preme being, a higher and younger-born principle, which exceeds that which Zeus embodied, just as Zeus had in his birth been a higher principle than the old reign contained; and Zeus is flung headlong, like Lucifer, into the abyss of past things. Thus Shelley, as is the universal way of genius, had created a great work by fusing in it two divergent products of the human spirit

the Hellenic idea of a higher power superseding the lower, and the Christian idea that this power was one of non-resistance, of forgiveness, of love. The reign of love now begins in the poem: Prometheus is released and wedded with Asia, who stands for the spirit of nature, in which marriage is typified the union of the human soul with nature, the harmony of man and nature, and he shares in the millennium which is thus established on earth.

At the end, you observe, the Titan Myth drops away; it does not appear in the last acts; for in it there was no such completion of the Promethean faith as Shelley describes.

And here I might end the discussion of Shelley's handling of the myth; but I cannot refrain from directing your attention to the marvellous power of the myth which could so blend the Greek and Christian genius, and contain the passion of the French Revolution issuing in the highest and most extreme forms of Chris

tian ethics in non-resistance, that is, and in the for

giveness of enemies. I say nothing of the practical wisdom of this doctrine; what is it, but the old verses ?

"But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also:

but I desire that you should identify this wisdom with its moment of utterance. The French Revolution the Revolution of the Terror and the block, of the burnt chateaux and the Napoleonic wars, was over and done with; Shelley, in whom its spirit burnt as the pure flame, had rejected its methods, while holding to its ideals. He had lifted it from a political to a moral cause: he had abandoned the sword as its Evangel, and he put persuasion in the place of force, and love in the place of hate, and the genius of victory which he invoked was the conversion of society by the stricken cheek and the lost cloak. The idea of humanity was the fountain of his thought and the armour of his argument. I will not refrain from saying that the idea of a suffering humanity, which finds the path of progress in invincible opposition to the ruling gods of the hour in the faith in greater divinities to come, is properly crowned and consecrated by this doctrine, that patient forgiveness of the wrong is the essence of victory over it, and the sure

road to its downfall. But the significance of such a myth is not to be exhausted by one poet, or by one treatment; and in my next lecture I shall take up the work of Keats, Goethe, Herder, and Schlegel, in interpreting life, as they conceived it, by the same formula.

I have left myself a moment to bring forward two considerations which may prove suggestive. The first is the analogy between Hebrew and Greek myths in the point that whereas in Eden the eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, whereby man became as God, was the occasion of man's ills, so in the myth of Greece the sharing of men in the divine fire was the cause of the sorrows of civilization. The second is that in the drama of the Book of Job there is a strong likeness to the situation in Prometheus, in the point that there is no action, but only a passive suffering in the principal character; and that in this suffering there is a dissent from the wisdom of Divine ways; that Job holds to his integrity and faith in his own righteousness in the face of all disaster and all argument, in quite the Promethean spirit, obdurately; and that he has the Promethean faith in the issue. The situation lies in the verse:

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'Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him; but I will maintain my ways before him.”

The dignity of the human soul is dramatically upheld at the great climax of Job's final assertion of

his righteousness; and the situation is solved only by the voice from the whirlwind declaring that as nature is a mystery, much more must human life find mystery as an element of its being. But in this great drama one of the marvellous works of human genius

though there is the presence of unjust suffering, of human integrity, and of a final victory of the right — there is no such clear presentation of the idea and its operation, as is found in the Promethean legend the idea formulated in this myth by the race out of its knowledge of its own life, not as a dramatic incident such as Job's, but as a pervading and constant law — the idea that the progress of man lies in an immortal suffering, an invincible endurance of the injustice of the present world, in anticipation of the absolute justice known only to the prophetic heart within. This idea is a natural product of man's reflection on his history, a natural interpretation of his experience; and he finds it imaginatively embodied in Prometheus more adequately and humanly than elsewhere. It has entered into thousands of lives in this last century of the Revolution, with both illumination and courage; sharing in this idea, and the life which is led in obedience to it, the humblest of men shares in the sublimity of the great Titan.