rt indeed Zeus's enemy, thou wilt find enough on thy
side down yonder."

"I have been Zeus's enemy," returned the stranger, mildly and gravely, "I
am so no longer. Immortal hate befits not the mortal I feel myself to have
become. Nor needest thou ascend the peak further. Maiden, I am Prometheus!"

II

It is a prerogative of the Gods that, when they do speak sooth, mortals
must needs believe them. Elenko hence felt no incredulity at the revelation
of Prometheus, or sought other confirmation than the bonds and broken links
of chain at his wrists and ankles.

"Now," he cried, or rather shouted, "is the prophecy fulfilled with which
of old I admonished the Gods in the halls of Olympus. I told them that Zeus
should beget a child mightier than himself, who should send him and them
the way he had sent his father. I knew not that this child was already
begotten, and that his name was Man. It has taken Man ages to assert
himself, nor has he yet, as it would seem, done more than enthrone a new
idol in the place of the old. But for the old, behold the last traces of
its authority in these fetters, of which the first smith will rid me.
Expect no thunderbolt, dear maiden; none will come: nor shall I regain the
immortality of which I feel myself bereaved since yesterday."

"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