University of Virginia Library

TWELFTH SCENE

The Caucasus. A lofty mountain-peak rising in pinnacles of naked rock.

On a narrow ledge, PROMETHEUS stands erect, chained to the face of the cliff. Before his feet the mountain falls sheerly away to green pastures far below, which slope steeply to a narrow beach of bright sand. The horizon of the sea closes the vast prospect. On either hand the trend of the coast, bordered by mountains, meadow and forest, field and stream, stretches in a vast curve indefinitely outward into the distance. Landward, as far as the eye can reach, rise high mountains clothed with forests and interspersed with fertile valleys.

It is a calm, clear evening, about half an hour before sunset. The sun hangs flaming over a windless sea and in a cloudless heaven. The moon just shows over the eastward hills. In the western sky there is one star.

The vast figure of the TITAN stands motionless and superb in the full splendour of the setting sun.

In the time elapsed between this and the preceding scene, HERAKLES has accomplished all his great Labours except the voyage to the Hesperides.

PROMETHEUS
The night returns—and still Prometheus
Wears on his limbs the chains He forged in Hell.
The night returns—and soon the Bird of God
Returneth ravening to his massacre.
The night returns—and God is in His Heaven,
Throned in the world's dominion..... Once again,
As when I fared up the prodigious night
And seized the Torch out of His Holy House,
Round his resplendent Being in Paradise,
I seem to feel the everlasting Light
Blend with the voice of the invisible choirs
Thro' mansions of perennial festival.....
The night returns—and God is in His Heaven,
And fear and anger vex the heart of God,
Brooding on me and my indomitable
Rebellion and the soul's validity;
While far below men kindle in their hearths
And hearts the Fire I gave, giving them life!
These were my works! I have achieved, God knows,
Somewhat of everlasting worth and real
Significance!—God knows and life records
My hazardous and unalterable deeds!
Mine was the cosmic issue—and in me
The purpose of the inexorable will
Of life, the process of the endless flux,
The motion of the universal being,
Found its assured, victorious utterance!
I was, in the beginning of the world,
Where there was only desolation, death,
Dismay and darkness,—where the lives of men
Were vile and violent like the lives of beasts;—
And I alone found out the Great Idea,
Found the supreme and secret meaning out;
And I alone found out the forthright way
Of man's deliverance, and restored the light,
And made of life a lovely and human thing,
And gave the soul divine and pregnant dreams! .....
Man was reborn in me!—and therefore God,
Jealous and fearful, came in wrath against me,
Binding me captive, whom He could not slay,
Here on this cliff, where His malignant hate,
Burning thro' æons of unrecorded time,
Visits me with intolerable wrongs.
Yet, tho' I wear His chains, and even now
The Eagle wheels aloft, scenting his carnage,
Still is my heart's inviolate hope serene
And undismayed; still life reveals its trust;
Still and forever I keep the Faith, and still
Bear and believe the testament of Truth.
The victory was mine and mine shall be
The victory!—the first and last and best
Are mine! I saved mankind and now, in turn,
Man shall conceive, in his maturity,
My Saviour and my Comrade and my Lord!
Therefore I stand, invincible, and wait,
Solitary and august and unafraid,
As he must be whose witness to mankind
Is of the free divinity of man.
Therefore I wait—for He shall surely come!
And when He comes, with gospel on His lips
And revelation in His eyes and power
And liberty shining in either hand,
He shall not find me crushed and overborne!—
Rather, safe-guarded by the constancy
Of an unwearied spirit and dauntless heart,
Shall He, at last, as from a father's hands,
Receive the Soul's unconquered citadel!

