GRYLLUS
It is early yet to judge:
But all the novelties I yet have seen
Seem changes for the worse.

THE THREE
If we could show him
Our triumphs in succession, one by one,
'Twould surely change his judgment: and herein
How might'st thou aid us, Circe!

CIRCE
I will do so:
And calling down, like Socrates, of yore,
The clouds to aid us, they shall shadow forth,
In bright succession, all that they behold,
From air, on earth and sea. I wave my wand:
And lo! they come, even as they came in Athens,
Shining like virgins of ethereal life.

The Chorus of Clouds descended, and a dazzling array of
female beauty was revealed by degrees through folds of misty
gauze. They sang their first choral song:

CHORUS OF CLOUDS{1}

Clouds ever-flowing, conspicuously soaring,
From loud-rolling Ocean, whose stream{2} gave us birth
To heights, whence we look over torrents down-pouring
To the deep quiet vales of the fruit-giving earth,--
As the broad eye of AEther, unwearied in brightness,
Dissolves our mist-veil in glittering rays,
Our forms we reveal from its vapoury lightness,
In semblance immortal, with far-seeing gaze.

1 The first stanza is pretty closely adapted from the
strophe of Aristophanes. The second is only a distant
imitation of the antistrophe.

2 In Homer, and all the older poets, the ocean is a river
surrounding the earth, and the seas are inlets from it.

Shower-bearing Virgins, we seek not the regions
Whence Pallas, the Muses, and Bacchus have fled,

But the city, where Commerce embodies her legions,
And Mammon exalts his omnipotent head.

All joys of thought, feeling, and taste are before us,
Wherever the beams of his favour are warm:

Though transient full oft as the veil of our chorus,
Now golden with glory, now passing in storm.

Reformers, scientific, moral, educational, political, passed in
succession, each answering a question of Gryllus. Gryllus observed, that
so far from everything being better than it had been, it seemed that
everything was wrong and wanted mending. T