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\title{Proserpine and Midas}
\date{1820}
\author{Mary Shelley}
\subtitle{Two unpublished Mythological Dramas}
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\chapter{PREFATORY NOTE.}
The editor came across the unpublished texts included in this volume as early as 1905. Perhaps he ought to apologize for delaying their appearance in print. The fact is he has long been afraid of overrating their intrinsic value. But as the great Shelley centenary year has come, perhaps this little monument of his wife’s collaboration may take its modest place among the tributes which will be paid to his memory. For Mary Shelley’s mythological dramas can at least claim to be the proper setting for some of the most beautiful lyrics of the poet, which so far have been read in undue isolation. And even as a literary sign of those times, as an example of that classical renaissance which the romantic period fostered, they may not be altogether negligible.
These biographical and literary points have been dealt with in an introduction for which the kindest help was long ago received from the late Dr. Garnett and the late Lord Abinger. Sir Walter Raleigh was also among the first to give both encouragement and guidance. My friends M. Emile Pons and Mr. Roger Ingpen have read the book in manuscript. The authorities of the Bodleian Library and of the Clarendon Press have been as generously helpful as is their well-known wont. To all the editor wishes to record his acknowledgements and thanks.
STRASBOURG.
\chapter{INTRODUCTION.}
\section{I.}
‘The compositions published in Mrs. Shelley’s lifetime afford but an inadequate conception of the intense sensibility and mental vigour of this extraordinary woman.’
Thus wrote Dr. Garnett, in 1862 (Preface to his Relics of Shelley). The words of praise may have sounded unexpectedly warm at that date. Perhaps the present volume will make the reader more willing to subscribe, or less inclined to demur.
Mary Godwin in her younger days certainly possessed a fair share of that nimbleness of invention which generally characterizes women of letters. Her favourite pastime as a child, she herself testifies,\footnote{Preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein. \forcelinebreak} had been to write stories. And a dearer pleasure had been—to use her own characteristic abstract and elongated way of putting it—‘the following up trains of thought which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents’. All readers of Shelley’s life remember how later on, as a girl of nineteen—and a two years’ wife—she was present, ‘a devout but nearly silent listener’, at the long symposia held by her husband and Byron in Switzerland (June 1816), and how the pondering over ‘German horrors’, and a common resolve to perpetrate ghost stories of their own, led her to imagine that most unwomanly of all feminine romances, Frankenstein. The paradoxical effort was paradoxically successful, and, as publishers’ lists aver to this day, Frankenstein’s monster has turned out to be the hardest-lived specimen of the ‘raw-head-and-bloody-bones’ school of romantic tales. So much, no doubt, to the credit of Mary Shelley. But more creditable, surely, is the fact that she was not tempted, as ‘Monk’ Lewis had been, to persevere in those lugubrious themes.
Although her publishers—et pour cause—insisted on styling her ‘the author of Frankenstein’, an entirely different vein appears in her later productions. Indeed, a quiet reserve of tone, a slow, sober, and sedate bearing, are henceforth characteristic of all her literary attitudes. It is almost a case of running from one to the other extreme. The force of style which even adverse critics acknowledged in Frankenstein was sometimes perilously akin to the most disputable kinds of romantic rant. But in the historical or society novels which followed, in the contributions which graced the ‘Keepsakes’ of the thirties, and even—alas—in the various prefaces and commentaries which accompanied the publication of so many poems of Shelley, his wife succumbed to an increasing habit of almost Victorian reticence and dignity. And those later novels and tales, though they sold well in their days and were kindly reviewed, can hardly boast of any reputation now. Most of them are pervaded by a brooding spirit of melancholy of the ‘moping’ rather than the ‘musical’ sort, and consequently rather ineffective as an artistic motive. Students of Shelley occasionally scan those pages with a view to pick some obscure ‘hints and indirections’, some veiled reminiscences, in the stories of the adventures and misfortunes of The Last Man or Lodore. And the books may be good biography at times—they are never life.
Altogether there is a curious contrast between the two aspects, hitherto revealed, of Mary Shelley’s literary activities. It is as if the pulse which had been beating so wildly, so frantically, in Frankenstein (1818), had lapsed, with Valperga (1823) and the rest, into an increasingly sluggish flow.
The following pages may be held to bridge the gap between those two extremes in a felicitous way. A more purely artistic mood, instinct with the serene joy and clear warmth of Italian skies, combining a good deal of youthful buoyancy with a sort of quiet and unpretending philosophy, is here represented. And it is submitted that the little classical fancies which Mrs. Shelley never ventured to publish are quite as worthy of consideration as her more ambitious prose works.
For one thing they give us the longest poetical effort of the writer. The moon of Epipsychidion never seems to have been thrilled with the music of the highest spheres. Yet there were times when Shelley’s inspiration and example fired her into something more than her usual calm and cold brilliancy.
One of those periods—perhaps the happiest period in Mary’s life—was during the early months in Italy of the English ‘exiles’. ‘She never was more strongly impelled to write than at this time; she felt her powers fresh and strong within her; all she wanted was some motive, some suggestion to guide her in the choice of a subject.’\footnote{Mrs. Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary W. Shelley, i. 216. \forcelinebreak}
Shelley then expected her to try her hand at a drama, perhaps on the terrible story of the Cenci, or again on the catastrophes of Charles the First. Her Frankenstein was attracting more attention than had ever been granted to his own works. And Shelley, with that touching simplicity which characterized his loving moments, showed the greatest confidence in the literary career of his wife. He helped her and encouraged her in every way. He then translated for her Plato’s Symposium. He led her on in her Latin and Italian studies. He wanted her—probably as a sort of preliminary exercise before her flight into tragedy—to translate Alfieri’s Myrrha. ‘Remember Charles the First, and do you be prepared to bring at least some of Myrrha translated,’ he wrote; ‘remember, remember Charles the First and Myrrha,’ he insisted; and he quoted, for her benefit, the presumptuous aphorism of Godwin, in St. Leon, ‘There is nothing which the human mind can conceive which it may not execute’.\footnote{Letter from Padua, 22 September 1818. \forcelinebreak}
But in the year that followed these auspicious days, the strain and stress of her life proved more powerful on Mary Shelley than the inspiration of literature. The loss of her little girl Clara, at Venice, on the 24th of September 1818, was cruel enough. However, she tried hard not to show the ‘pusillanimous disposition’ which, Godwin assured his daughter, characterizes the persons ‘that sink long under a calamity of this nature’.\footnote{27 October 1818 \forcelinebreak} But the death of her boy, William, at Rome, on the 4th of June 1819, reduced her to a ‘kind of despair’. Whatever it could be to her husband, Italy no longer was for her a ‘paradise of exiles’. The flush and excitement of the early months, the ‘first fine careless rapture’, were for ever gone. ‘I shall never recover that blow,’ Mary wrote on the 27th of June 1819; ‘the thought never leaves me for a single moment; everything on earth has lost its interest for me,’ This time her imperturbable father ’philosophized’ in vain. With a more sympathetic and acuter intelligence of her case, Leigh Hunt insisted (July 1819) that she should try and give her paralysing sorrow some literary expression, ‘strike her pen into some\dots{} genial subject\dots{} and bring up a fountain of gentle tears for us’. But the poor childless mother could only rehearse her complaint—‘to have won, and thus cruelly to have lost’ (4 August 1819). In fact she had, on William’s death, discontinued her diary.
Yet on the date just mentioned, as Shelley reached his twenty-seven years, she plucked up courage and resumed the task. Shelley, however absorbed by the creative ardour of his Annus mirabilis, could not but observe that his wife’s ‘spirits continued wretchedly depressed’ (5 August 1819); and though masculine enough to resent the fact at times more than pity it, he was human enough to persevere in that habit of co-operative reading and writing which is one of the finest traits of his married life. ‘I write in the morning,’ his wife testifies, ‘read Latin till 2, when we dine; then I read some English book, and two cantos of Dante with Shelley’\footnote{Letter to Mrs. Hunt, 28 August 1819. \forcelinebreak} —a fair average, no doubt, of the homely aspect of the great days which produced The Cenci and Prometheus.
On the 12th November, in Florence, the birth of a second son, Percy Florence Shelley, helped Mary out of her sense of bereavement. Subsequent letters still occasionally admit ‘low spirits’. But the entries in the Journal make it clear that the year 1819-20 was one of the most pleasantly industrious of her life. Not Dante only, but a motley series of books, great and small, ancient and modern, English and foreign, bespoke her attention. Not content with Latin, and the extemporized translations which Shelley could give her of Plato’s Republic, she started Greek in 1820, and soon came to delight in it. And again she thought of original composition. ‘Write’, ‘work,’—the words now occur daily in her Journal. These must mainly refer to the long historical novel, which she had planned, as early as 1819,\footnote{She had ‘thought of it’ at Marlow, as appears from her letter to Mrs. Gisborne, 30 June 1821 (in Mrs. Marshall, i. p. 291); but the materials for it were not found before the stay at Naples, and it was not actually begun ‘till a year afterwards, at Pisa’ (ibid.). \forcelinebreak} under the title of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, and which was not published until 1823, as Valperga. It was indeed a laborious task. The novel ‘illustrative of the manners of the Middle Ages in Italy’ had to be ‘raked out of fifty old books’, as Shelley said.\footnote{Letter to T. L. Peacock, November 1820. \forcelinebreak}
But heavy as the undertaking must have been, it certainly did not engross all the activities of Shelley’s wife in this period. And it seems highly probable that the two little mythological dramas which we here publish belong to this same year 1820.
The evidence for this date is as follows. Shelley’s lyrics, which these dramas include, were published by his wife (Posthumous Poems, 1824) among the ‘poems written in 1820’. Another composition, in blank verse, curiously similar to Mary’s own work, entitled Orpheus, has been allotted by Dr. Garnett (Relics of Shelley, 1862) to the same category.\footnote{Dr. Garnett, in his prefatory note, states that Orpheus ‘exists only in a transcript by Mrs. Shelley, who has written in playful allusion to her toils as amanuensis Aspetto fin che il diluvio cala, ed allora cerco di posare argine alle sue parole’. The poem is thus supposed to have been Shelley’s attempt at improvisation, if not indeed a translation from the Italian of the ‘improvvisatore’ Sgricci. The Shelleys do not seem to have come to know and hear Sgricci before the end of December 1820. The Italian note after all has no very clear import. And Dr. Garnett in 1905 inclined to the view that Orpheus was the work not of Shelley, but of his wife. A comparison of that fragment and the dramas here published seems to me to suggest the same conclusion, though in both cases Mary Shelley must have been helped by her husband. \forcelinebreak} Again, it may well be more than a coincidence, that the Proserpine motive occurs in that passage from Dante’s Purgatorio, canto 28, on ‘Matilda gathering flowers’, which Shelley is known to have translated shortly before Medwin’s visit in the late autumn of 1820.
O come, that I may hear
\forcelinebreak
Thy song: like Proserpine, in Enna’s glen,
\forcelinebreak
Thou seemest to my fancy,—singing here,
\forcelinebreak
And gathering flowers, as that fair maiden, when
\forcelinebreak
She lost the spring and Ceres her more dear.\footnote{As published by Medwin, 1834 and 1847. \forcelinebreak}
But we have a far more important, because a direct, testimony in a manuscript addition made by Thomas Medwin in the margin of a copy of his Life of Shelley (1847).\footnote{The copy, 2 vols., was sold at Sotheby’s on the 6th December 1906: Mr. H. Buxton Forman (who was, I think, the buyer) published the contents in The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, By Thomas Medwin, A New Edition printed from a copy copiously amended and extended by the Author . . . Milford, 1913. The passage here quoted appears on p. 27 of the 2nd vol. of the 1847 edition (Forman ed., p. 252) \forcelinebreak} The passage is clearly intended—though chronology is no more than any other exact science the ‘forte’ of that most tantalizing of biographers—to refer to the year 1820.