HERAKLES appears somewhat higher up in the mountain. He advances to the sheer edge of the precipice and pauses, gazing out over the world. From where he stands PROMETHEUS is invisible.
HERAKLES
Hither away are the Hesperides—
Hither away is hope—hither away
The heart of life yearns unto Paradise! .....
Hither away the insatiable will
Of life, grown conscious of its aim, intends
New liberations, new supremacies,
New powers and new ineffable dominions
And new aggrandizements of being and life's
New utterance of the soul's new testament!
Hither away is the new enterprise
Of thought; the endless wind, hither away,
Strains out the sails of the mind's caravel;—
The stars, the sunrise and the land-fall are
Out in the dark ..... beyond ..... hither away! .....
Hither away love is a lovelier thing
And of more majesty and mightier:
Nerved to the temper of supreme ambitions,
Filled with achievement, flushed, immediate, fain—
Yea, all of profit and service to the soul!
Hither away is Truth more excellent,
Freedom more absolute, conception more
Creative, life more ample and lordlier,
Knowledge more vastly and serenely sphered
In new dilate horizons of calm light,
Faith more secure and Justice more divine!
Hither away is the New Future!—where
The harvest of the sowing of spent lives
Shall feed new generations, and suffice
To sow new fields and ripen and provide
The Living Bread of new prosperities.....
Hither has labour brought me; and away,—
Wise from the past with new proficiencies,
Single and resolute and well-matured
To new activities, new avatars
And new validities,—the strength of life,
Spent all in conscious service to the soul,
Shall bring me on ..... and on ..... hither away
Into the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory,
Into the whole inheritance of man! .....
O not in vain have I been up and down
In the whole earth, and seen the imperial East
Whose florid cities shine under the sun
With banners and dyed raiment and red gold,
And in the wide, wild West wandered to where,
Round the scarped, savage, wind-swept verge of the world,
The heavy headlands stand into the sea! .....
O not in vain, from the Iberian hills
To Themiscyra, from the Libyan waste
To the Thessalian plain, my feet have trod
The sea, the mountain and the wilderness;
My strength and skill have brought the outlawed beasts
Into subjection, and, with civil arts
And fine express proficiencies and grave
Liberal manners, cultured and endowed
With spirit and substance and significance
The shy, fierce lives of vagrant, bestial men!
O not in vain I served and sacrificed,
Loved and was lonely, and, in mighty works,
Extolled the Spirit, and practised and professed
Tender and excellent humanities
And the victorious virtues of the soul!
And not in vain, out of the night of Hell,
I drew the Hound of Hell, the ravening Death,
Into the light of life, and held him forth
Where the soul's sun shed lightnings in his eyes
And he was like a thing of little meaning,
Powerless and vain and no-wise terrible—
While with my inmost heart I laughed aloud
Into the blind and vacant face of Death,
And cast him from me, so he fled away
Screaming into the darkness whence he came! .....
Nothing is vain of all that I have done!
I have prevailed by labours and subdued
All that man is below his utmost truth,
His inmost virtue, his essential strength,
His soul's transcendent, one preëminence!
Yea, I have brought into the soul's dominion
All that I am!—and in the Master's House
There is no strength of all my mortal being
That does not serve Him now; there is no aim,
There is no secret which He does not know;
There is no will save one, which is the Lord's! .....

PROMETHEUS
calling with a mighty voice
O unutterable ecstasy of hope! .....
O Son of Man! .....

HERAKLES
Who calls me? Who is here,
Sharing my solitude?

PROMETHEUS
O Son of Man!—
O Herakles!—I am Prometheus!

HERAKLES
swiftly descending the cliff to where PROMETHEUS stands chained
Prometheus!—Prometheus!—Torch-Bearer!—
Titan!—My brother!—O my brother!—

PROMETHEUS
Hail!
Herakles! Herakles! O Son of Man!—
O Liberator!—O holy day of triumph!—
My brother and my son—all is fulfilled!
Yea, I have kept the faith, and all is well,
All is surpassing well! .....

HERAKLES
Prometheus!—
Friend and Redeemer of the life and soul
Of man!—O Torch-Bearer!—receive from me
The love and the thanksgiving of mankind,
Who keep and celebrate in sacred trust
Your memory, living with the life you gave!
Receive out of my heart the love, receive
The emulation of humanity,
Which is the harvest of your seed!—for I,
I am of you and yours, Prometheus!
Yours is the light of life, the light of being,
In which I was conceived into this world—
Father!

