"Here sit I, forming mortals after my image; A race resembling me, to suffer, to weep, To enjoy, to be glad, and thee to scorn, as I."

PROMETHEUS.

LORD BYRON.

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.

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.

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,

Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,

A mighty lesson we inherit :

Thou art a symbol and a sign

To mortals of their fate and force;

Like thee Man is in part divine,

A troubled stream from a pure source;

And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;

His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence :

To which his spirit may oppose
Itself- and equal to all woes,

And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concentred recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory!

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

FROM ACT I., SCENE I.

Prometheus is discovered bound to the precipice. He addresses Jove :

Monarch of gods and demons and all spirits

But One who throng those bright and rolling worlds
Which Thou and I alone of living things

Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this earth
Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou
Requitest for knee-worship, prayer and praise,
And toil and hecatombs of broken hearts,
With fear and self-contempt and barren hope.
While me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate,
Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn,
O'er mine own misery and thy vain revenge
Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,
And moments aye divided by keen pangs
Till they seemed years — torture and solitude,
Scorn and despair - these are mine empire :
More glorious far than that which thou surveyest
From thine unenvied throne, oh mighty god!
Almighty had I deigned to share the shame
Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here,
Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain,
Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb,
Insect or beast, or shape or sound of life
Ah me, alas! pain, pain ever, forever!

No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.
I ask the Earth have not the mountains felt?
I ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun,
Has it not seen? The Sea, in storm or calm
Heaven's ever-changing shadow, spread below,