Then Hope approached, she who can borrow
For poor to-day, from rich to-morrow,
And Fear withdrew, as night when day
Descends upon the orient ray,

And after long and vain endurance
The poor heart woke to her assurance.
-At one birth these four were born
With the world's forgotten morn,
And from Pleasure still they hold
All it circles, as of old.

When, as summer lures the swallow,
Pleasure lures the heart to follow-

O weak heart of little wit!

The fair hand that wounded it,
Seeking, like a panting hare,
Refuge in the lynx's lair,
Love, Desire, Hope, and Fear,
Ever will be near.

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PROLOGUE TO HELLAS.1

HERALD OF ETERNITY.

IT is the day when all the sons of God
Wait in the roofless senate-house, whose floor
Is Chaos, and the immovable abyss

1 The honour of giving this magnificent fragment to the world is entirely Mr. Garnett's. It was first published in Relics of Shelley; and I cannot do better than quote in extenso the note there prefixed to it, which is as follows:

"Mrs. Shelley informs us, in her note on the Prometheus Unbound, that at the time of her husband's arrival in Italy, he meditated the produc

tion of three dramas. One of these was the Prometheus itself; the second, a drama on the subject of Tasso's madness; the third one founded on the Book of Job; 'of which,' she adds, 'he never abandoned the idea.' That this was the case will be apparent from the following newly-discovered frag ment, which may have been, as I have on the whole preferred to describe it, an unfinished prologue to Hellas, or

The shadow of God, and delegate

Of that before whose breath the universe

Is as a print of dew.

Hierarchs and kings

Who from yon thrones pinnacled on the past
Sway the reluctant present, ye who sit
Pavilioned on the radiance or the gloom
Of mortal thought, which like an exhalation
Steaming from earth, conceals the

Which gave it birth,

of heaven

assemble here

Before your Father's throne; the swift decree

Yet hovers, and the fiery incarnation

Is yet withheld, clothed in which it shall

annul

The fairest of those wandering isles that gem
The sapphire space of interstellar air,

That green and azure sphere, that earth inwrapt
Less in the beauty of its tender light
Than in an atmosphere of living spirit
Which interpenetrating all the. . .

it rolls from realm to realm ·

perhaps the original sketch of that work, discarded for the existing more dramatic, but less ambitious version, for which the Pers of Eschylus evidently supplied the model. It is written in the same book as the original MS. of Hellas, and so blended with this as to be only separable after very minute examination. Few even of Shelley's rough drafts have proved more difficult to decipher or connect; numerous chasms will be observed. which, with every diligence, it has proved impossible to fill up; the correct reading of many printed lines is far from certain; and the imperfec

tion of some passages is such as to have occasioned their entire omission. Nevertheless, I am confident that the unpolished and mutilated remnant will be accepted as a worthy emanation of one of Shelley's sublimest

moods, and a noble earnest of what he might have accomplished could he have executed his original design of founding a drama on the Book of Job. Weak health, variable spirits, above all, the absence of encouragement, must be enumerated as chief among the causes which have deprived our literature of so magnificent a work."

And age to age, and in its ebb and flow

Impels the generations

To their appointed place,

Whilst the high Arbiter

Beholds the strife, and at the appointed time.
Sends his decrees veiled in eternal. . .

Within the circuit of this pendant orb
There lies an antique region, on which fell
The dews of thought in the world's golden dawn
Earliest and most benign, and from it sprung
Temples and cities and immortal forms

And harmonies of wisdom and of song,

And thoughts, and deeds worthy of thoughts so fair.
And when the sun of its dominion failed,

And when the winter of its glory came,

The winds that stript it bare blew on and swept

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That dew into the utmost wildernesses

In wandering clouds of sunny rain that thawed
The unmaternal bosom of the North.

Haste, sons of God,

for ye beheld,

Reluctant, or consenting, or astonished,

The stern decrees go forth, which heaped on Greece
Ruin and degradation and despair.

A fourth now waits: assemble, sons of God,

To speed or to prevent or to suspend,

If, as ye dream, such power be not withheld,
The unaccomplished destiny.

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The splendour-winged worlds disperse
Like wild doves scattered.

From every point of the Infinite,

Like a thousand dawns on a single night

The splendours rise and spread ;

And through thunder and darkness dread

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Light and music are radiated,

And in their pavilioned chariots led
By living wings high overhead

The giant Powers move,

Gloomy or bright as the thrones they fill.

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There are two fountains in which spirits weep
When mortals err, Discord and Slavery named,
And with their bitter dew two Destinies
Filled each their irrevocable urns; the third,
Fiercest and mightiest, mingled both, and added
Chaos and Death, and slow Oblivion's lymph,
And hate and terror, and the poisoned rain

The Aurora of the nations. By this brow

Whose pores wept tears of blood, by these wide wounds,

By this imperial crown of agony,

By infamy and solitude and death,

For this I underwent, and by the pain
Of pity for those who would

for me

The unremembered joy of a revenge,
For this I felt by Plato's sacred light,
Of which my spirit was a burning morrow-
By Greece and all she cannot cease to be,
Her quenchless words, sparks of immortal truth,
Stars of all night-her harmonies and forms,
Echoes and shadows of what Love adores

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In thee, I do compel thee, send forth Fate,

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Thy irrevocable child: let her descend

A seraph-winged victory [arrayed]

In tempest of the omnipotence of God
Which sweeps through all things.

From hollow leagues, from Tyranny which arms
Adverse miscreeds and emulous anarchies

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To stamp, as on a winged serpent's seed,

Upon the name of Freedom; from the storm

Of faction, which like earthquake shakes and sickens
The solid heart of enterprise; from all

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