"Bright clouds float in heaven, Dew-stars gleam on earth, Waves assemble on ocean: They are gathered and driven By the storm of delight, by the panic of glee! They shake with emotion, They dance in their mirth. But where are ye?
The pine boughs are singing Old songs with new gladness; The billows and fountains Fresh music are flinging Like the notes of a spirit from land and from sea; The storms mock the mountains With the thunder of gladness. But where are ye?"
The people thus inquired for, being the chorus of Hours, sleepily reply:
"The voice of the spirits of air and of earth Has drawn back the figured curtain of sleep Which covered our being and darkened our birth In the deep."
We have heard the lute of Hope in sleep; We have known the voice of love in dreams, We have felt the wand of power come and leap--
"As the billows leap in the morning beams,"
"Weave the dance on the floor of the breeze, Pierce with song heaven's silent light, Enchant the day that too swiftly flees, To check its flight ere the cave of night.
Once the hungry Hours were hounds Which chased the day like a bleeding deer, And it limped and stumbled with many wounds Through the nightly dells of the desert year.
But now oh! weave the mystic measure Of music, and dance, and shapes of light; Let the Hours and the spirits of night and pleasure Like the clouds and sunbeams unite."
"We join the throng Of the dance and the song, By the whirlwind of gladness borne along; As the flying-fish leap From the Indian deep And mix with the sea-birds half asleep."
This long lyric outburst, wholly unnecessary to an action which was already complete, seems an instructive fact to place before young writers in a time when many souls which might be poetic gardens if they would compact all their energies into growing two roses and a lily--three poems in all, for a lifetime--become instead mere wastes of profuse weeds that grow and are cut down and cast into the oven with each monthly magazine.
But it would not be fair to leave Shelley with this flat taste in our mouths, and I will therefore beg to finish our examination of the _Prometheus Unbound_ by three quotations from these last acts, in which his modernness of detail and of subtlety,--being exercised upon matters capable of such treatment--has made for us some strong and beautiful poetry. Here for instance at the opening of Scene I. Act II. we have a charming specimen of the modern poetic treatment of nature and of landscape, full of spirituality and full of detail. The stage direction is "Morning; A Lovely Vale in the Indian Caucasus. Asia, alone." Asia, who is the lovely bride of Prometheus, is awaiting Panthea who is to come with news of him. She begins with an invocation of the Spring.