‘Mrs. Shelley had at this time been writing some little Dramas on classical subjects, one of which was the Rape of Proserpine, a very graceful composition which she has never published. Shelley contributed to this the exquisite fable of Arethusa and the Invocation to Ceres.—Among the Nymphs gathering flowers on Enna were two whom she called Ino and Uno, names which I remember in the Dialogue were irresistibly ludicrous. She also wrote one on Midas, into which were introduced by Shelley, in the Contest between Pan and Apollo, the Sublime Effusion of the latter, and Pan’s characterised Ode.’
This statement of Medwin finally settles the question. The ‘friend’ at whose request, Mrs. Shelley says,\footnote{The Hymns of Pan and Apollo were first published by Mrs. Shelley in the Posthumous Poems, 1824, with a note saying that they had been ‘written at the request of a friend to be inserted in a drama on the subject of Midas’. Arethusa appeared in the same volume, dated ‘Pisa, 1820’. Proserpine’s song was not published before the first collected edition of 1839. \forcelinebreak} the lyrics were written by her husband, was herself. And she was the author of the dramas.\footnote{Not E. E. Williams (Buxton Forman, ed. 1882, vol. iv, p. 34). The manuscript of the poetical play composed about 1822 by the latter, ‘The Promise’, with Shelley’s autograph poem (‘Night! with all thine eyes look down’), was given to the Bodleian Library in 1914. \forcelinebreak}
The manuscript (Bodleian Library, MS. Shelley, d. 2) looks like a cheap exercise-book, originally of 40, now of 36 leaves, 8 1\Slash{}4 x 6 inches, in boards. The contents are the dramas here presented, written in a clear legible hand—the equable hand of Mrs. Shelley.\footnote{Shelley’s lyrics are also in his wife’s writing—Mr. Locock is surely mistaken in assuming two different hands to this manuscript (The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Methuen, 1909, vol. iii, p. xix).} There are very few words corrected or cancelled. It is obviously a fair copy. Mr. C. D. Locock, in his Examination of the Shelley Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1903, pp. 24-25), has already pointed out the valuable emendations of the ‘received’ text of Shelley’s lyrics which are found here. In fact the only mystery is why neither Shelley, nor Mary in the course of her long widowed years, should have published these curious, and surely not contemptible, by-products of their co-operation in the fruitful year 1820.
\bigskip
\section{II.}
For indeed there is more than a personal interest attached to these writings of Mrs. Shelley’s. The fact that the same mind which had revelled, a few years earlier, in the fantastical horrors of Frankenstein’s abortive creation, could now dwell on the melancholy fate of Proserpine or the humorous disappointment of Midas, and delight in their subtle poetical or moral symbolism—this fact has its significance. It is one of the earliest indications of the revival, in the heart of Romanticism, of the old love of classical myths and classical beauty.
The subject is a wide one, and cannot be adequately dealt with in this place. But a few words may not be superfluous for a correct historical appreciation of Mrs. Shelley’s attempt.
How deficient had been the sense of classical beauty in the so-called classical age of English literature, is a trite consideration of criticism. The treatment of mythology is particularly conclusive on this point. Throughout the ‘Augustan’ era, mythology was approached as a mere treasure-house of pleasant fancies, artificial decorations, ‘motives’, whether sumptuous or meretricious. Allusions to Jove and Venus, Mercury, Apollo, or Bacchus, are of course found in every other page of Dryden, Pope, Prior, Swift, Gay, and Parnell. But no fresh presentation, no loving interpretation, of the old myths occur anywhere. The immortal stories were then part and parcel of a sort of poetical curriculum through which the whole school must be taken by the stern masters Tradition and Propriety. There is little to be wondered at, if this matter of curriculum was treated by the more passive scholars as a matter of course, and by the sharper and less reverent disciples as a matter of fun. Indeed, if any personality is then evinced in the adaptation of these old world themes, it is generally connected with a more or less emphatic disparagement or grotesque distortion of their real meaning.
When Dryden, for example, makes use of the legend of Midas, in his Wife of Bath’s Tale, he makes, not Midas’s minister, but his queen, tell the mighty secret—and thus secures another hit at woman’s loquacity.
Prior’s Female Phaëton is a younger sister, who, jealous of her elder’s success, thus pleads with her ‘mamma’:
I’ll have my earl as well as she
\forcelinebreak
Or know the reason why.
And she wants to flaunt it accordingly.
Finally,
Fondness prevailed; mamma gave way;
\forcelinebreak
Kitty, at heart’s desire,
\forcelinebreak
Obtained the chariot for a day,
\forcelinebreak
And set the world on fire.
Pandora, in Parnell’s Hesiod or the Rise of Woman, is only a
‘shining vengeance\dots{}
\forcelinebreak
A pleasing bosom-cheat, a specious ill’
sent by the gods upon earth to punish the race of Prometheus.
The most poetical fables of Greece are desecrated by Gay into mere miniatures for the decoration of his Fan.
Similar instances abound later on. When Armstrong brings in an apostrophe to the Naiads, it is in the course of a Poetical Essay on the Art of Preserving Health. And again, when Cowper stirs himself to intone an Ode to Apollo, it is in the same mock-heroic vein:
Patron of all those luckless brains,
\forcelinebreak
That to the wrong side leaning
\forcelinebreak
Indite much metre with much pains
\forcelinebreak
And little or no meaning\dots{}
Even in Gray’s—‘Pindaric Gray’s’—treatment of classical themes, there is a sort of pervading ennui, or the forced appreciativeness of a gouty, disappointed man. The daughter of Jove to whom he dedicates his hymns too often is ‘Adversity’. And classical reminiscences have, even with him, a dull musty tinge which recalls the antiquarian in his Cambridge college-rooms rather than the visitor to Florence and Rome. For one thing, his allusions are too many, and too transitory, to appear anything but artistic tricks and verse-making tools. The ‘Aegean deep’, and ‘Delphi’s steep’, and ‘Meander’s amber waves’, and the ‘rosy-crowned Loves’, are too cursorily summoned, and dismissed, to suggest that they have been brought in for their own sweet sakes.
It was thus with all the fine quintessences of ancient lore, with all the pearl-like accretions of the faiths and fancies of the old world: they were handled about freely as a kind of curious but not so very rare coins, which found no currency in the deeper thoughts of our modern humanity, and could therefore be used as a mere badge of the learning and taste of a literary ‘coterie’.
The very names of the ancient gods and heroes were in fact assuming that abstract anaemic look which common nouns have in everyday language. Thus, when Garrick, in his verses Upon a Lady’s Embroidery, mentions ‘Arachne’, it is obvious that he does not expect the reader to think of the daring challenger of Minerva’s art, or the Princess of Lydia, but just of a plain spider. And again, when Falconer, in his early Monody on the death of the Prince of Wales, expresses a rhetorical wish
‘to aid hoarse howling Boreas with his sighs,’
that particular son of Astræus, whose love for the nymph Orithyia was long unsuccessful, because he could not ‘sigh’, is surely far from the poet’s mind; and ‘to swell the wind’, or ‘the gale’, would have served his turn quite as well, though less ‘elegantly’.
Even Gibbon, with all his partiality for whatever was pre- or post- Christian, had indeed no better word than ‘elegant’ for the ancient mythologies of Greece and Rome, and he surely reflected no particularly advanced opinion when he praised and damned, in one breath, ‘the pleasant and absurd system of Paganism.’\footnote{Essay on the Study of Literature, § 56. \forcelinebreak} No wonder if in his days, and for a long time after, the passionate giants of the Ages of Fable had dwindled down to the pretty puppets with which the daughters of the gentry had to while away many a school hour.
But the days of this rhetorical—or satirical, didactic—or perfunctory, treatment of classical themes were doomed. It is the glory of Romanticism to have opened ‘magic casements’ not only on ‘the foam of perilous seas’ in the West, but also on
the chambers of the East,
\forcelinebreak
The chambers of the Sun, that now
\forcelinebreak
From ancient melody had ceased.\footnote{Blake, Poetical Sketches, 1783. \forcelinebreak}
Romanticism, as a freshening up of all the sources of life, a general rejuvenescence of the soul, a ubiquitous visiting of the spirit of delight and wonder, could not confine itself to the fields of mediaeval romance. Even the records of the Greek and Roman thought assumed a new beauty; the classical sense was let free from its antiquarian trammels, and the perennial fanes resounded to the songs of a more impassioned worship.
The change, however, took some time. And it must be admitted that in England, especially, the Romantic movement was slow to go back to classical themes. Winckelmann and Goethe, and Chénier—the last, indeed, practically all unknown to his contemporaries—had long rediscovered Antiquity, and felt its pulse anew, and praised its enduring power, when English poetry had little, if anything, to show in answer to the plaintive invocation of Blake to the Ancient Muses.
The first generation of English Romantics either shunned the subject altogether, or simply echoed Blake’s isolated lines in isolated passages as regretful and almost as despondent. From Persia to Paraguay Southey could wander and seek after exotic themes; his days could be ‘passed among the dead’—but neither the classic lands nor the classic heroes ever seem to have detained him. Walter Scott’s ‘sphere of sensation may be almost exactly limited by the growth of heather’, as Ruskin says;\footnote{Modern Painters, iii. 317 \forcelinebreak} and when he came to Rome, his last illness prevented him from any attempt he might have wished to make to enlarge his field of vision. Wordsworth was even less far-travelled, and his home-made poetry never thought of the ‘Pagan’ and his ‘creed outworn’, but as a distinct pis-aller in the way of inspiration.\footnote{Sonnet ‘The world is too much with us’; cf. The Excursion, iv. 851-57. \forcelinebreak} And again, though Coleridge has a few magnificent lines about them, he seems to have even less willingly than Wordsworth hearkened after
The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
\forcelinebreak
The fair humanities of old religion.\footnote{The Piccolomini, II, iv. \forcelinebreak}
It was to be otherwise with the later English Romantic poets. They lived and worked at a time when the whole atmosphere and even the paraphernalia of literary composition had just undergone a considerable change. After a period of comparative seclusion and self-concentration, England at the Peace of Amiens once more found its way to Europe—and vice versa. And from our point of view this widening of prospects is especially noticeable. For the classical revival in Romanticism appears to be closely connected with it.
It is an alluring subject to investigate. How the progress of scholarship, the recent ‘finds’ of archaeology, the extension of travelling along Mediterranean shores, the political enthusiasms evoked by the stirrings of young Italy and young Greece, all combined to reawaken in the poetical imagination of the times the dormant memories of antiquity has not yet been told by the historians of literature.\footnote{At least as far as England is concerned. For France, cf. Canat, a renaissance de la Grèce antique, Hachette, Paris, 1911. \forcelinebreak}
But—and this is sufficient for our purpose—every one knows what the Elgin Marbles have done for Keats and Shelley; and what inspirations were derived from their pilgrimages in classic lands by all the poets of this and the following generation, from Byron to Landor. Such experiences could not but react on the common conception of mythology. A knowledge of the great classical sculpture of Greece could not but invest with a new dignity and chastity the notions which so far had been nurtured on the Venus de’ Medici and the Belvedere Apollo—even Shelley lived and possibly died under their spell. And ‘returning to the nature which had inspired the ancient myths’, the Romantic poets must have felt with a keener sense ‘their exquisite vitality’.\footnote{J. A, Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, ii, p. 258. \forcelinebreak} The whole tenor of English Romanticism may be said to have been affected thereby.
