, he thus addresses the daughters of the sea:_

"Ere he had syllabled one single word,

I knew his embassy from heaven's blue palace ;—
But have ye never, Ocean Sisters, heard

That foe on foe still breathes extremest malice?
Then let the arrowy lightnings fly
From the proud tyrant of the sky,
And in the face of the forsaken

Be their dishevell'd ringlets shaken;

While the dark winds, like maniacs in their mirth,

Vex, with gigantic fits, the heavens that gave them birth.

And let the spirit of the angry wind

Rock the faint earth, and shake her from her column,

And lash the waves of ocean intertwined

In many an evolution dark and solemn;

And war with the eternal stars,

As they travel in their cars,

And hurl my frame with many a spasm,
Down, down, and down to hell's dark chasm,

Still doom'd that pilot dim to follow,

Thro' the whirlpools black and hollow,

That frown on destiny's relentless sea,

So let my fate be wrought-it brings not death to me!"

Hermes now advises his gentle companions to withdraw, but their affection for Prometheus gives them new strength, and they indignantly refuse to take his counsel. He warns them of the consequences of their folly, and then departs from the scene of this fearful tragedy. Undismayed, self-devoted, and loyal even to death, the affectionate sisters cluster round the doomed Titan, like radiant and beautiful

thoughts around the troubled spirit of the poet. There lost, but unbewailing, stood the hero of eternity: and as in an after age a great but erring genius gathered together the folds of his robe, ere he fell, that he might fall as became Cæsar; so, in the dawn of time, that great and perfect being gathered together the folds of his spirits' robe, that he might fall as became Prometheus. These are his last words :Nay! it is no fable,

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Earth grows unstable,

And quakes and rocks and swings;
And the booming thunder,
With voice of wonder,

Rolls, bounds, and leaps and springs.
And the garlands of lightning,
In heaven are brightning,

As they livingly glare from the sky;
And the whirlwinds ride,

In their shadowy pride,

On the sands that they wreathe on high.
And the ghosts of the winds

Whom their monarch unbinds,

All career on their desolate path;
And one on the other,

Like brother on brother,

Breathe forth the hot flames of their wrath:
While sky and sea with tempests cloven,
Are blended and are interwoven ;-
Such and so dark, my fate is drawing nigh,
Sent by the Almighty tyrant of the sky!

O, gentle Earth! the mother of my love,
Shrine of the great, the beautiful, the bright;
O crystal Air! that weavest far above
The network of the universal light,-

Do ye behold the wrongs which I sustain

The mountain-rack, the eagle, and the chain ?"

The hour of doom arrives-amid thunders and lightnings and earthquakes and great voices, Prometheus descends alive into the rock. Ages on ages passed by, and the hero still lingered there.— At length a deliverer came, and he was rescued from his living tomb. Since that period he has walked abroad in the earth for "the healing of the nations:" in all patience and serenity of mind, and selfpossession of heart and soul, he has journeyed through the wilderness of this wide world, commanding men to love one another, because they are brethren,-beseeching them to subdue all the dark and evil propensities of their nature, and evoking from the mysterious depths of the heart, all the holy and lovely feelings, all the sweetnesses and charities, all "the hues and colours of kindness," which have an abiding city there: teaching them to be wise, and free in proportion to their wisdom, and good and gentle in proportion to both wisdom and freedom: finally, enjoining all to look forward to that time when the generations of men shall be gathered together under the mighty shadow of the universal father and only potentate,-assuring them

that "though the vision tarry, yet will it come," and that man will hereafter behold the hour,

When truth and love and justice shall arise,

And when on the regenerated earth,
Bright as the poet's fabled paradise,
The beauty of young holiness hath birth,
And with the silver poesy united,

Dwells on the lofty hill-the pleasant sea;
Dwells where the spirit of the world hath lighted
With splendour uncreate all things that be.

W. M. W. C

THE DREAMS OF A STUDENT.

'MID the toils of the closet, he sighed for the song
Of the bird in the summer-shade;

What he read of the fountains of old made him long
For the murmur their waters made.

And the glorious ocean was aye in his soul,
As it stretched in its wide expanse ;

And he heard in fancy its billows roll,
And he dreamed of its sunny glance.

But most did he long o'er the hills of the North
With some social foot-step to roam;

To rouse the wild deer from its covert forth,
And to visit the Zetlander's home.

To climb the tall mountain-to cross the lone fell,
Where Nature in silence reigns;

To visit the clime where the Laplanders dwell
'Mid their snowy-mantled plains.

To visit the land of the Norse and that sea,
Winter-bound in its fetters of frost;

To gaze where from Norway's rocky lee
The deep in a vortex is tost.

To list to the legends of Odin and Thor,

Recited by Northern maid;

And in rapture to stray 'mid scenes where before

No Briton had ever strayed.

And anon his spirit would rove in its dream,

'Mid Arcadia's fabled bowers;

And rest by some god-deserted stream,

On a rosy bed of flowers.

Would pause by the grave of the self-doomed king,
Where the tepid waters flow;

Or haste with an eager and tireless wing

To Athena's plains below.

His soul too would fly to the plains of the west,

As boundless and free as they ;

And roam where on Eri's un-traffic-stained breast

The silvery moon-beams play.

March, 1840.—VOL. I.—NO. IV.

H. G. R.

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