PROMETHEUS
Behold, my light is everywhere! .....
Light—where the sun gorgeously dies away,
Aureoled with its own magnificence;
Light—where the quiet, interminable sea
Shines like a blind and burnished shield of gold;
Light—where the sky utters a single star;
Light—where the ethereal vesture, pale as mist,
Spun of the scant, strange silver of the moon,
Hangs on the shoulders of the heaven-ward hills.....
See! the whole sphered, smooth skies are like a bowl
Carved of a single azurite and brimmed
With golden wine, with light!—to slake the thirst
Of man's insatiable spirit, and rouse,
Far in the depths of his creative mind,
Light, the eternal light, which there displays
Commensurate splendours and sublimities
To these of God's initial ordinance!
O Light—eternal Light! O miracle
And benediction—tranquil, tender majesty—
Spacious and grave serenity of light!
O meaning, revelation, breath of life—
Interpretation and significance,
Prospect and clear persuasion of the truth—
Impalpable essence of the universal being—
Light!—of the sun, the moon, the stars—the soul!
Here have I stood,—how long, day after day!—
Sole in my strength as in a watch-tower,
And seen, abroad over the living world,
The punctual sunrise and the stars return,
The light return, to me illustrious!
Thus have I been assured, and thus received
My life's recognizance—seeing the light
Witness my worth and vindicate my deed;
Seeing the light perennial, and the life—
To me and mine perennial victory! .....
And now, O Son!—O Son of Man!—O strength
Born of my strength!—I know not all in vain
I nursed mankind with mystic hopes and dreams,
And gave, out of God's violated dwelling,
Eternal treasures to ephemeral man!
I know not all in vain I have endured
These violent years and harsh extremities:
For you, conceived of my humanity,
You are my celebration and my crown,
You are my perfect proof!

HERAKLES
Prometheus!—
With all my friendless, childless, desolate,
And lonely heart I love you! Let us be,
Henceforward and together without end,
As brother and brother, blent in perfect love.....
O to surrender utterly—to give,
Utterly and at last and all in all,
The passionate proud liberality
Of the unspared, exultant, eloquent,
Abandoned, loosed and loving heart of man! .....
O to commune as equals! O to share
The soul that finds no less than life itself,
And all of life and love and death and birth
And being its special issue!—O my brother,
Give me your love and blend your light with mine!
What may we not achieve, who have so wrought
Apart and lonely—being at last as one:
One heart, one soul, one life, one enterprise!
Come! let us hence.....

PROMETHEUS
..... O to the end of the world—
O to the end of time and truth, together
Let us go hence! ..... I love you, Herakles!

He starts toward HERAKLES. The fetters restrain him.
HERAKLES
Shatter the bonds! Rise from the fetters! Rise!
Come!—let us go in strength, and quietly
Blent in one meditation and one vision,
Elate, into the future, hand in hand.....
Come!—for the light of life clears and abounds;
Come!—the supreme occasion is prepared;
Come!—the victorious voice of love proclaims
The epic grandeur of the soul's ambition!
Suffer His chains no more, Prometheus!
The hour is now—rise and depart with me!
Will you be lax now the great door stands wide
Asunder, and salvation is at hand?
Where is your faith?—Alas, Prometheus,
Where is your strength? .....

PROMETHEUS
struggling vainly against the fetters
My strength has well sufficed
Here to withstand God's grim omnipotence,
Day after day, despite what agonies! .....

HERAKLES
Shatter the chains!

PROMETHEUS
still struggling in vain
He will not let me go.....
Yet, tho' His strength prevails against me thus,
He is not now victorious—I am still
Stedfast and undefeated! It is well
With me!—for all the utmost power of God
Can rob me of my honour by no means,
Nor vex the heart's exultant happiness!

HERAKLES
Honour and happiness?—O hungry heart,
Dreaming of love! O rash, insensate hope
Of friendship and of free communion!
O stern, relentless solitude!—Alas!
Alas, Prometheus, yours are empty words!
What is the honour of a captive soul?
What is the happiness a heart can feel,
Whose love refrains, whose faith falters and fails?

PROMETHEUS
You speak at ease, knowing no fate like mine:
It is a happy and honourable thing
Thus to preserve so long inviolate
The life where human hope finds sanctuary,
And keep aloft the blood-stained banner of man's
Rebellion, like a challenge and defiance,
Flowing in the free wind of life forever! .....
It is a happy and honourable thing
Thus to withstand the very power of God,
And bear so long unspeakable agonies! .....

HERAKLES
..... Thus to withstand a phantom, and endure
The anguish of a self-inflicted pain?—
Honour and happiness are cheaply bought,
Yea, for a little price, Prometheus!

PROMETHEUS
A little price?—this dire captivity,
These tortures, æons and æons long! .....

HERAKLES
The price
Is small, since it is insufficient to the cost
Of liberty, and has not paid the living wage
Of the soul's nurture in the coin of truth.
Life you have kept inviolate—and so much,
In all your captive and disconsolate years,
Was honourably done. What is there more?
What have you done with life, Prometheus?—
O you have treasured unprofitable things,
Lain sick and idle in the lap of dreams,
And wasted life and strength in senseless war
With vain imaginings! .....