For English Romanticism—and this is one of its most distinctive merits—had no exclusiveness about it. It was too spontaneous, one would almost say, too unconscious, ever to be clannish. It grew, untrammelled by codes, uncrystallized into formulas, a living thing always, not a subject-matter for grandiloquent manifestoes and more or less dignified squabbles. It could therefore absorb and turn to account elements which seemed antagonistic to it in the more sophisticated forms it assumed in other literatures. Thus, whilst French Romanticism—in spite of what it may or may not have owed to Chénier—became often distinctly, deliberately, wilfully anti-classical, whilst for example\footnote{As pointed out by Brunetière, Évolution de la Poésie lyrique, ii, p. 147. \forcelinebreak} Victor Hugo in that all-comprehending Légende des Siècles could find room for the Hegira and for Zim-Zizimi, but did not consecrate a single line to the departed glories of mythical Greece, the Romantic poets of England may claim to have restored in freshness and purity the religion of antiquity. Indeed their voice was so convincing that even the great Christian chorus that broke out afresh in the Victorian era could not entirely drown it, and Elizabeth Barrett had an apologetic way of dismissing ‘the dead Pan’, and all the ‘vain false gods of Hellas’, with an acknowledgement of
your beauty which confesses
\forcelinebreak
Some chief Beauty conquering you.
This may be taken to have been the average attitude, in the forties, towards classical mythology. That twenty years before, at least in the Shelley circle, it was far less grudging, we now have definite proof.
Not only was Shelley prepared to admit, with the liberal opinion of the time, that ancient mythology ‘was a system of nature concealed under the veil of allegory’, a system in which ‘a thousand fanciful fables contained a secret and mystic meaning’:\footnote{Edinb. Rev., July 1808. \forcelinebreak} he was prepared to go a considerable step farther, and claim that there was no essential difference between ancient mythology and the theology of the Christians, that both were interpretations, in more or less figurative language, of the great mysteries of being, and indeed that the earlier interpretation, precisely because it was more frankly figurative and poetical than the later one, was better fitted to stimulate and to allay the sense of wonder which ought to accompany a reverent and high-souled man throughout his life-career.
In the earlier phase of Shelley’s thought, this identification of the ancient and the modern faiths was derogatory to both. The letter which he had written in 1812 for ihe edification of Lord Ellenborough revelled in the contemplation of a time ‘when the Christian religion shall have faded from the earth, when its memory like that of Polytheism now shall remain, but remain only as the subject of ridicule and wonder’. But as time went on, Shelley’s views became less purely negative. Instead of ruling the adversaries back to back out of court, he bethought himself of venturing a plea in favour of the older and weaker one. It may have been in 1817 that he contemplated an ‘Essay in favour of polytheism’.\footnote{Cf. our Shelley’s Prose in the Bodleian MSS., 1910, p. 124. \forcelinebreak} He was then living on the fringe of a charmed circle of amateur and adventurous Hellenists who could have furthered the scheme. His great friend, Thomas Love Peacock, ‘Greeky Peaky’, was a personal acquaintance of Thomas Taylor ‘the Platonist’, alias ‘Pagan Taylor’. And Taylor’s translations and commentaries of Plato had been favourites of Shelley in his college days. Something at least of Taylor’s queer mixture of flaming enthusiasm and tortuous ingenuity may be said to appear in the unexpected document we have now to examine.
It is a little draft of an Essay, which occurs, in Mrs. Shelley’s handwriting, as an insertion in her Journal for the Italian period. The fragment—for it is no more—must be quoted in full.\footnote{From the ‘Boscombe’ MSS. Unpublished. \forcelinebreak}
The necessity of a Belief in the
\forcelinebreak
Heathen Mythology
\forcelinebreak
to a Christian
If two facts are related not contradictory of equal probability \& with equal evidence, if we believe one we must believe the other.
1st. There is as good proof of the Heathen Mythology as of the Christian Religion.
2ly. that they [do] not contradict one another.
Con[clusion]. If a man believes in one he must believe in both.
Examination of the proofs of the Xtian religion—the Bible \& its authors. The twelve stones that existed in the time of the writer prove the miraculous passage of the river Jordan.\footnote{Josh. iv. 8.—These notes are \emph{not} Shelley’s. \forcelinebreak} The immoveability of the Island of Delos proves the accouchement of Latona\footnote{Theogn. 5 foll.; Homer’s Hymn to Apollo, i. 25. \forcelinebreak} —the Bible of the Greek religion consists in Homer, Hesiod \& the Fragments of Orpheus \&c.—All that came afterwards to be considered apocryphal—Ovid = Josephus—of each of these writers we may believe just what we cho[o]se.
To seek in these Poets for the creed \& proofs of mythology which are as follows—Examination of these—1st with regard to proof—2 in contradiction or conformity to the Bible—various apparitions of God in that Book [—] Jupiter considered by himself—his attributes—disposition [—] acts—whether as God revealed himself as the Almighty to the Patriarchs \& as Jehovah to the Jews he did not reveal himself as Jupiter to the Greeks—the possibility of various revelations—that he revealed himself to Cyrus.\footnote{Probably Xenophon, Cyrop. VIII. vii. 2. \forcelinebreak}
The inferior deities—the sons of God \& the Angels—the difficulty of Jupiter’s children explained away—the imagination of the poets—of the prophets—whether the circumstance of the sons of God living with women\footnote{Gen. vi. \forcelinebreak} being related in one sentence makes it more probable than the details of Greek—Various messages of the Angels—of the deities—Abraham, Lot or Tobit. Raphael [—]Mercury to Priam\footnote{Iliad, xxiv. \forcelinebreak} —Calypso \& Ulysses—the angel wd then play the better part of the two whereas he now plays the worse. The ass of Balaam—Oracles—Prophets. The revelation of God as Jupiter to the Greeks—-a more successful revelation than that as Jehovah to the Jews—Power, wisdom, beauty, \& obedience of the Greeks—greater \& of longer continuance—than those of the Jews. Jehovah’s promises worse kept than Jupiter’s—the Jews or Prophets had not a more consistent or decided notion concerning after life \& the Judgements of God than the Greeks [—] Angels disappear at one time in the Bible \& afterwards appear again. The revelation to the Greeks more complete than to the Jews—prophesies of Christ by the heathens more incontrovertible than those of the Jews. The coming of X. a confirmation of both religions. The cessation of oracles a proof of this. The Xtians better off than any but the Jews as blind as the Heathens—Much more conformable to an idea of [the] goodness of God that he should have revealed himself to the Greeks than that he left them in ignorance. Vergil \& Ovid not truth of the heathen Mythology, but the interpretation of a heathen—as Milton’s Paradise Lost is the interpretation of a Christian religion of the Bible. The interpretation of the mythology of Vergil \& the interpretation of the Bible by Milton compared—whether one is more inconsistent than the other—In what they are contradictory. Prometheus desmotes quoted by Paul\footnote{Shelley may refer to the proverbial phrase ‘to kick against the pricks’ (Acts xxvi. 14), which, however, is found in Pindar and Euripides as well as in Aeschylus (Prom. 323). \forcelinebreak} [—] all religion false except that which is revealed—revelation depends upon a certain degree of civilization—writing necessary—no oral tradition to be a part of faith—the worship of the Sun no revelation—Having lost the books [of] the Egyptians we have no knowledge of their peculiar revelations. If the revelation of God to the Jews on Mt Sinai had been more peculiar \& impressive than some of those to the Greeks they wd not immediately after have worshiped a calf—A latitude in revelation—How to judge of prophets—the proof [of] the Jewish Prophets being prophets.
The only public revelation that Jehovah ever made of himself was on Mt Sinai—Every other depended upon the testimony of a very few \& usually of a single individual—We will first therefore consider the revelation of Mount Sinai. Taking the fact plainly it happened thus. The Jews were told by a man whom they believed to have supernatural powers that they were to prepare for that God wd reveal himself in three days on the mountain at the sound of a trumpet. On the 3rd day there was a cloud \& lightning on the mountain \& the voice of a trumpet extremely loud. The people were ordered to stand round the foot of the mountain \& not on pain of death to infringe upon the bounds—The man in whom they confided went up the mountain \& came down again bringing them word
The draft unfortunately leaves off here, and we are unable to know for certain whether this Shelleyan paradox, greatly daring, meant to minimize the importance of the ‘only public revelation’ granted to the chosen people. But we have enough to understand the general trend of the argument. It did not actually intend to sap the foundations of Scriptural authority. But it was bold enough to risk a little shaking in order to prove that the Sacred Books of the Greeks and Romans did not, after all, present us with a much more rickety structure. This was a task of conciliation rather than destruction. And yet even this conservative view of the Shelleys’ exegesis cannot—and will not—detract from the value of the above document. Surely, this curious theory of the equal ‘inspiration’ of Polytheism and the Jewish or Christian religions, whether it was invented or simply espoused by Mrs. Shelley, evinces in her—for the time being at least—a very considerable share of that adventurous if somewhat uncritical alacrity of mind which carried the poet through so many religious and political problems. It certainly vindicates her, more completely perhaps than anything hitherto published, against the strictures of those who knew her chiefly or exclusively in later years, and could speak of her as a ‘most conventional slave’, who ‘even affected the pious dodge’, and ‘was not a suitable companion for the poet’.\footnote{Trelawny’s letter, 3 April 1870; in Mr. H. Buxton Forman’s edition, 1910, p. 229. \forcelinebreak} Mrs. Shelley—at twenty-three years of age—had not yet run the full ‘career of her humour’; and her enthusiasm for classical mythology may well have, later on, gone the way of her admiration for Spinoza, whom she read with Shelley that winter (1820-1), as Medwin notes,\footnote{I. e. ed. H. Buxton Forman, p. 253. \forcelinebreak} and ‘whose arguments she then thought irrefutable—tempora mutantur!’
However that may be, the two little mythological dramas on Proserpine and Midas assume, in the light of that enthusiasm, a special interest. They stand—or fall—both as a literary, and to a certain extent as an intellectual effort. They are more than an attitude, and not much less than an avowal. Not only do they claim our attention as the single poetical work of any length which seems to have been undertaken by Mrs. Shelley; they are a unique and touching monument of that intimate co-operation which at times, especially in the early years in Italy, could make the union of ‘the May’ and ‘the Elf’ almost unreservedly delightful. It would undoubtedly be fatuous exaggeration to ascribe a very high place in literature to these little Ovidian fancies of Mrs. Shelley. The scenes, after all, are little better than adaptations—fairly close adaptations—of the Latin poet’s well-known tales.
