to quote Mrs. Shelley again,
"the poet gives further scope to his imagination.... Maternal Earth, the
mighty parent, is superseded by the Spirit of the Earth, the guide
of our planet through the realms of sky; while his fair and weaker
companion and attendant, the Spirit of the Moon, receives bliss from
the annihilation of evil in the superior sphere." We are in a strange
metaphysical region, an interstellar space of incredibly rarefied fire
and light, the true home of Shelley's spirit, where the circling
spheres sing to one another in wave upon wave of lyrical rapture, as
inexpressible in prose as music, and culminating in the cry:

"To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory."

On the whole, Prometheus has been over-praised, perhaps because the
beauty of the interspersed songs has dazzled the critics. Not only
are the personages too transparently allegorical, but the allegory is
insipid; especially tactless is the treatment of the marriage between
Prometheus, the Spirit of Humanity, and Asia, the Spirit of Nature, as
a romantic love affair. When, in the last of his more important poems,
Shelley returned to the struggle between the good and evil principles,
it was in a different Spirit. The short drama of 'Hellas' (1821) was "a
mere improvise," the boiling over of his sympathy with the Greeks, who
were in revolt against the Turks. He wove into it, with all possible
heightening of poetic imagery, the chief events of the period of
revolution through which southern Europe was then passing, so that it
differs from the Prometheus in having historical facts as ostensible
subject. Through it reverberates the dissolution of kingdoms in feats
of arms by land and sea from Persia to Morocco, and these cataclysms,
though suggestive of something that transcends any human warfare, are
yet not completely pinnacled in "the intense inane." But this is not
the only merit of "Hellas;' its poetry is purer than that of the earlier
work, because Shelley no longer takes sides so violently. He has
lost the cruder optimism of the 'Prometheus', and is thrown back for
consol