PROMETHEUS
Nay, but with the Living
God!

HERAKLES
Who then is God, and what is He? .....
Enough!—I know you, and I know your worth;
And I salute you and acknowledge you,
Prometheus, and your strong, magnificent deeds.
Here I salute and specify in you
The long, defiant life, proud and resolved;
The dim, strong, spiritual, heroic trust;
The courage and the unconquerable will,
Which held you stedfast in the urgent fear
Of dire, fantastic dreams and spectral things.
Yet, in the strict account, nothing is new
Since the beginning, when your splendid deed
Brought light into the darkness of the world;—
And know you well no splendour can suffice
Save for the moment's payment and reward!

The voice of the POET from far below; sounding clear tho' faint in the distance
No single, excellent deed,
Born of the spirit's utmost need,—
No one magnificent
Stress of impassioned virtue, nobly wrought,—
No honourable and manly pride
Of an eternal conflict, hardly fought,—
No desolation where the soul is tried—
No grim captivity where life is spent—
No pain, no sacrifice,
No strength, no splendour can alone suffice
To pay the constant cost of liberty,
The daily wage of truth's enlightenment.
Nothing accrues!—Of all the soul has been
And learned and done there is no usury,
Save as the Light is more before us seen,
And the occasion more sufficiently
Prepared—more grandly and more arduously!
And, save as we
Are—by the endless labours undismayed—
More apt to learn, more eager to become,
More prompt to go and more resolved to be
Free in the universal truth, which is our home.
The living of the soul is daily earned
And daily spent—to-day the price is paid;
To-day the truth is learned;
Yet is the labour by no means gainsaid,
For all is partial and provisional—
Yea, to the end of all! .....
Yea, we shall hear again the forward call
To-morrow; and to-morrow we shall wake
To find to-morrow's payment still to make;
And we shall rise to-morrow and renew
The labour; and to-morrow truth shall be
As strange and true and splendid as
To-day and yesterday it was,
The way shall be as endless, we
As eager, and the world as new! .....

A moment of silence.
HERAKLES
It is my poet, singing his soul away.....
Hear him, Prometheus, for his songs are sooth—
And all shall come to pass! ..... Only, for you
All has been long postponed; but now, at last,
To-morrow and the labour and the truth
Are here at hand—and truth is terrible!
Courage, O Titan! O Prometheus,
Courage, courage!—you shall more need it now
That I am come to strip you of your chains,
Your lifelong honour and your happiness,
And leave you real and bare in the real world,
Than ever when all alone, incessantly,
You stood superb against the power of God
And took no ease of the remorseless pain.....
You shall more need it now to, gloriously,
And more magnificently than God, and more
With loveliness and with simplicity
And the sufficient, quiet, serious strength
Which He had not, who thundered and was hidden,
Assume—resume, perhaps, after so long!—
Dominion over more than ever He
Held under various rule of fear and love.
Courage, Strong Heart, courage!—for now, at last,
You shall recover what you gave away
Such countless vague millenniums ago:—
The Kingdom and the Power and the Glory,
The strength, the will, the clear eternities
Of truth, the sacred miracles of love,
The widening skies, the calm infinities
Of liberty—the inherent heritage of man,
So long estranged under God's usurpation! .....

PROMETHEUS
I shall recover? ..... My inheritance? .....
Mine? ..... What betides? ..... O what shall come to pass? .....
Where is my victory—the full, the flushed
And mystic consummation of my dreams? .....

The voice of the POET somewhat nearer
Courage! for thus and only thus—
As we are prompt and hazardous,
As we are rapt, religious and austere—
We are victorious,
And find the strange, steep way, and hear
The airs rush into song before our flight,
And pass out of the night,
Persuaded by a single star,
And learn that where the soul's adventures are
The truth's discovery is near,
And the delight
Of liberty, and pæans, and pageantries of light! .....