Even Proserpine, though clearly the more successful of the two, both more strongly knit as drama, and less uneven in style and versification, cannot for a moment compare with the far more original interpretations of Tennyson, Swinburne, or Meredith.\footnote{Demeter and Persephone, 1889; The Garden of Proserpine, 1866; The Appeasement of Demeter, 1888. \forcelinebreak} But it is hardly fair to draw in the great names of the latter part of the century. The parallel would be more illuminating—and the final award passed on Mrs. Shelley’s attempt more favourable—if we were to think of a contemporary production like ‘Barry Cornwall’s’ Rape of Proserpine, which, being published in 1820, it is just possible that the Shelleys should have known. B. W. Procter’s poem is also a dramatic ‘scene’, written ‘in imitation of the mode originated by the Greek Tragic Writers’. In fact those hallowed models seem to have left far fewer traces in Barry Cornwall’s verse than the Alexandrian—or pseudo-Alexandrian—tradition of meretricious graces and coquettish fancies, which the eighteenth century had already run to death.\footnote{To adduce an example—in what is probably not an easily accessible book to-day: Proserpine, distributing her flowers, thus addresses one of her nymphs: \protect\endgraf For this lily, \protect\endgraf Where can it hang but at Cyane’s breast! \protect\endgraf And yet ’twill wither on so white a bed, \protect\endgraf If flowers have sense for envy. \forcelinebreak} And, more damnable still, the poetical essence of the legend, the identification of Proserpine’s twofold existence with the grand alternation of nature’s seasons, has been entirely neglected by the author. Surely his work, though published, is quite as deservedly obscure as Mrs. Shelley’s derelict manuscript. Midas has the privilege, if it be one, of not challenging any obvious comparison. The subject, since Lyly’s and Dryden’s days, has hardly attracted the attention of the poets. It was so eminently fit for the lighter kinds of presentation that the agile bibliographer who aimed at completeness would have to go through a fairly long list of masques,\footnote{There is an apostrophe \emph{on} the s. \forcelinebreak} comic operas, or ‘burlettas’, all dealing with the ludicrous misfortunes of the Phrygian king. But an examination of these would be sheer pedantry in this place. Here again Mrs. Shelley has stuck to her Latin source as closely as she could.\footnote{MS. \emph{mytles.} \forcelinebreak} She has made a gallant attempt to connect the two stories with which Midas has ever since Ovid’s days been associated, and a distinct—indeed a too perceptible—effort to press out a moral meaning in this, as she had easily extricated a cosmological meaning in the other tale.
Perhaps we have said too much to introduce these two little unpretending poetical dramas. They might indeed have been allowed to speak for themselves. A new frame often makes a new face; and some of the best known and most exquisite of Shelley’s lyrics, when restored to the surroundings for which the poet intended them, needed no other set-off to appeal to the reader with a fresh charm of quiet classical grace and beauty. But the charm will operate all the more unfailingly, if we remember that this clear classical mood was by no means such a common element in the literary atmosphere of the times—not even a permanent element in the authors’ lives. We have here none of the feverish ecstasy that lifts Prometheus and Hellas far above the ordinary range of philosophical or political poetry. But Shelley’s encouragement, probably his guidance and supervision, have raised his wife’s inspiration to a place considerably higher than that of Frankenstein or Valperga. With all their faults these pages reflect some of that irradiation which Shelley cast around his own life—the irradiation of a dream beauteous and generous, beauteous in its theology (or its substitute for theology) and generous even in its satire of human weaknesses.
\bigskip
\chapter{PROSERPINE. A DRAMA IN TWO ACTS.}
\section{DRAMATIS PERSONAE}
Ceres.
\forcelinebreak
Proserpine.
\forcelinebreak
Ino, Eunoe Nymphs attendant upon Proserpine.
\forcelinebreak
Iris.
\forcelinebreak
Arethusa, Naiad of a Spring.
\forcelinebreak
\noindent
Shades from Hell, among which Ascalaphus.
Scene; the plain of Enna, in Sicily.
\section{ACT I.}
Scene; a beautiful plain, shadowed on one side by an overhanging rock, on the other a chesnut wood. Etna at a distance.
Enter Ceres, Proserpine, Ino and Eunoe.
Pros. Dear Mother, leave me not! I love to rest
\forcelinebreak
Under the shadow of that hanging cave
\forcelinebreak
And listen to your tales. Your Proserpine
\forcelinebreak
Entreats you stay; sit on this shady bank,
\forcelinebreak
And as I twine a wreathe tell once again
\forcelinebreak
The combat of the Titans and the Gods;
\forcelinebreak
Or how the Python fell beneath the dart
\forcelinebreak
Of dread Apollo; or of Daphne’s change,—
\forcelinebreak
That coyest Grecian maid, whose pointed leaves
\forcelinebreak
Now shade her lover’s brow. And I the while
\forcelinebreak
Gathering the starry flowers of this fair plain
\forcelinebreak
Will weave a chaplet, Mother, for thy hair.
\forcelinebreak
But without thee, the plain I think is vacant,
\forcelinebreak
Its\footnote{MS. \emph{fawns} \forcelinebreak} blossoms fade,—its tall fresh grasses droop,
\forcelinebreak
Nodding their heads like dull things half asleep;—
\forcelinebreak
Go not, dear Mother, from your Proserpine.
Cer. My lovely child, it is high Jove’s command:—
\forcelinebreak
The golden self-moved seats surround his throne,
\forcelinebreak
The nectar is poured out by Ganymede,
\forcelinebreak
And the ambrosia fills the golden baskets;
\forcelinebreak
They drink, for Bacchus is already there,
\forcelinebreak
But none will eat till I dispense the food.
\forcelinebreak
I must away—dear Proserpine, farewel!—
\forcelinebreak
Eunoe can tell thee how the giants fell;
\forcelinebreak
Or dark-eyed Ino sing the saddest change
\forcelinebreak
Of Syrinx or of Daphne, or the doom
\forcelinebreak
Of impious Prometheus, and the boy
\forcelinebreak
Of fair Pandora, Mother of mankind.
\forcelinebreak
This only charge I leave thee and thy nymphs,—
\forcelinebreak
Depart not from each other; be thou circled
\forcelinebreak
By that fair guard, and then no earth-born Power
\forcelinebreak
Would tempt my wrath, and steal thee from their sight[.]
\forcelinebreak
But wandering alone, by feint or force,
\forcelinebreak
You might be lost, and I might never know
\forcelinebreak
Thy hapless fate. Farewel, sweet daughter mine,
\forcelinebreak
Remember my commands.
Pros. —Mother, farewel!
\forcelinebreak
Climb the bright sky with rapid wings; and swift
\forcelinebreak
As a beam shot from great Apollo’s bow
\forcelinebreak
Rebounds from the calm mirror of the sea
\forcelinebreak
Back to his quiver in the Sun, do thou
\forcelinebreak
Return again to thy loved Proserpine.
(Exit Ceres.)
And now, dear Nymphs, while the hot sun is high
\forcelinebreak
Darting his influence right upon the plain,
\forcelinebreak
Let us all sit beneath the narrow shade
\forcelinebreak
That noontide Etna casts.—And, Ino, sweet,
\forcelinebreak
Come hither; and while idling thus we rest,
\forcelinebreak
Repeat in verses sweet the tale which says
\forcelinebreak
How great Prometheus from Apollo’s car
\forcelinebreak
Stole heaven’s fire—a God-like gift for Man!
\forcelinebreak
Or the more pleasing tale of Aphrodite;
\forcelinebreak
How she arose from the salt Ocean’s foam,
\forcelinebreak
And sailing in her pearly shell, arrived
\forcelinebreak
On Cyprus sunny shore, where myrtles\footnote{Inserted in a later hand, here as p. 18. \forcelinebreak} bloomed
\forcelinebreak
And sweetest flowers, to welcome Beauty’s Queen;
\forcelinebreak
And ready harnessed on the golden sands
\forcelinebreak
Stood milk-white doves linked to a sea-shell car,
\forcelinebreak
With which she scaled the heavens, and took her seat
\forcelinebreak
Among the admiring Gods.
Eun. Proserpine’s tale
\forcelinebreak
Is sweeter far than Ino’s sweetest aong.
Pros. Ino, you knew erewhile a River-God,
\forcelinebreak
Who loved you well and did you oft entice
\forcelinebreak
To his transparent waves and flower-strewn banks.
\forcelinebreak
He loved high poesy and wove sweet sounds,
\forcelinebreak
And would sing to you as you sat reclined
\forcelinebreak
On the fresh grass beside his shady cave,
\forcelinebreak
From which clear waters bubbled, dancing forth,
And spreading freshness in the noontide air.
\forcelinebreak
When you returned you would enchant our ears
\forcelinebreak
With tales and songs which did entice the fauns,\footnote{The intended place of the apostrophe is not clear. \forcelinebreak}
\forcelinebreak
With Pan their King from their green haunts, to hear.
\forcelinebreak
Tell me one now, for like the God himself,
\forcelinebreak
Tender they were and fanciful, and wrapt
\forcelinebreak
The hearer in sweet dreams of shady groves,
\forcelinebreak
Blue skies, and clearest, pebble-paved streams.
Ino. I will repeat the tale which most I loved;
\forcelinebreak
Which tells how lily-crowned Arethusa,
\forcelinebreak
Your favourite Nymph, quitted her native Greece,
\forcelinebreak
Flying the liquid God Alpheus, who followed,
\forcelinebreak
Cleaving the desarts of the pathless deep,
\forcelinebreak
And rose in Sicily, where now she flows
\forcelinebreak
The clearest spring of Enna’s gifted plain.
(By Shelley)\footnote{MS. \emph{Ocean’ foam} as if a genitive was meant; but cf. \emph{Ocean foam} in the Song of Apollo (Midas). \forcelinebreak}
Arethusa arose
\forcelinebreak
From her couch of snows,
\forcelinebreak
In the Acroceraunian mountains,—
\forcelinebreak
From cloud, and from crag,
\forcelinebreak
With many a jag,
\forcelinebreak
Shepherding her bright fountains.
\forcelinebreak
She leapt down the rocks
\forcelinebreak
With her rainbow locks,
\forcelinebreak
Streaming among the streams,—
Her steps paved with green
\forcelinebreak
The downward ravine,
\forcelinebreak
Which slopes to the Western gleams:—
\forcelinebreak
And gliding and springing,
\forcelinebreak
She went, ever singing
\forcelinebreak
In murmurs as soft as sleep;
\forcelinebreak
The Earth seemed to love her
\forcelinebreak
And Heaven smiled above her,
\forcelinebreak
As she lingered towards the deep.
Then Alpheus bold
\forcelinebreak
On his glacier cold,
\forcelinebreak
With his trident the mountains strook;
\forcelinebreak
And opened a chasm
\forcelinebreak
In the rocks;—with the spasm
\forcelinebreak
All Erymanthus shook.
\forcelinebreak
And the black south wind
\forcelinebreak
It unsealed behind
\forcelinebreak
The urns of the silent snow,
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And earthquake and thunder
\forcelinebreak
Did rend in sunder
\forcelinebreak
The bars of the springs below:—
\forcelinebreak
And the beard and the hair
\forcelinebreak
Of the river God were
\forcelinebreak
Seen through the torrent’s sweep
As he followed the light
\forcelinebreak
Of the fleet nymph’s flight
\forcelinebreak
To the brink of the Dorian deep.
Oh, save me! oh, guide me!
\forcelinebreak
And bid the deep hide me,
\forcelinebreak
For he grasps me now by the hair!
