deepening of the sunrise into its full glory, we must turn to the expectant heart of Love. The beginning of the second act gives us the fullest blaze of color in the whole poem, though the triumph of purest light is to follow later. This sunrise-picture seems written in the hues of the sky itself. Its greatest marvel lies in its swift transitions, the tremulous passage of glory changed to glory even as we behold. Only the soul of a Turner could apprehend such a vision, and the brush of a Turner could but give us one arrested instant; while Shelley reveals the whole unfolding wondrous passage of the morning from promise to radiant fulfilment.

From this point, the fresh light of morning shines more and more clearly through the poem. Once again we feel it with peculiar power, where Asia and Panthea, breathing the pure air of the heights, watch below their feet the curling, brilliant, sunlit mists which veil the abode of Demogorgon.

Again for a short space, we descend to the region of shadows, and, standing before the throne of Demogorgon, perceive

"A mighty darkness

Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom
Dart round, as light from the meridian sun."

Then, with abrupt and breathless transition, we are lifted to the final Height of Vision, and to the consummation of the drama. The apotheosis of Asia gives us the fulness of white light, the high noon of the great cosmic day. Shelley's mysticism here introduces one or two confusing lines; but his thought evidently is that the physical day has yielded to the new spiritual order, and that the rising of the material sun is superseded, at least in this great moment, by

the rising of the sun of Love. The development of the theme of the Day is now dropped, and the light is seemingly constant, the implication perhaps being that, in the evolution of human destiny, we have reached at last the era of unshadowed bliss, which stoops not to evening.

The supreme aesthetic glory of the Prometheus Unbound is not its nature-descriptions nor its color-treatment, but its music. Never did melody so enfold the spirit of a poet. The form is transparent and supple as clear flame. Blank verse rises into the long, passionate swing of the anapæst, or is broken by the flute-like notes of short trochaic lines, or relieved by the half-lyrical effect of rhymed endings. The verse lends itself with equal beauty to the grandeur of sustained endurance, to the passionate yearning of love, to severe philosophic inquiry, to the ethereal notes of spirit-voices dying on the wind. The variety of metres is marvellous. Thirty-six distinct verse-forms are to be found, besides the blank verse. These forms are usually simple; but at times the versification-scheme is as complex as that of the most elaborate odes of Dryden or Collins. Yet the artificial and labored beauty of the eighteenth century verse is replaced in Shelley by song spontaneous as that of his own skylark. The conventions, the external barriers of poetry, are completely swept away by the new democracy. We may apply to Shelley, and indeed to the typical poet of the modern world, the noble line:

"His nature is its own divine control."

The blank verse itself is no monotonous instrument, and the range of the poet's power can in no way be better illustrated than by the different kinds of music which he is able to draw

from an instrument technically unchanged. This may be seen at once by comparing the opening soliloquy of Prometheus, in Act. I., with that of the opening soliloquy of Asia in Act II. The music of these two passages is entirely different. In the speech of Prometheus, consonant strikes hard on consonant, and the vowel-coloring is scant and cold. The lines have a sonorous pomp, derived in part from their austere majesty of epithet, in part from their sternly repressed passion. But into the words of Asia has passed something of the soft air and light of the spring-tide which she sings. The melody has a prolonged and gentle sweetness, which might be languid, were it not for the sparkle of delicate life that animates the whole. The same distinction of quality may always be felt in the best utterances of Prometheus and of Asia. Jupiter, again, speaks with a proud accent all his own. His monologue has a cer

tain metallic ring, a harshness of utterance, quite different from the pure, quiet, sad, and strong accent of Prometheus. To Demogorgon's speeches Shelley has not, I think, succeeded in imparting a distinct cadence. He says little, and his few speeches are commonplace as poetry, though at times suggestive as thought. Any poet of the third order could have written :

"Lift thy lightnings not.

The tyranny of heaven none may retain
Or reassume or hold, succeeding thee."

Probably even Shelley found it difficult to impart individual accent to the words of a "Mighty Darkness."

Of all these different types of blank verse, there is one most intimately characteristic of Shelley. We find it always in the speeches of Asia, sometimes elsewhere. Miltonic

echoes sound through the words of Prometheus and of Jupiter, but there is a cadence of which Shelley alone is master, unique in haunting, clinging melody.

"It is the unpastured sea hungering for calm."

"See where the child of heaven, with wingèd feet
Runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn."

In lines like these, Shelley has drawn a new music from English words.

Even the blank verse of Shelley holds a subtle lyrical cry; but it is the sweep and variety of direct lyrical modulation which first arrests attention in the Prometheus Unbound. There is no rigid distinction in the use of metre, yet the major characters of the drama use as a rule the plain recitative, while Ione, Panthea, and the other chorus-characters generally sing rather than speak. These choruscharacters, or rather chorus-voices, enhance wonderfully the imaginative power of the drama. Coming from an unseen source, they make themselves heard again and again at critical moments. The whole creation, visible and invisible, seems thus to share in the great spiritual action of the poem ; and the unearthly beauty of these snatches of song thrills us with the sense that we are listening to elemental creatures, too fine for discernment by any grosser sense than that of sound. These spirit-voices are first heard in Act I., where the Earth-mother, yet unenlightened, bemoans Prometheus's retraction of the curse:

06 Misery, oh misery to me

That Jove at last should vanquish ye.
Wail, howl aloud, land and sea.

The earth's rent heart shall answer ye.

Mourn, spirits of the living and the dead,

Your refuge, your defence, lies fallen and vanquishèd."

FIRST ECHO.

Lies fallen, and vanquishèd.

SECOND ECHO.

Fallen and vanquishèd.

Thus we have the impression of the Powers of Nature, ethereal yet unspiritual, unable to apprehend the higher attitude of regenerate man. But the most exquisite instance of this fairy-like use of the lyrical interlude is in that first scene of the second act, already quoted, where all nature, becoming vocal with spirit-voices, sings and whispers its quickening message. These tiny lyrics can be compared to nothing but the Ariel songs in the Tempest. They have the same light trochaic movement, sacred, in Shakespeare and Shelley, to fairy suggestion; they have the same dainty and elusive grace. Perhaps the singing of the wind in the pine branches and the lovely, inarticulate rise and fall of the sounds of nature in a spring morning ring through the songs of Shelley's echoes even more perfectly than through those of Shakespeare's tricksy sprite. In the last act of the Prometheus the spirit-voices have it all their own way. Their music, from an undertone, has become dominant, and they blend with a grander harmony in expressing the rapture of a creation redeemed to the freedom of new and perfect life.