HERAKLES
Courage!—

PROMETHEUS
My strength and courage shall suffice,

HERAKLES
You shall be more victorious than you dreamed,
Prometheus!—for your victory is truth,
Only conceived in the unfettered mind
Which, of the gross amorphous element
Of life, in its alembic subtly fused
And wonderfully transfigured, makes the clear
Cogency of the universal laws.
Yea, God has long enough stood in the plain,
Noble and forthright way of man's ambition,
Wielded his regency, and for a mess
Of pottage bought his vast inheritance;—
And man shall come into his kingdom! ..... God,
As truth discerns, is of the infancy
Of man—the primal, dim, projected shape
In which his anxious mind figured at large,
On the vast shadow of his ignorance,
His sense of the inevitable Unknown,
The chance, blind sum of nameless energies,
Amid whose secret peril he walked in darkness,
Bearing the light of life's concentred fire,
The pure, fine flame of the self-realized soul,
Fearfully on its way, windy with doom.....
For thus, in symbols, fables, parables,
We are expressed; we hear some vague report
Of what we know not, and our minds devise
Some image that shall well enough suffice
To methodize to thought's austere command,
To reason's quiet, inevitable terms,
The garbled jargon that the senses speak—
Which are persuaded of the Something there! .....
Thus rose the myth of God, when time was young,
When, curious of whatever strictly shaped
The horror and hardship of his destiny,
Man's fear and ignorance conceived the cause
In his own likeness, and believed—and wept!
Now we have looked abroad and looked within,
Straining the symbol, and we learn to know,
Quietly and at last, its secret sense,
Shadowed and insufficiently set forth,
Is, in the meaning and the truth, ourselves!—
We are the Gods! We are the Householders
Of heaven and earth and all that in them is!
It is your Self, your universe and mine,
Prometheus—yours and mine and man's forever!

PROMETHEUS
Mine is God's burden of the universe? .....
Mine the relentless energies of God,
Which lurk beneath this candid and benign
Masque of perennial nature, and conspire
To compass man's destruction and despair? .....
I am alone? ..... I am responsible? .....
O nothing, nothing of all my dreams comes true!

The voice of the POET nearer than before
Brave, spiritual, and strong,
Let us take wings and will, O Soul! for we,
We have too long, too idly and too long,
In fate's relentless grip,
Lain like a derelict ship
Cast from the shining circles of the sea
High on the shores of time's captivity.
Let us take wings and will!—perchance
To-day, the least of life's impartial days,
In unpremeditated, common ways,
We shall achieve deliverance—
And wake, and hearken, and hear
The rush of the changing tide
And the shout of the flood returning, deep and wide,
Over the reefs of doubt and fear,
Over the shoals of change and chance,
Over the shores of time—and feel,
Under our keel,
The old ecstatic buoyancy,
The strong, smooth, spacious, sun-starred breast of the Sea! .....

HERAKLES
Prometheus! Prometheus! Prometheus!—
The soul of man can never be enslaved
Save by its own infirmities, nor freed
Save by its very strength and own resolve
And constant vision and supreme endeavour!
You will be free? Then, courage, O my brother!—
O let the soul stand in the open door
Of life and death and knowledge and desire
And see the peaks of thought kindle with sunrise! .....
Then shall the soul return to rest no more,
Nor harvest dreams in the dark fields of sleep.....
Rather the soul shall go with great resolve
To dwell at last upon the shining mountains
In liberal converse with the eternal stars.....
O let the soul feel the unhindered wind
Blow out at sunrise to the dazzled sea,
Strain in its sails and urge its enterprise! .....
Then shall it tarry in the anchorage,
By teeming wharves of vulgar merchandise,
No more—but rather choose to go abroad
Into the great, gold morning, and afar,
Where, from new skies, new seas receive the light.....
O let the soul, at truth's persuasion, wake
And understand!—it shall not then endure
To fail and be at peace and profitless:
For little glory has it of all this world,
And all its strength is nervous and disused
In the low, little labours of mankind.
It is alone and understood by none;
Its speech is not of vain, vile, violent things;
But on its lips the dominant, great voice,
Which is the one true voice, cries out in song
Of Lord-ship and a last deliverance!—
It is the soul of man—and can not stay;
It is the soul of man—and may not rest;
It is the soul of man—and will not fail,
And shall not cease to labour evermore,
Until at last its own infinity
Is in its own perfection all conceived! .....
Prometheus! Prometheus!—God is dead,
And man is overcome!—and you and I
And all men whatsoever whose minds report
The truth, whose lives exemplify the soul—
We are the Heirs of all the universe,
And of ourselves supremely, all in all!
Yea!—for the Lord, who dreamed of regencies
Too little perfect and resplendent, and
Set over them celestial deputies
In His own image, feigned and fabulous,
Is come into His kingdom out of sleep!
Yea!—for the hour is come, the Lord is roused—
And all is His, and all is victory! .....
A scant moment's silence. Then, his voice sounding like a summons:
Prometheus!—You are free!—Prometheus!—

PROMETHEUS raises his arms. The fetters fall from his limbs. He takes a step forward to the edge of the precipice.
PROMETHEUS
Free.....
His face turns skyward. In the last, dark flush of the sunset the EAGLE appears, swooping swiftly down.
God's winged blood-hound falls to his quarry.....

