“Is this no sorrow to thee?” asked Elenko.
“Has not my immortality been one of pain?” answered Prometheus. “Now I feel no pain, and dread one only.”
“And that is?”
“The pain of missing a certain fellow-mortal,” answered Prometheus, with a look so expressive that the hitherto unawed maiden cast her eyes to the ground. Hastening away from the conversation to which, nevertheless, she inly purposed to return.
“Is Man, then, the maker of Deity?” she asked.
“Can the source of his being originate in himself?” asked Prometheus. “To assert this were self-contradiction, and pride inflated to madness. But of the more exalted beings who have like him emanated from the common principle of all existence, Man, since his advent on the earth, though not the creator, is the preserver or the destroyer. He looks up to them, and they are; he out-grows them, and they are not. For the barbarian and Triballian gods there is no return; but the Olympians, if dead as deities, survive as impersonations of Man’s highest conceptions of the beautiful. Languid and spectral indeed must be their existence in this barbarian age; but better days are in store for them.”
“And for thee, Prometheus?”
“There is now no place,” replied he, “for an impeacher of the Gods. My cause is won, my part is played. I am rewarded for my love of man by myself becoming human. When I shall have proved myself also mortal I may haply traverse realms which Zeus never knew, with, I would hope, Elenko by my side.”
Elenko’s countenance expressed her full readiness to accompany Prometheus as far beyond the limits of the phenomenal world as he might please to conduct her. A thought soon troubled her delicious reverie, and she inquired:
“Peradventure, then, the creed which I have execrated may be truer and better than that which I have professed?”