ODE ON MELANCHOLY.

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By night-shade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries ;

For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud.
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt-sand wave,
Or in the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-moth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

མ.

THE main direction of our studies has been indicated in the preceding lectures to such an extent that from this point forward our customary review may be omitted. In examing the Prometheus of Eschylus we have found three particulars, in which not only Eschylus, but his entire contemporary time shows complete unconsciousness of the most precious and essential belongings of personality. These particulars were, (1), the absolute impossibility of growth, implicitly affirmed of the gods and explicitly affirmed of men in the passages which were read; (2) the awkwardness of Jove's apparatus of power which included a minister for every kind of act— as contrasted with the elasticity and much-in-little which each man must perceive in regarding the action of his own mind; and (3) the gross and purely physical character of the punishments used by Jove to break the spirit of Prometheus. It was contended, you remember, that if the audience of Eschylus had acquired that direct way of looking phenomena in the face, which is one of the incidents of our modern personality, they would have perceived such an inadequacy between the thunders and earthquakes of Jove, on the one hand, and the immortal spirit of a Titan and a god like Prometheus, on the other, that the play, instead of being a religious and impressive spectacle to them, as it doubtless was, would have been simply a matter of ridicule, or at best one of those mere dilettante entertainments where of our own free will we forgive the grossest

violations of common sense and propriety for the sake of the music or the scenery with which they are associated, as for example at the Italian opera, or the Christmas pantomime.

This last particular brings us directly upon Shciley's play of the Prometheus Unbound.

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We have seen that Eschylus had a f: audience for this fable, and was working upon emes which are deep as religion; but now, when w. come An 2300 years to a time from which t' beliefs have long exhaled, and when growth of personality has quite rod away the old lumpish terror stood before the cave of the physical and darkerdt. in sh a time it would, of course, be truly a a nan like Shelley should have elaborate un rometheus fable into a lyrical drama pectation of shaking the souls of men with this d machinery of thunder, whirlwind and earth

quake.

ich a mistake-the mistake of tearing the old fable rcibly away from its old surroundings, and of: it in modern thoughts before modern men, wo much the same with that which Emerson has no his poem Each and All:

"I thought of the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;

I brought him home in his nest at even;

He sings the song, but it pleases not now,

For I did not bring home the river and sky---
He sang to my ear, they sang to my eye.
The delicate shells lay on the shore;

Bubbles of the latest wave

Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.

I wiped away the weeds and foam

I fetched my sea-born treasures home;

But the poor, unsightly, noisome things

Had left their beauty on the shore

With the sun and the sand and the wild sea-shore."

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Accordingly, it is instructive, as we look into Shelley' work, to observe how this inability of his to bring hom the river and the sky along with the sparrow-thi inability to bring a (ek-hearted audience to listen to his Greek fable-operated to inf a certain tang of insincerity, of dilettantism, whenever he attempts to reproduce upon us the old terrors of thunder and lightning which schylus found so effective. We-w modern: ---cannot for our lives help seeing the man in his hirt sleeves who is turning the crank of the thur! behind the scenes; nay, we are inclined to as certain proud indignation, How is it that you wis. tremble at this mere resinous lightning, when w seen a man (not a Titan nor a god), one of ourselves forth into a thunder-storm and send his kite up into the very bosom thereof, and fairly entice the lightning by his wit to come and perch upon his finger, and be the tame bird of him and his fellows thereafter and forever? But, secondly, it is still more conclusive upon our present point, of the different demands made by the personality of our time from that of Eschylus, to observe how Shelley's own sense of this difference, his own modern instinct, has led him to make most material alterations. of the old fable, not only increasing the old list of physical torments with a number that are purely spiritual and modern, but also by dignifying at once the characte of Prometheus and the catastrophe of the play with that enormous motive of forgiveness which seems to b the largest outcome of the developed personality. Many

of you are aware of the scholastic belief that the Prometheus Bound of Eschylus was but the middle playof a trilogy, and that the last showed us a compromise effected between Prometheus and Jove, according to which Prometheus reveals the fatal secret concerning Jove's marriage, and Jove makes a new league of amity vith the Titan. We have a note of this change in .reatment in the very opening lines of Shelley's playwhich I now beg to set before you in the briefest possible sketch. Scene I. of Act I. opens according to the stage direction-upon A ravine of icy rocks in the Indian Caucasus: Prometheus is discovered bound to the precipice: Panthea and Ione are seated at his feet: time, night: during the scene, morning slowly breaks. Prometheus begins to speak at once. I read only here and there a line selected with special reference to showing the change of treatment I have indicated as due to that intenser instinct of personality which Shelley shared in common with his contemporaries over Æschylus and his contemporaries.

Prometheus exclaims:

"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!

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!"

Here we have the purely spiritual torments of "soliude, scorn and despair" set before us; though Shelley retains and even multiplies the physical torments of