HERAKLES
Your eagle comes as a tamed hawk returns.....

The EAGLE sweeps down and lights on the shoulder of PROMETHEUS, where it folds its great wings and remains motionless.
The voice of the POET close at hand
And then!—O then it is, after the deed is done,
And the Great Gates stand open, and we are gone,
Who shall no more return,
Foundered and tempest-driven,
As drift and wreckage on the shores of time—
O then and thus it is we learn
How all the soul was skilled to ask is given!
And wonderfully and nobly we discern
A sense of life transcendent and sublime,
A knowledge that we shall by no means miss
The love, the grace, the grandeur that we earn!
For then and thus it is
The soul achieves its metamorphosis,
The Sleeper wakes within the House of Dream,
And, deep within the vision of his eyes,
In the starred, silent heights of heaven
The incommensurable night is riven,
And in the blinding beam
Of dawn across unfathomable skies,
His wings flash skyward from their shattered chrysalis! .....
Thus do we end our exile; then it is
We find the last release, and rise,
Knowing the truth which testifies
That pain and time and long captivity
And life and death and destined circumstance
Are only phases of our ignorance! .....
And thus it is at last that we,
After great love and long adjournments, see
The pinnacles of thought lighten with song—
And all the spirits of the Free,
Calm and majestic, move along
In an ascending theory! .....
While we stand with wings and will
Nerved to the task before us still;
While we watch with stedfast eyes,
Clear and valiant as a bell,
The flame of thought that never dies;
While we explore the secret none can tell;
While we prepare, in tense tranquillity,
For the inveterate miracle,
The soul's perennial truth, the truth's perennial liberty! .....

Ascending from below, the POET and the WOMAN appear, faint and exhausted, on the level where HERAKLES and PROMETHEUS are standing.
The WOMAN
Herakles! .....

She falls fainting to the ground.
The POET
Love has spent its strength..... and I
Am hardly come so far after my vision.....

He falls on his knees beside the WOMAN.
HERAKLES
O human heart of love!—O Visionary,
Filled with the sacred utterance of song!—
Welcome! The hour is come and gone. Behold!—
Yours is the victory, for man is free!

PROMETHEUS
Free!—I hear Pyrrha crying in the darkness.....
And Epimetheus calls me..... and Pandora
Sings in the total night desolate songs
And strange, old legends, dim with secrecies.....
I see Deukalion's face, fierce and afraid,
Staring aloft into the new, bleak light! .....
I was a thing of terror and of tears
To them—more sad and terrible than death!—
When, with my hollow reed of the pure flame
Of everlasting, living light, I came
Among them, flushed, triumphant, fabulous,—
Came as the herald of life's endless task,
With trumpet-calls and splendid exhortations,
Eloquent in my hour of victory!
I was a thing of terror and of tears
To them—my turn has come to fear and weep!
For now I stand in the beginning—I,
Prometheus!—as they stood in the beginning—
Pyrrha, Deukalion, Hellen, mortal men
And women—with the life they had not asked! .....
I stand in the beginning, stand and weep
Here in the new, bleak light of liberty,
As once they stood and wept, seeing the light! .....
I stand in the beginning—I, who once
Believed fond fancies of the mystic end—
The unimaginable, fantastic, dim
Apotheosis of my hopes and dreams! .....
I stand in the beginning! God is dead,
And man is overcome, and I am free!—
And who am I? ..... And what is liberty? .....

HERAKLES.
Liberty is the freedom to become
Free.....

The POET
The soul's long day's work is liberty.

HERAKLES turns and begins to ascend the mountain.
PROMETHEUS
Mine is the long day's work..... Mine is the soul.....
Mine is the freedom to be free..... I know
At last and without question, suddenly,
There is no Power in whose almighty hands
I can lay down the burden of this world;
And I am all alone and utterly
Real and responsible; and now my house
Of life is ruined, and I am left alone,
Shelterless and at large, like a poor beast.....
All that I was—my value and my worth,
My sense and strength—is gone! ..... The mind's defiance,
The heart's indomitable rebellion, are
No more; no more the tortures and the chains;
Honour and pride and happiness no more!
These were my virtue, these my hope and faith,
These were my own, my life's, significance:—
They are no more! ..... And in the stead of them,
What is my meaning, aim, and end? .....

