No More Learning

PROMETHEUS:
They last while Jove must reign: nor more, nor less _415
Do I desire or fear.

MERCURY:
Yet pause, and plunge
Into Eternity, where recorded time,
Even all that we imagine, age on age,
Seems but a point, and the reluctant mind
Flags wearily in its unending flight, _420
Till it sink, dizzy, blind, lost, shelterless;
Perchance it has not numbered the slow years
Which thou must spend in torture, unreprieved?

PROMETHEUS:
Perchance no thought can count them, yet they pass.

MERCURY:
If thou might'st dwell among the Gods the while
Lapped in voluptuous joy? _425

PROMETHEUS:
I would not quit
This bleak ravine, these unrepentant pains.

MERCURY:
Alas! I wonder at, yet pity thee.

PROMETHEUS:
Pity the self-despising slaves of Heaven,
Not me, within whose mind sits peace serene. _430
As light in the sun, throned: how vain is talk!
Call up the fiends.

IONE:
O, sister, look! White fire
Has cloven to the roots yon huge snow-loaded cedar;
How fearfully God's thunder howls behind!

MERCURY:
I must obey his words and thine: alas! _435
Most heavily remorse hangs at my heart!

PANTHEA:
See where the child of Heaven, with winged feet,
Runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn.
IONE:
Dear sister, close thy plumes over thine eyes
Lest thou behold and die: they come: they come _440
Blackening the birth of day with countless wings,
And hollow underneath, like death.

FIRST FURY:
Prometheus!

SECOND FURY:
Immortal Titan!

THIRD FURY:
Champion of Heaven's slaves!

PROMETHEUS:
He whom some dreadful voice invokes is here,
Prometheus, the chained Titan. Horrible forms, _445
What and who are ye? Never yet there came
Phantasms so foul through monster-teeming Hell
From the all-miscreative brain of Jove;
Whilst I behold such execrable shapes,
Methinks I grow like what I contemplate, _450
And laugh and stare in loathsome sympathy.

FIRST FURY:
We are the ministers of pain, and fear,
And disappointment, and mistrust, and hate,
And clinging crime; and as lean dogs pursue
Through wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn, _455
We track all things that weep, and bleed, and live,
When the great King betrays them to our will.

PROMETHEUS:
Oh! many fearful natures in one name,
I know ye; and these lakes and echoes know
The darkness and the clangour of your wings. _460
But why more hideous than your loathed selves
Gather ye up in legions from the deep?

SECOND FURY:
We knew not that: Sisters, rejoice, rejoice!

PROMETHEUS:
Can aught exult in its deformity?

SECOND FURY:
The beauty of delight makes lovers glad, _465
Gazing on one another: so are we.
As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels
To gather for her festal crown of flowers
The aereal crimson falls, flushing her cheek,
So from our victim's destined agony _470
The shade which is our form invests us round,
Else we are shapeless as our mother Night.

PROMETHEUS:
I laugh your power, and his who sent you here,
To lowest scorn.