\forcelinebreak
The loud ocean heard,
\forcelinebreak
To its blue depth stirred,
\forcelinebreak
And divided at her prayer[,]
\forcelinebreak
And under the water
\forcelinebreak
The Earth’s white daughter
\forcelinebreak
Fled like a sunny beam,
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Behind her descended
\forcelinebreak
Her billows unblended
\forcelinebreak
With the brackish Dorian stream:—
\forcelinebreak
Like a gloomy stain
\forcelinebreak
On the Emerald main
\forcelinebreak
Alpheus rushed behind,
\forcelinebreak
As an eagle pursueing
\forcelinebreak
A dove to its ruin,
\forcelinebreak
Down the streams of the cloudy wind.
Under the bowers
\forcelinebreak
Where the Ocean Powers
\forcelinebreak
Sit on their pearled thrones,
\forcelinebreak
Through the coral woods
\forcelinebreak
Of the weltering floods,
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Over heaps of unvalued stones;
\forcelinebreak
Through the dim beams,
\forcelinebreak
Which amid the streams
\forcelinebreak
Weave a network of coloured light,
\forcelinebreak
And under the caves,
\forcelinebreak
Where the shadowy waves
\forcelinebreak
Are as green as the forest’s\footnote{MS. \emph{the bright gold fields.} \forcelinebreak} night:—
\forcelinebreak
Outspeeding the shark,
\forcelinebreak
And the sword fish dark,
\forcelinebreak
Under the Ocean foam,\footnote{MS. pages numbered 11, 12, \&c., to the end instead of 12, 13, \&c. \forcelinebreak}
\forcelinebreak
And up through the rifts
\forcelinebreak
Of the mountain clifts,
\forcelinebreak
They passed to their Dorian Home.
And now from their fountains
\forcelinebreak
In Enna’s mountains,
\forcelinebreak
Down one vale where the morning basks,
\forcelinebreak
Like friends once parted,
\forcelinebreak
Grown single hearted
\forcelinebreak
They ply their watery tasks.
At sunrise they leap
\forcelinebreak
From their cradles steep
\forcelinebreak
In the cave of the shelving hill[,—]
\forcelinebreak
At noontide they flow
\forcelinebreak
Through the woods below
\forcelinebreak
And the meadows of asphodel,—
\forcelinebreak
And at night they sleep
\forcelinebreak
In the rocking deep
\forcelinebreak
Beneath the Ortygian shore;—
\forcelinebreak
Like spirits that lie
\forcelinebreak
In the azure sky,
\forcelinebreak
When they love, but live no more.
Pros. Thanks, Ino dear, you have beguiled an hour
\forcelinebreak
With poesy that might make pause to list
\forcelinebreak
The nightingale in her sweet evening song.
\forcelinebreak
But now no more of ease and idleness,
\forcelinebreak
The sun stoops to the west, and Enna’s plain
\forcelinebreak
Is overshadowed by the growing form
\forcelinebreak
Of giant Etna:—Nymphs, let us arise,
\forcelinebreak
And cull the sweetest flowers of the field,
\forcelinebreak
And with swift fingers twine a blooming wreathe
\forcelinebreak
For my dear Mother’s rich and waving hair.
Eunoe. Violets blue and white anemonies
Bloom on the plain,—but I will climb the brow
\forcelinebreak
Of that o’erhanging hill, to gather thence
\forcelinebreak
That loveliest rose, it will adorn thy crown;
\forcelinebreak
Ino, guard Proserpine till my return.
(Exit.)
Ino. How lovely is this plain!—Nor Grecian vale,
\forcelinebreak
Nor bright Ausonia’s ilex bearing shores,
\forcelinebreak
The myrtle bowers of Aphrodite’s sweet isle,
\forcelinebreak
Or Naxos burthened with the luscious vine,
\forcelinebreak
Can boast such fertile or such verdant fields
\forcelinebreak
As these, which young Spring sprinkles with her stars;—
\forcelinebreak
Nor Crete which boasts fair Amalthea’s horn
\forcelinebreak
Can be compared with the bright golden\footnote{MS. \emph{fawn.} \forcelinebreak} fields
\forcelinebreak
Of Ceres, Queen of plenteous Sicily.
Pros. Sweet Ino, well I know the love you bear
\forcelinebreak
My dearest Mother prompts your partial voice,
\forcelinebreak
And that love makes you doubly dear to me.
\forcelinebreak
But you are idling,—look[,] my lap is full
\forcelinebreak
Of sweetest flowers;—haste to gather more,
\forcelinebreak
That before sunset we may make our crown.
\forcelinebreak
Last night as we strayed through that glade, methought
\forcelinebreak
The wind that swept my cheek bore on its wings
\forcelinebreak
The scent of fragrant violets, hid
\forcelinebreak
Beneath the straggling underwood; Haste, sweet,
\forcelinebreak
To gather them; fear not—I will not stray.
Ino. Nor fear that I shall loiter in my task.
(Exit.)
(By Shelley.)
Pros. \emph{(sings as she gathers her flowers.)}
\forcelinebreak
Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth,
\forcelinebreak
Thou from whose immortal bosom
\forcelinebreak
Gods, and men, and beasts have birth,
\forcelinebreak
Leaf, and blade, and bud, and blossom,
\forcelinebreak
Breathe thine influence most divine
\forcelinebreak
On thine own child Proserpine.
If with mists of evening dew
\forcelinebreak
Thou dost nourish these young flowers
\forcelinebreak
Till they grow in scent and hue
\forcelinebreak
Fairest children of the hours[,]
\forcelinebreak
Breathe thine influence most divine
\forcelinebreak
On thine own child Proserpine.
(she looks around.)
My nymphs have left me, neglecting the commands
\forcelinebreak
Of my dear Mother. Where can they have strayed?
\forcelinebreak
Her caution makes me fear to be alone;—
\forcelinebreak
I’ll pass that yawning cave and seek the spring
\forcelinebreak
Of Arethuse, where water-lilies bloom
\forcelinebreak
Perhaps the nymph now wakes tending her waves,
\forcelinebreak
She loves me well and oft desires my stay,—
The lilies shall adorn my mother’s crown.
(Exit.)
(After a pause enter Eunoe.)
Eun. I’ve won my prize! look at this fragrant rose!
\forcelinebreak
But where is Proserpine? Ino has strayed
\forcelinebreak
Too far I fear, and she will be fatigued,
\forcelinebreak
As I am now, by my long toilsome search.
Enter Ino.
Oh! you here, Wanderer! Where is Proserpine?
Ino. My lap’s heaped up with sweets; dear Proserpine,
\forcelinebreak
You will not chide me now for idleness;—
\forcelinebreak
Look here are all the treasures of the field,—
\forcelinebreak
First these fresh violets, which crouched beneath
\forcelinebreak
A mossy rock, playing at hide and seek
\forcelinebreak
With both the sight and sense through the high fern;
\forcelinebreak
Star-eyed narcissi \& the drooping bells
\forcelinebreak
Of hyacinths; and purple polianthus,
\forcelinebreak
Delightful flowers are these; but where is she,
\forcelinebreak
The loveliest of them all, our Mistress dear?
Eun. I know not, even now I left her here,
\forcelinebreak
Guarded by you, oh Ino, while I climbed
\forcelinebreak
Up yonder steep for this most worthless rose:—
\forcelinebreak
Know you not where she is? Did you forget
\forcelinebreak
Ceres’ behest, and thus forsake her child?
Ino. Chide not, unkind Eunoe, I but went
Down that dark glade, where underneath the shade
\forcelinebreak
Of those high trees the sweetest violets grow,—
\forcelinebreak
I went at her command. Alas! Alas!
\forcelinebreak
My heart sinks down; I dread she may be lost;—
\forcelinebreak
Eunoe, climb the hill, search that ravine,
\forcelinebreak
Whose close, dark sides may hide her from our view:—
\forcelinebreak
Oh, dearest, haste! Is that her snow-white robe?
Eun. No;—’tis a faun9 beside its sleeping Mother,
\forcelinebreak
Browsing the grass;—what will thy Mother say,
\forcelinebreak
Dear Proserpine, what will bright Ceres feel,
\forcelinebreak
If her return be welcomed not by thee?
Ino. These are wild thoughts,—\& we are wrong to fear
\forcelinebreak
That any ill can touch the child of heaven;
\forcelinebreak
She is not lost,—trust me, she has but strayed
\forcelinebreak
Up some steep mountain path, or in yon dell,
\forcelinebreak
Or to the rock where yellow wall-flowers grow,
\forcelinebreak
Scaling with venturous step the narrow path
\forcelinebreak
Which the goats fear to tread;—she will return
\forcelinebreak
And mock our fears.
Eun. The sun now dips his beams
\forcelinebreak
In the bright sea; Ceres descends at eve
\forcelinebreak
From Jove’s high conclave; if her much-loved child
\forcelinebreak
Should meet her not in yonder golden field,
\forcelinebreak
Where to the evening wind the ripe grain waves
Its yellow head, how will her heart misgive.
\forcelinebreak
Let us adjure the Naiad of yon brook[,]
\forcelinebreak
She may perchance have seen our Proserpine,
\forcelinebreak
And tell us to what distant field she’s strayed:—
\forcelinebreak
Wait thou, dear Ino, here, while I repair
\forcelinebreak
To the tree-shaded source of her swift stream.
(Exit Eunoe.)
Ino. Why does my heart misgive? \& scalding tears,
\forcelinebreak
That should but mourn, now prophecy her loss?
\forcelinebreak
Oh, Proserpine! Where’er your luckless fate
\forcelinebreak
Has hurried you,—to wastes of desart sand,
\forcelinebreak
Or black Cymmerian cave, or dread Hell,
\forcelinebreak
Yet Ino still will follow! Look where Eunoe
\forcelinebreak
Comes, with down cast eyes and faltering steps,
\forcelinebreak
I fear the worst;—
Re-enter Eunoe.
Has she not then been seen?
Eun. Alas, all hope is vanished! Hymera says
\forcelinebreak
She slept the livelong day while the hot beams
\forcelinebreak
Of Phoebus drank her waves;—nor did she wake
\forcelinebreak
Until her reed-crowned head was wet with dew;—
\forcelinebreak
If she had passed her grot she slept the while.
Ino. Alas! Alas! I see the golden car,
\forcelinebreak
And hear the flapping of the dragons wings,
\forcelinebreak
Ceres descends to Earth. I dare not stay,
\forcelinebreak
I dare not meet the sorrow of her look[,]
The angry glance of her severest eyes.
Eun. Quick up the mountain! I will search the dell,
\forcelinebreak
She must return, or I will never more.
(Exit.)
Ino. And yet I will not fly, though I fear much
\forcelinebreak
Her angry frown and just reproach, yet shame
\forcelinebreak
Shall quell this childish fear, all hope of safety
\forcelinebreak
For her lost child rests but in her high power,
\forcelinebreak
And yet I tremble as I see her come.
Enter Ceres.
Cer. Where is my daughter? have I aught to dread?
\forcelinebreak
Where does she stray? Ino, you answer not;—
\forcelinebreak
She was aye wont to meet me in yon field,—
\forcelinebreak
Your looks bode ill;—I fear my child is lost.
Ino. Eunoe now seeks her track among the woods;
\forcelinebreak
Fear not, great Ceres, she has only strayed.
Cer. Alas! My boding heart,—I dread the worst.
\forcelinebreak
Oh, careless nymphs! oh, heedless Proserpine!
\forcelinebreak
And did you leave her wandering by herself?
\forcelinebreak
She is immortal,—yet unusual fear
\forcelinebreak
Runs through my veins. Let all the woods be sought,
\forcelinebreak
Let every dryad, every gamesome faun\footnote{MS. \emph{fawn.}}
\forcelinebreak
Tell where they last beheld her snowy feet
\forcelinebreak
Tread the soft, mossy paths of the wild wood.