HERAKLES
standing higher in the mountain, in the place where he first appeared
To you,
As you to Pyrrha and Deukalion,
Now I renew, appraised and amplified
And more sublime, more glorious, more secure,
The one true, perfect, and profitable gift!—
All that there is at all I give you!—Lo,
Yours is the Universe and yours the Soul,
And life and labour and liberty are yours
To understand and blend them into one! .....
All that there is I give you, and no less,
And nothing more!—no phantoms and vain dreams,
No spectral fears and false expectancies,
No empty honour, no vainglorious joy.
These are destroyed—but not that, in their stead,
Other, tho' lordlier, vain imaginings
And awful ghosts and unsubstantial things
Should fill the shadows whence their shapes are gone;—
Rather are they destroyed that in their room
The soul of man may go abroad at last,
Gravely and quietly, as befits the soul;
And freely, masterfully and wisely dwell
In the waste, spacious realm, withheld so long!

PROMETHEUS
I understand at last. The end is come
Of all my dreams, for now the new bleak light
Of the Beginning is upon mine eyes,
And I am wakened! ..... And I understand
At last..... And Truth is grave and chaste as death—
And radiant as life is in its whole strength!
So, as I may, I take the stern, great gift:
Mine is the Soul, and mine the Universe;
Mine is the burden, mine the task. I know
The price of Truth, the worth of Liberty.
I understand at last—and now my strength
Returns!—Where are the labours and the life? .....
Where is the conflict? ..... Where the victory? .....

HERAKLES
Knowledge alone is victory! When all
Is understood, all is subdued, received,
Possessed and perfect. For the soul of man
Is, in the universe of force and change,
Of blind, immeasurable energies,
Subtile and secret and supremely one,
The sole self-realized power, the single strength
Aimed and reflective and perfectible.
Therefore alone the mind's conception turns
Chaos to cosmos, ignorance to truth,
Force to the freedom of articulate laws—
Giving to phases of the senseless flux,
One after one, the soul's identity.
Yea, of the soul is all our hope! To know
Is truth and freedom!—Therefore, O my Brother,
Therefore beyond us, in the vast Unknown,
Waiting the power and conquest of the mind,
Is the far prospect of our enterprise! .....
And should we come into dominion!—then,
O then, at last, when all is lived and learned,
Loved and received in its eternal kind—
When we are Gods and Saviours, every one—
When in communion and accord we dwell
As native in each far, impermanent star,
And in the inhospitable vacancies
Are welcome and securely domiciled—
When we are strangers nowhere in the earth
Or sea, and nowhere in the being of man—
When the long life of all man's endless lives,
Its gradual pregnancies, its pangs and throes,
Its countless multitudes of perished Gods
And outworn forms and spent humanities,—
When all the cosmic process of the past
Stands in the immediate compass of our minds—
When all is present to us and all is known,
Even to the least, even to the uttermost,
Even to the first and last—when, over all,
The widening circles of our thought expand
To infinite horizons everywhere—
Then, tenoned in our foothold on the still,
Supernal, central pinnacle of being,
Shall we not look abroad and look within,
Over the total Universe, the vast,
Complex and vital sum of force and form,
And say, in one, sufficient utterance,
The single, whole, transcendent Truth,—“I am!”

A brief silence.
The POET
rising to his feet
Come! I will lead you down, Prometheus!

PROMETHEUS
Down.....
My Son!—My Brother!—must we say farewell?

HERAKLES
Hither away are the Hesperides.....

The POET
Come! I will lead you down, Prometheus, down,
Where, in reality, in deed, in truth,
Your work begins!

PROMETHEUS
Where does the work begin?

HERAKLES
There, wheresoever the soul's dominion ends!

For a moment no one moves. Then PROMETHEUS slowly gathers the WOMAN in his huge arms,

---

456

and begins to descend the mountain, the POET leading the way. The last vestige of sunset is gone. The night is calm and perfect. The thin figure of the POET and the vast stature of the TITAN, with the insensible WOMAN upon his breast, and the great EAGLE still perched upon his shoulder, loom vaguely in the still moonlight. HERAKLES stands motionless on his eminence,—clear, strong, and solitary against the stars.