ill bear up and steer
Right onward."

So spoke Milton, the blind Titan of the seventeenth century; and
Shakespeare says:

"True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings;
Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings."

Upon the earth, and on the children of men who were as gods in their
knowledge and mastery of the force of fire, Jupiter had had his
revenge. For Prometheus he reserved another punishment. He, the
greatly-daring, once the dear friend and companion of Zeus himself,
was chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus by the vindictive deity.
There, on a dizzy height, his body thrust against the sun-baked rock,
Prometheus had to endure the torment of having a foul-beaked vulture
tear out his liver, as though he were a piece of carrion lying on the
mountain side. All day, while the sun mercilessly smote him and the
blue sky turned from red to black before his pain-racked eyes, the
torture went on. Each night, when the filthy bird of prey that worked
the will of the gods spread its dark wings and flew back to its eyrie,
the Titan endured the cruel mercy of having his body grow whole once
more. But with daybreak there came again the silent shadow, the smell
of the unclean thing, and again with fierce beak and talons the
vulture greedily began its work.

Thirty thousand years was the time of his sentence, and yet Prometheus
knew that at any moment he could have brought his torment to an end. A
secret was his--a mighty secret, the revelation of which would have
brought him the mercy of Zeus and have reinstated him in the favour of
the all-powerful god. Yet did he prefer to endure his agonies rather
than to free himself by bowing to the desires of a tyrant who had
caused Man to be made, yet denied to Man those gifts that made him
nobler than the beasts and raised him almost to the heights of the
Olympians. Thus for him the weary centuries dragged by--in suffering
that knew no respite--in endurance that the gods might have ended.
Prometheus had brought an imperial gift to the men that he had made,
and imperially he paid the penalty.

"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, O, Mighty God!
Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame
Of thine ill tyranny, and hu