\forcelinebreak
But that I see the base of Etna firm
\forcelinebreak
I well might fear that she had fallen a prey
To Earth-born Typheus, who might have arisen
\forcelinebreak
And seized her as the fairest child of heaven,
\forcelinebreak
That in his dreary caverns she lies bound;
\forcelinebreak
It is not so: all is as safe and calm
\forcelinebreak
As when I left my child. Oh, fatal day!
\forcelinebreak
Eunoe does not return: in vain she seeks
\forcelinebreak
Through the black woods and down the darksome glades,
\forcelinebreak
And night is hiding all things from our view.
\forcelinebreak
I will away, and on the highest top
\forcelinebreak
Of snowy Etna, kindle two clear flames.
\forcelinebreak
Night shall not hide her from my anxious search,
\forcelinebreak
No moment will I rest, or sleep, or pause
\forcelinebreak
Till she returns, until I clasp again
\forcelinebreak
My only loved one, my lost Proserpine.
END OF ACT FIRST.
\bigskip
\section{ACT II}
Scene.
\forcelinebreak
The Plain of Enna as before.
\forcelinebreak
Enter Ino \& Eunoe.
Eun. How weary am I! and the hot sun flushes
\forcelinebreak
My cheeks that else were white with fear and grief[.]
\forcelinebreak
E’er since that fatal day, dear sister nymph,
\forcelinebreak
On which we lost our lovely Proserpine,
\forcelinebreak
I have but wept and watched the livelong night
\forcelinebreak
And all the day have wandered through the woods[.]
Ino. How all is changed since that unhappy eve!
\forcelinebreak
Ceres forever weeps, seeking her child,
\forcelinebreak
And in her rage has struck the land with blight;
\forcelinebreak
Trinacria mourns with her;—its fertile fields
\forcelinebreak
Are dry and barren, and all little brooks
\forcelinebreak
Struggling scarce creep within their altered banks;
\forcelinebreak
The flowers that erst were wont with bended heads,
\forcelinebreak
To gaze within the clear and glassy wave,
\forcelinebreak
Have died, unwatered by the failing stream.—
\forcelinebreak
And yet their hue but mocks the deeper grief
\forcelinebreak
Which is the fountain of these bitter tears.
\forcelinebreak
But who is this, that with such eager looks
Hastens this way?—
Eun. ’Tis fairest Arethuse,
\forcelinebreak
A stranger naiad, yet you know her well.
Ino. My eyes were blind with tears.
Enter Arethusa.
Dear Arethuse,
\forcelinebreak
Methinks I read glad tidings in your eyes,
\forcelinebreak
Your smiles are the swift messengers that bear
\forcelinebreak
A tale of coming joy, which we, alas!
\forcelinebreak
Can answer but with tears, unless you bring
\forcelinebreak
To our grief solace, Hope to our Despair.
\forcelinebreak
Have you found Proserpine? or know you where
\forcelinebreak
The loved nymph wanders, hidden from our search?
Areth. Where is corn-crowned Ceres? I have hastened
\forcelinebreak
To ease her anxious heart.
Eun. Oh! dearest Naiad,
\forcelinebreak
Herald of joy! Now will great Ceres bless
\forcelinebreak
Thy welcome coming \& more welcome tale.
Ino. Since that unhappy day when Ceres lost
\forcelinebreak
Her much-loved child, she wanders through the isle;
\forcelinebreak
Dark blight is showered from her looks of sorrow;—
\forcelinebreak
And where tall corn and all seed-bearing grass
\forcelinebreak
Rose from beneath her step, they wither now
Fading under the frown of her bent brows:
\forcelinebreak
The springs decrease;—the fields whose delicate green
\forcelinebreak
Was late her chief delight, now please alone,
\forcelinebreak
Because they, withered, seem to share her grief.
Areth. Unhappy Goddess! how I pity thee!
Ino. At night upon high Etna’s topmost peak
\forcelinebreak
She lights two flames, that shining through the isle
\forcelinebreak
Leave dark no wood, or cave, or mountain path,
\forcelinebreak
Their sunlike splendour makes the moon-beams dim,
\forcelinebreak
And the bright stars are lost within their day.
\forcelinebreak
She’s in yon field,—she comes towards this plain,
\forcelinebreak
Her loosened hair has fallen on her neck,
\forcelinebreak
Uncircled by the coronal of grain:—
\forcelinebreak
Her cheeks are wan,—her step is faint \& slow.
Enter Ceres.
Cer. I faint with weariness: a dreadful thirst
\forcelinebreak
Possesses me! Must I give up the search?
\forcelinebreak
Oh! never, dearest Proserpine, until
\forcelinebreak
I once more clasp thee in my vacant arms!
\forcelinebreak
Help me, dear Arethuse! fill some deep shell
\forcelinebreak
With the clear waters of thine ice-cold spring,
\forcelinebreak
And bring it me;—I faint with heat and thirst.
Areth. My words are better than my freshest waves[:]
I saw your Proserpine—
Cer. Arethusa, where?
\forcelinebreak
Tell me! my heart beats quick, \& hope and fear
\forcelinebreak
Cause my weak limbs to fail me.—
Areth. Sit, Goddess,
\forcelinebreak
Upon this mossy bank, beneath the shade
\forcelinebreak
Of this tall rock, and I will tell my tale.
\forcelinebreak
The day you lost your child, I left my source.
\forcelinebreak
With my Alpheus I had wandered down
\forcelinebreak
The sloping shore into the sunbright sea;
\forcelinebreak
And at the coast we paused, watching the waves
\forcelinebreak
Of our mixed waters dance into the main:—
\forcelinebreak
When suddenly I heard the thundering tread
\forcelinebreak
Of iron hoofed steeds trampling the ground,
\forcelinebreak
And a faint shriek that made my blood run cold.
\forcelinebreak
I saw the King of Hell in his black car,
\forcelinebreak
And in his arms he bore your fairest child,
\forcelinebreak
Fair as the moon encircled by the night,—
\forcelinebreak
But that she strove, and cast her arms aloft,
\forcelinebreak
And cried, “My Mother!”—When she saw me near
\forcelinebreak
She would have sprung from his detested arms,
\forcelinebreak
And with a tone of deepest grief, she cried,
\forcelinebreak
“Oh, Arethuse!” I hastened at her call—
\forcelinebreak
But Pluto when he saw that aid was nigh,
\forcelinebreak
Struck furiously the green earth with his spear,
Which yawned,—and down the deep Tartarian gulph
\forcelinebreak
His black car rolled—the green earth closed above.
Cer. (\emph{starting up})
\forcelinebreak
Is this thy doom, great Jove? \& shall Hell’s king
\forcelinebreak
Quitting dark Tartarus, spread grief and tears
\forcelinebreak
Among the dwellers of your bright abodes?
\forcelinebreak
Then let him seize the earth itself, the stars,—
\forcelinebreak
And all your wide dominion be his prey!—
\forcelinebreak
Your sister calls upon your love, great King!
\forcelinebreak
As you are God I do demand your help!—
\forcelinebreak
Restore my child, or let all heaven sink,
\forcelinebreak
And the fair world be chaos once again!
Ino. Look[!] in the East that loveliest bow is formed[;]
\forcelinebreak
Heaven’s single-arched bridge, it touches now
\forcelinebreak
The Earth, and ’mid the pathless wastes of heaven
\forcelinebreak
It paves a way for Jove’s fair Messenger;—
\forcelinebreak
Iris descends, and towards this field she comes.
Areth. Sovereign of Harvests, ’tis the Messenger
\forcelinebreak
That will bring joy to thee. Thine eyes light up
\forcelinebreak
With sparkling hope, thy cheeks are pale with dread.
Enter Iris.
Cer. Speak, heavenly Iris! let thy words be poured
\forcelinebreak
Into my drooping soul, like dews of eve
\forcelinebreak
On a too long parched field.—Where is my Proserpine?
Iris. Sister of Heaven, as by Joves throne I stood
\forcelinebreak
The voice of thy deep prayer arose,—it filled
\forcelinebreak
The heavenly courts with sorrow and dismay:
\forcelinebreak
The Thunderer frowned, \& heaven shook with dread
\forcelinebreak
I bear his will to thee, ’tis fixed by fate,
\forcelinebreak
Nor prayer nor murmur e’er can alter it.
\forcelinebreak
If Proserpine while she has lived in hell
\forcelinebreak
Has not polluted by Tartarian food
\forcelinebreak
Her heavenly essence, then she may return,
\forcelinebreak
And wander without fear on Enna’s plain,
\forcelinebreak
Or take her seat among the Gods above.
\forcelinebreak
If she has touched the fruits of Erebus,
\forcelinebreak
She never may return to upper air,
\forcelinebreak
But doomed to dwell amidst the shades of death,
\forcelinebreak
The wife of Pluto and the Queen of Hell.
Cer. Joy treads upon the sluggish heels of care!
\forcelinebreak
The child of heaven disdains Tartarian food.
\forcelinebreak
Pluto[,] give up thy prey! restore my child!
Iris. Soon she will see again the sun of Heaven,
\forcelinebreak
By gloomy shapes, inhabitants of Hell,
\forcelinebreak
Attended, and again behold the field
\forcelinebreak
Of Enna, the fair flowers \& the streams,
\forcelinebreak
Her late delight,—\& more than all, her Mother.
Ino. Our much-loved, long-lost Mistress, do you come?
And shall once more your nymphs attend your steps?
\forcelinebreak
Will you again irradiate this isle—
\forcelinebreak
That drooped when you were lost?\footnote{MS. \emph{this isle?—That drooped when you were lost} \forcelinebreak} \& once again
\forcelinebreak
Trinacria smile beneath your Mother’s eye?
(Ceres and her companions are ranged on one side in eager
\forcelinebreak
expectation; from, the cave on the other, enter Proserpine,
\forcelinebreak
attended by various dark \& gloomy shapes bearing
\forcelinebreak
torches; among which Ascalaphus. Ceres \& Proserpine
\forcelinebreak
embrace;—her nymphs surround her.)
Cer. Welcome, dear Proserpine! Welcome to light,
\forcelinebreak
To this green earth and to your Mother’s arms.
\forcelinebreak
You are too beautiful for Pluto’s Queen;
\forcelinebreak
In the dark Stygian air your blooming cheeks
\forcelinebreak
Have lost their roseate tint, and your bright form
\forcelinebreak
Has faded in that night unfit for thee.
Pros. Then I again behold thee, Mother dear:—
\forcelinebreak
Again I tread the flowery plain of Enna,
\forcelinebreak
And clasp thee, Arethuse, \& you, my nymphs;
\forcelinebreak
I have escaped from hateful Tartarus,
\forcelinebreak
The abode of furies and all loathed shapes
\forcelinebreak
That thronged around me, making hell more black.
\forcelinebreak
Oh! I could worship thee, light giving Sun,
\forcelinebreak
Who spreadest warmth and radiance o’er the world.
\forcelinebreak
Look at\footnote{MS. Look at—the branches. \forcelinebreak} the branches of those chesnut trees,
\forcelinebreak
That wave to the soft breezes, while their stems
Are tinged with red by the sun’s slanting rays.
\forcelinebreak
And the soft clouds that float ’twixt earth and sky.
\forcelinebreak
How sweet are all these sights! There all is night!
