eption, but in an occasional carelessness of execution--a gasp in
the rhythm; and when we consider its richness and majesty, when we feel
its resistless grasp upon the heart, we could pardon it if its great
pearls were strung on straws or its diamonds hidden in a sand-hill of
sentimentality. But never was poem freer from morbidness: it repels the
sickly pallor of our modern stereotyped sorrow, and is made up only of a
grief that is regal--more--divine. If any place by its side the
Prometheus of AEschylus and appeal to the unapproachable dignity of their
model, we can only say that we hold these two poems distinct as the East
is from the West, only between them springs boldly the blue arch of a
universal humanity that suffered and enjoyed as now when the earth was
young. But it must not be forgotten that the Greek lived when with men
was born a boundless sympathy for, and pride in, their gods; that what
are now to us but the wonderful dreams of a primeval poesy, shadowing
mighty truths, were to the ancients living influences that molded their
lives. And if it be urged that already faith must have grown dim in so
great a mind as that of AEschylus, then indeed we wonder not at the
marvels of magnificent despair, the death-in-life of a godlike suffering
which reach in his 'Prometheus Chained' a height of sublimity we may
scarcely hope to see approached in modern times, for the mind that
created it stood in a light shallop, drifting away from the old
landmarks of a worn-out creed into the dark, unknown night of doubt and
speculation. But the Prometheus of Lowell is not the god-man writhing in
an awful conflict with his slavery but begun. His heart

'For ages hath been empty of all joy,
Except to brood upon its silent hope,
As o'er its hope of day the sky doth now.'

The defiant pride and scornful dignity that raised him above our
sympathy in AEschylus, are tempered by Lowell with a human longing for
comfort that, in its mighty woe, might melt adamant, or draw from the
watchful heavens

'Mild-eyed Astarte, his best comforter,
With her pale smile of sad benignity.'

Chained to the rock in utter loneliness he lies. Long since the 'crisped
smiles' of the waves and the 'swift-winged winds' had ceased to listen
to his call.

'Year after year will pass away and seem
To me, in mine eternal agony,
But as the shadows of dark summer clouds,
Which I have watched so often darkening o'er
The vast Sarmatian plai