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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;

What is it but the telescope of truth?

Which strips the distance of its phantasies,

And brings life near in utter nakedness,

Making the cold reality too real!

VIII.

A change came o'er the spirit of

my

dream.

The Wanderer was alone as heretofore,

The beings which surrounded him were gone,
Or were at war with him; he was a mark
For blight and desolation, compass'd round
With Hatred and Contention; Pain was mix'd

In all which was served up to him, until
Like to the Pontic monarch of old days,

180

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,
And made him friends of mountains: with the stars
And the quick Spirit of the Universe

He held his dialogues; and they did teach
To him the magic of their mysteries;

To him the book of Night was opened wide,

And voices from the deep abyss reveal'd

A marvel and a secret-Be it so.

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IX.

My dream was past; it had no further change.
It was of a strange order, that the doom

Of these two creatures should be thus traced out

Almost like a reality-the one

To end in madness-both in misery.

56.

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,

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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
On him the torments of thy rack;
The fate thou didst so well foresee
But would not to appease him tell;
And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
And in his Soul a vain repentance,

And evil dread so ill dissembled

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

Of thine impenetrable Spirit,

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