\forcelinebreak
No God like that (\emph{pointing to the sun})
\forcelinebreak
smiles on the Elysian plains,
\forcelinebreak
The air [is] windless, and all shapes are still.
Iris. And must I interpose in this deep joy,
\forcelinebreak
And sternly cloud your hopes? Oh! answer me,
\forcelinebreak
Art thou still, Proserpine, a child of light?
\forcelinebreak
Or hast thou dimmed thy attributes of Heaven
\forcelinebreak
By such Tartarian food as must for ever
\forcelinebreak
Condemn thee to be Queen of Hell \& Night?
Pros. No, Iris, no,—I still am pure as thee:
\forcelinebreak
Offspring of light and air, I have no stain
\forcelinebreak
Of Hell. I am for ever thine, oh, Mother!
Cer. (\emph{to the shades from Hell})
\forcelinebreak
Begone, foul visitants to upper air!
\forcelinebreak
Back to your dens! nor stain the sunny earth
\forcelinebreak
By shadows thrown from forms so foul—Crouch in!
\forcelinebreak
Proserpine, child of light, is not your Queen!
(to the nymphs)
Quick bring my car,—we will ascend to heaven,
\forcelinebreak
Deserting Earth, till by decree of Jove,
\forcelinebreak
Eternal laws shall bind the King of Hell
\forcelinebreak
To leave in peace the offspring of the sky.
Ascal. Stay, Ceres! By the dread decree of Jove
Your child is doomed to be eternal Queen
\forcelinebreak
Of Tartarus,—nor may she dare ascend
\forcelinebreak
The sunbright regions of Olympian Jove,
\forcelinebreak
Or tread the green Earth ’mid attendant nymphs.
\forcelinebreak
Proserpine, call to mind your walk last eve,
\forcelinebreak
When as you wandered in Elysian groves,
\forcelinebreak
Through bowers for ever green, and mossy walks,
\forcelinebreak
Where flowers never die, nor wind disturbs
\forcelinebreak
The sacred calm, whose silence soothes the dead,
\forcelinebreak
Nor interposing clouds, with dun wings, dim
\forcelinebreak
Its mild and silver light, you plucked its fruit,
\forcelinebreak
You ate of a pomegranate’s seeds—
Cer. Be silent,
\forcelinebreak
Prophet of evil, hateful to the Gods!
\forcelinebreak
Sweet Proserpine, my child, look upon me.
\forcelinebreak
You shrink; your trembling form \& pallid cheeks
\forcelinebreak
Would make his words seem true which are most false[.]
\forcelinebreak
Thou didst not taste the food of Erebus;—
\forcelinebreak
Offspring of Gods art thou,—nor Hell, nor Jove
\forcelinebreak
Shall tear thee from thy Mother’s clasping arms.
Pros. If fate decrees, can we resist? farewel!
\forcelinebreak
Oh! Mother, dearer to your child than light,
Than all the forms of this sweet earth \& sky,
\forcelinebreak
Though dear are these, and dear are my poor nymphs,
\forcelinebreak
Whom I must leave;—oh! can immortals weep?
\forcelinebreak
And can a Goddess die as mortals do,
\forcelinebreak
Or live \& reign where it is death to be?
\forcelinebreak
Ino, dear Arethuse, again you lose
\forcelinebreak
Your hapless Proserpine, lost to herself
\forcelinebreak
When she quits you for gloomy Tartarus.
Cer. Is there no help, great Jove? If she depart
\forcelinebreak
I will descend with her—the Earth shall lose
\forcelinebreak
Its proud fertility, and Erebus
\forcelinebreak
Shall bear my gifts throughout th’ unchanging year.
\forcelinebreak
Valued till now by thee, tyrant of Gods!
\forcelinebreak
My harvests ripening by Tartarian fires
\forcelinebreak
Shall feed the dead with Heaven’s ambrosial food.
\forcelinebreak
Wilt thou not then repent, brother unkind,
\forcelinebreak
Viewing the barren earth with vain regret,
\forcelinebreak
Thou didst not shew more mercy to my child?
Ino. We will all leave the light and go with thee,
\forcelinebreak
In Hell thou shalt be girt by Heaven-born nymphs,
\forcelinebreak
Elysium shall be Enna,—thou’lt not mourn
\forcelinebreak
Thy natal plain, which will have lost its worth
\forcelinebreak
Having lost thee, its nursling and its Queen.
Areth. I will sink down with thee;—my lily crown
Shall bloom in Erebus, portentous loss
\forcelinebreak
To Earth, which by degrees will fade \& fall
\forcelinebreak
In envy of our happier lot in Hell;—
\forcelinebreak
And the bright sun and the fresh winds of heaven
\forcelinebreak
Shall light its depths and fan its stagnant air.
(They cling round Proserpine; the Shades of Hell seperate
\forcelinebreak
and stand between them.)
Ascal. Depart! She is our Queen! Ye may not come!
\forcelinebreak
Hark to Jove’s thunder! shrink away in fear
\forcelinebreak
From unknown forms, whose tyranny ye’ll feel
\forcelinebreak
In groans and tears if ye insult their power.
Iris. Behold Jove’s balance hung in upper sky;
\forcelinebreak
There are ye weighed,—to that ye must submit.
Cer. Oh! Jove, have mercy on a Mother’s prayer!
\forcelinebreak
Shall it be nought to be akin to thee?
\forcelinebreak
And shall thy sister, Queen of fertile Earth,
\forcelinebreak
Derided be by these foul shapes of Hell?
\forcelinebreak
Look at the scales, they’re poized with equal weights!
\forcelinebreak
What can this mean? Leave me not[,] Proserpine[,]
\forcelinebreak
Cling to thy Mother’s side! He shall not dare
\forcelinebreak
Divide the sucker from the parent stem.
(embraces her)
Ascal. He is almighty! who shall set the bounds
\forcelinebreak
To his high will? let him decide our plea!
\forcelinebreak
Fate is with us, \& Proserpine is ours!
(He endeavours to part Ceres \& Proserpine, the nymphs
\forcelinebreak
prevent him.)
Cer. Peace, ominous bird of Hell \& Night! Depart!
\forcelinebreak
Nor with thy skriech disturb a Mother’s grief,
\forcelinebreak
Avaunt! It is to Jove we pray, not thee.
Iris. Thy fate, sweet Proserpine, is sealed by Jove,
\forcelinebreak
When Enna is starred by flowers, and the sun
\forcelinebreak
Shoots his hot rays strait on the gladsome land,
\forcelinebreak
When Summer reigns, then thou shalt live on Earth,
\forcelinebreak
And tread these plains, or sporting with your nymphs,
\forcelinebreak
Or at your Mother’s side, in peaceful joy.
\forcelinebreak
But when hard frost congeals the bare, black ground,
\forcelinebreak
The trees have lost their leaves, \& painted birds
\forcelinebreak
Wailing for food sail through the piercing air;
\forcelinebreak
Then you descend to deepest night and reign
\forcelinebreak
Great Queen of Tartarus, ’mid\footnote{MS. \emph{mid}} shadows dire,
\forcelinebreak
Offspring of Hell,—or in the silent groves
\forcelinebreak
Of, fair Elysium through which Lethe runs,
\forcelinebreak
The sleepy river; where the windless air
\forcelinebreak
Is never struck by flight or song of bird,—
But all is calm and clear, bestowing rest,
\forcelinebreak
After the toil of life, to wretched men,
\forcelinebreak
Whom thus the Gods reward for sufferings
\forcelinebreak
Gods cannot know; a throng of empty shades!
\forcelinebreak
The endless circle of the year will bring
\forcelinebreak
Joy in its turn, and seperation sad;
\forcelinebreak
Six months to light and Earth,—six months to Hell.
Pros. Dear Mother, let me kiss that tear which steals
\forcelinebreak
Down your pale cheek altered by care and grief.
\forcelinebreak
This is not misery; ’tis but a slight change
\forcelinebreak
Prom our late happy lot. Six months with thee,
\forcelinebreak
Each moment freighted with an age of love:
\forcelinebreak
And the six short months in saddest Tartarus
\forcelinebreak
Shall pass in dreams of swift returning joy.
\forcelinebreak
Six months together we shall dwell on earth,
\forcelinebreak
Six months in dreams we shall companions be,
\forcelinebreak
Jove’s doom is void; we are forever joined.
Cer. Oh, fairest child! sweet summer visitor!
\forcelinebreak
Thy looks cheer me, so shall they cheer this land
\forcelinebreak
Which I will fly, thou gone. Nor seed of grass,
\forcelinebreak
Or corn shall grow, thou absent from the earth;
\forcelinebreak
But all shall lie beneath in hateful night
Until at thy return, the fresh green springs,
\forcelinebreak
The fields are covered o’er with summer plants.
\forcelinebreak
And when thou goest the heavy grain will droop
\forcelinebreak
And die under my frown, scattering the seeds,
\forcelinebreak
That will not reappear till your return.
\forcelinebreak
Farewel, sweet child, Queen of the nether world,
\forcelinebreak
There shine as chaste Diana’s silver car
\forcelinebreak
Islanded in the deep circumfluous night.
\forcelinebreak
Giver of fruits! for such thou shalt be styled,
\forcelinebreak
Sweet Prophetess of Summer, coming forth
\forcelinebreak
From the slant shadow of the wintry earth,
\forcelinebreak
In thy car drawn by snowy-breasted swallows!
\forcelinebreak
Another kiss, \& then again farewel!
\forcelinebreak
Winter in losing thee has lost its all,
\forcelinebreak
And will be doubly bare, \& hoar, \& drear,
\forcelinebreak
Its bleak winds whistling o’er the cold pinched ground
\forcelinebreak
Which neither flower or grass will decorate.
\forcelinebreak
And as my tears fall first, so shall the trees
\forcelinebreak
Shed their changed leaves upon your six months tomb:
\forcelinebreak
The clouded air will hide from Phoebus’ eye
\forcelinebreak
The dreadful change your absence operates.
\forcelinebreak
Thus has black Pluto changed the reign of Jove,
\forcelinebreak
He seizes half the Earth when he takes thee.
THE END
\bigskip
\chapter{MIDAS. A DRAMA IN TWO ACTS.}
\section{DRAMATIS PERSONAE}
\emph{Immortals.}
\forcelinebreak
Apollo.
\forcelinebreak
Bacchus.
\forcelinebreak
Pan.
\forcelinebreak
Silenus.
\forcelinebreak
Tmolus, God of a Hill.
\forcelinebreak
Fauns, \&c.
\forcelinebreak
\noindent
\emph{Mortals.}
\forcelinebreak
Midas, King of Phrygia.
\forcelinebreak
Zopyrion, his Prime-Minister.
\forcelinebreak
Asphalion, Lacon, Courtiers.
\forcelinebreak
Courtiers, Attendants, Priests, \&c.
Scene, Phrygia.
\section{ACT I.}
Scene; a rural spot; on one side, a bare Hill, on the other an Ilex wood; a stream with reeds on its banks.
The Curtain rises and discovers Tmolus seated on a throne of turf, on his right hand Apollo with his lyre, attended by the Muses; on the left, Pan, fauns, \&c.
Enter Midas and Zopyrion.
Midas. The Hours have oped the palace of the dawn
\forcelinebreak
And through the Eastern gates of Heaven, Aurora
\forcelinebreak
Comes charioted on light, her wind-swift steeds,
\forcelinebreak
Winged with roseate clouds, strain up the steep.
