A Night Thought.
I do not envy you, ye joyless stars,
Though fair ye be, and glorious to the sight—
The seaman’s hope amidst the ’whelming storm,
When help from God or man there cometh none.
No! for ye love not, nor have ever loved!
Through the broad fields of heaven, the eternal hours
Lead on your circling spheres unceasingly.
How vast a journey have ye travell’d o’er,
Since I, upon the bosom of my love,
Forgot all memory of night or you!
Let us follow up these glorious lines with a conception worthy of Æschylus—indeed an abstract of his master-subject. It were out of place here to dilate upon the mythical grandeur of Prometheus, and the heroic endurance of his character, as depicted by the ancient poet. To our mind and ear, the modern is scarcely inferior.
Prometheus.
Curtain thy heavens, thou Jove, with clouds and mist,
And, like a boy that moweth thistles down,
Unloose thy spleen on oaks and mountain-tops;
Yet canst thou not deprive me of my earth,
Nor of my hut, the which thou didst not build,
Nor of my hearth, whose little cheerful flame
Thou enviest me!
I know not aught within the universe
More slight, more pitiful than you, ye Gods!
Who nurse your majesty with scant supplies
Of offerings wrung from fear, and mutter’d prayers,
And needs must starve, were’t not that babes and beggars
Are hope-besotted fools!
When I was yet a child, and knew not whence
My being came, nor where to turn its powers,
Up to the sun I bent my wilder’d eye,
As though above, within its glorious orb,
There dwelt an ear to listen to my plaint,
A heart, like mine, to pity the oppress’d.
Who gave me succour
Against the Titans in their tyrannous might?
Who rescued me from death—from slavery?
Thou!—thou, my soul, burning with hallow’d fire,
Thou hast thyself alone achieved it all!
Yet didst thou, in thy young simplicity,
Glow with misguided thankfulness to him
That slumbers on in idlesse there above!
I reverence thee?
Wherefore? Hast thou ever
Lighten’d the sorrows of the heavy-laden?
Thou ever stretch’d thy hand to still the tears
Of the perplex’d in spirit?
Was it not
Almighty Time, and ever-during Fate—
My lords and thine—that shaped and fashion’d me
Into the man I am?
Belike it was thy dream,
That I should hate life—fly to wastes and wilds,
For that the buds of visionary thought
Did not all ripen into goodly flowers?