The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears
Of their moon-freezing crystals; the bright chains
Eat with their burning cold into my bones.
... The earthquake fiends are charged
To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds
When the rocks split and close again behind;
While from their wild abysses howling throng
The genii of the storm, urging the rage
Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail."
And presently, when after the repulse of Mercury Jove begins to stir up new terrors, we hear Ione exclaiming:
"O, sister, look! white fire
Has cloven to the roots yon huge snow-loaded cedar;
How fearfully God's thunder howls behind!"
But even in Shelley's array of these terrors we perceive a cunning outcrop of modernness in a direction which I have not yet mentioned but which we will have frequent occasion to notice when we come to read the modern novel together; and that is in the detail of the description Æschylus paints these conclusions with a big brush, and three sweeps of it; Shelley itemizes them.
It is worth while observing too, that the same spirit of detail in modern criticism forces us to convict Shelley here of an inconsistency in his scene; for how could this "snow-loaded cedar" of Ione exist with propriety in a scene which Prometheus himself has just described as "without herb, insect, or beast, or sound of life?"
The same instinct of modernness both in the spirituality of the torment and in the minuteness of its description displays itself a little farther on in the curse of Prometheus. Prometheus tells us in this same opening speech that long ago he uttered a certain awful curse against Jove which he now desires to recall; but it would seem that in order to recall it he wishes to hear the exact words of it. "What was that curse?"—he exclaims at the end of the speech; "for ye all heard me speak." To this question we have page after page of replies from five voices—namely, the Voice of the Mountains, of the Springs, of the Air, of the Whirlwinds and of the Earth—embodying such a mass of falsetto sublimity that Shelley himself would surely have drawn his pen through the whole, if he had lived into the term of manhood.
Finally the whole awkward device for getting the curse of Prometheus before the reader is consummated by raising up the phantasm of Jupiter which repeats the curse, word for word.
In truth, Shelley appears always to have labored under an essential immaturity: it is very possible that if he had lived a hundred years he would never have become a man: he was penetrated with modern ideas, but penetrated as a boy would be, crudely, overmuch, and with a constant tendency to the extravagant and illogical: so that I call him the modern boy.