\forcelinebreak
She loosely holds the reins, her golden hair,
\forcelinebreak
Its strings outspread by the sweet morning breeze[,]
\forcelinebreak
Blinds the pale stars. Our rural tasks begin;
\forcelinebreak
The young lambs bleat pent up within the fold,
\forcelinebreak
The herds low in their stalls, \& the blithe cock
\forcelinebreak
Halloos most loudly to his distant mates.
\forcelinebreak
But who are these we see? these are not men,
\forcelinebreak
Divine of form \& sple[n]didly arrayed,
They sit in solemn conclave. Is that Pan,
\forcelinebreak
Our Country God, surrounded by his Fauns?
\forcelinebreak
And who is he whose crown of gold \& harp
\forcelinebreak
Are attributes of high Apollo?
Zopyr. Best
\forcelinebreak
Your majesty retire; we may offend.
Midas. Aye, and at the base thought the coward blood
\forcelinebreak
Deserts your trembling lips; but follow me.
\forcelinebreak
Oh Gods! for such your bearing is, \& sure
\forcelinebreak
No mortal ever yet possessed the gold
\forcelinebreak
That glitters on your silken robes; may one,
\forcelinebreak
Who, though a king, can boast of no descent
\forcelinebreak
More noble than Deucalion’s stone-formed men[,]
\forcelinebreak
May I demand the cause for which you deign
\forcelinebreak
To print upon this worthless Phrygian earth
\forcelinebreak
The vestige of your gold-inwoven sandals,
\forcelinebreak
Or why that old white-headed man sits there
\forcelinebreak
Upon that grassy throne, \& looks as he
\forcelinebreak
Were stationed umpire to some weighty cause[?]
Tmolus. God Pan with his blithe pipe which the Fauns love
\forcelinebreak
Has challenged Phoebus of the golden lyre[,]
\forcelinebreak
Saying his Syrinx can give sweeter notes
\forcelinebreak
Than the stringed instrument Apollo boasts.
\forcelinebreak
I judge between the parties. Welcome, King,
I am old Tmolus, God of that bare Hill,
\forcelinebreak
You may remain and hear th’ Immortals sing.
Mid. [\emph{aside}] My judgement is made up before I hear;
\forcelinebreak
Pan is my guardian God, old-horned Pan,
\forcelinebreak
The Phrygian’s God who watches o’er our flocks;
\forcelinebreak
No harmony can equal his blithe pipe.
(Shelley.)
Apollo (sings).
The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie,
\forcelinebreak
Curtained with star-enwoven tapestries,
\forcelinebreak
From the broad moonlight of the sky,
\forcelinebreak
Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes
\forcelinebreak
Waken me when their Mother, the grey Dawn,
\forcelinebreak
Tells them that dreams \& that the moon is gone.
Then I arise, and climbing Heaven’s blue dome,
\forcelinebreak
I walk over the mountains \& the waves,
\forcelinebreak
Leaving my robe upon the Ocean foam,—
\forcelinebreak
My footsteps pave the clouds with fire; the caves
\forcelinebreak
Are filled with my bright presence \& the air
\forcelinebreak
Leaves the green Earth to my embraces bare.
The sunbeams are my shafts with which I kill
\forcelinebreak
Deceit, that loves the night \& fears the day;
\forcelinebreak
All men who do, or even imagine ill
\forcelinebreak
Fly me, and from the glory of my ray
\forcelinebreak
Good minds and open actions take new might
\forcelinebreak
Until diminished by the reign of night.
I feed the clouds, the rainbows \& the flowers
\forcelinebreak
With their etherial colours; the moon’s globe
\forcelinebreak
And the pure stars in their eternal bowers
\forcelinebreak
Are cinctured with my power as with a robe;
\forcelinebreak
Whatever lamps on Earth or Heaven may shine
\forcelinebreak
Are portions of one power, which is mine.
I stand at noon upon the peak of heaven,
\forcelinebreak
Then with unwilling steps I wander down
\forcelinebreak
Into the clouds of the Atlantic even—
\forcelinebreak
For grief that I depart they weep \& frown [;]
\forcelinebreak
What look is more delightful than the smile
\forcelinebreak
With which I soothe them from the western isle [?]
I am the eye with which the Universe
\forcelinebreak
Beholds itself \& knows it is divine.
\forcelinebreak
All harmony of instrument or verse,
\forcelinebreak
All prophecy, all medecine is mine;
\forcelinebreak
All light of art or nature;—to my song
\forcelinebreak
Victory and praise, in its own right, belong.
(Shelley.)
Pan (sings).
From the forests and highlands
\forcelinebreak
We come, we come;
\forcelinebreak
From the river-girt islands
\forcelinebreak
W[h]ere loud waves are dumb,
\forcelinebreak
Listening my sweet pipings;
The wind in the reeds \& the rushes,
\forcelinebreak
The bees on the bells of thyme,
\forcelinebreak
The birds on the myrtle bushes[,]
\forcelinebreak
The cicale above in the lime[,]
\forcelinebreak
And the lizards below in the grass,
\forcelinebreak
Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was
\forcelinebreak
Listening my sweet pipings.
Liquid Peneus was flowing,
\forcelinebreak
And all dark Tempe lay
\forcelinebreak
In Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing
\forcelinebreak
The light of the dying day
\forcelinebreak
Speeded by my sweet pipings.
\forcelinebreak
The Sileni, \& Sylvans, \& Fauns
\forcelinebreak
And the nymphs of the woods \& the waves
\forcelinebreak
To the edge of the moist river-lawns,
\forcelinebreak
And the brink of the dewy caves[,]
\forcelinebreak
And all that did then attend \& follow
\forcelinebreak
Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo!
\forcelinebreak
With envy of my sweet pipings.
I sang of the dancing stars,
\forcelinebreak
I sang of the daedal Earth—-
\forcelinebreak
And of heaven—\& the giant wars—
\forcelinebreak
And Love, \& death, [\&] birth,
And then I changed my pipings,
\forcelinebreak
Singing how down the vale of Menalus,
\forcelinebreak
I pursued a maiden \& clasped a reed,
\forcelinebreak
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
\forcelinebreak
It breaks in our bosom \& then we bleed!
\forcelinebreak
All wept, as I think both ye now would
\forcelinebreak
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
\forcelinebreak
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.
Tmol. Phoebus, the palm is thine. The Fauns may dance
\forcelinebreak
To the blithe tune of ever merry Pan;
\forcelinebreak
But wisdom, beauty, \& the power divine
\forcelinebreak
Of highest poesy lives within thy strain.
\forcelinebreak
Named by the Gods the King of melody,
\forcelinebreak
Receive from my weak hands a second crown.
Pan. Old Grey-beard, you say false! you think by this
\forcelinebreak
To win Apollo with his sultry beams
\forcelinebreak
To thaw your snowy head, \& to renew
\forcelinebreak
The worn out soil of your bare, ugly hill.
\forcelinebreak
I do appeal to Phrygian Midas here;
\forcelinebreak
Let him decide, he is no partial judge.
Mid. Immortal Pan, to my poor, mortal ears
\forcelinebreak
Your sprightly song in melody outweighs
\forcelinebreak
His drowsy tune; he put me fast asleep,
\forcelinebreak
As my prime minister, Zopyrion, knows;
But your gay notes awoke me, \& to you,
\forcelinebreak
If I were Tmolus, would I give the prize.
Apol. And who art thou who dar’st among the Gods
\forcelinebreak
Mingle thy mortal voice? Insensate fool!
\forcelinebreak
Does not the doom of Marsyas fill with dread
\forcelinebreak
Thy impious soul? or would’st thou also be
\forcelinebreak
Another victim to my justest wrath?
\forcelinebreak
But fear no more;—thy punishment shall be
\forcelinebreak
But as a symbol of thy blunted sense.
\forcelinebreak
Have asses’ ears! and thus to the whole world
\forcelinebreak
Wear thou the marks of what thou art,
\forcelinebreak
Let Pan himself blush at such a judge.\footnote{A syllable here, a whole foot in the previous line, appear to be missing. \forcelinebreak}
(Exeunt all except Midas \& Zopyrion.)
Mid. What said he? is it true, Zopyrion?
\forcelinebreak
Yet if it be; you must not look on me,
\forcelinebreak
But shut your eyes, nor dare behold my shame.
\forcelinebreak
Ah! here they are! two long, smooth asses[’] ears!
\forcelinebreak
They stick upright! Ah, I am sick with shame!
Zopyr. I cannot tell your Majesty my grief,
\forcelinebreak
Or how my soul’s oppressed with the sad change
\forcelinebreak
That has, alas! befallen your royal ears.
Mid. A truce to your fine speeches now, Zopyrion;
\forcelinebreak
To you it appertains to find some mode
\forcelinebreak
Of hiding my sad chance, if not you die.
Zopyr. Great King, alas! my thoughts are dull \& slow[;]
Pardon my folly, might they not be cut,
\forcelinebreak
Rounded off handsomely, like human ears [?]
Mid. (\emph{feeling his ears})
\forcelinebreak
They’re long \& thick; I fear ’twould give me pain;
\forcelinebreak
And then if vengeful Phoebus should command
\forcelinebreak
Another pair to grow—that will not do.
Zopyr. You wear a little crown of carved gold,
\forcelinebreak
Which just appears to tell you are a king;
\forcelinebreak
If that were large and had a cowl of silk,
\forcelinebreak
Studded with gems, which none would dare gainsay,
\forcelinebreak
Then might you—
Mid. Now you have it! friend,
\forcelinebreak
I will reward you with some princely gift.
\forcelinebreak
But, hark! Zopyrion, not a word of this;
\forcelinebreak
If to a single soul you tell my shame
\forcelinebreak
You die. I’ll to the palace the back way
\forcelinebreak
And manufacture my new diadem,
\forcelinebreak
The which all other kings shall imitate
\forcelinebreak
As if they also had my asses[’] ears.
(Exit.)
Zopyr. (\emph{watching Midas off})
\forcelinebreak
He cannot hear me now, and I may laugh!
\forcelinebreak
I should have burst had he staid longer here.
\forcelinebreak
Two long, smooth asses’ ears that stick upright;
\forcelinebreak
Oh, that Apollo had but made him bray!
\forcelinebreak
I’ll to the palace; there I’ll laugh my fill
With—hold! What were the last words that Midas said?
\forcelinebreak
I may not speak—not to my friends disclose
\forcelinebreak
The strangest tale? ha! ha! and when I laugh
\forcelinebreak
I must not tell the cause? none know the truth?
\forcelinebreak
None know King Midas has—but who comes here?
\forcelinebreak
It is Asphalion: he knows not this change;
\forcelinebreak
I must look grave \& sad; for now a smile
\forcelinebreak
If Midas knows it may prove capital.
\forcelinebreak
Yet when I think of those—oh! I shall die,
\forcelinebreak
In either way, by silence or by speech.
Enter Asphalion.
Asphal. Know you, Zopyrion?—
Zopyr. What[!] you know it too?
\forcelinebreak
Then I may laugh;—oh, what relief is this!
\forcelinebreak
How does he look, the courtiers gathering round?
\forcelinebreak
Does he hang down his head, \& his ears too?
\forcelinebreak
Oh, I shall die! (\emph{laughs.})
Asph. He is a queer old dog,
\forcelinebreak
Yet not so laughable. ’Tis true, he’s drunk,
\forcelinebreak
And sings and reels under the broad, green leaves,
\forcelinebreak
And hanging clusters of his crown of grapes.—
Zopyr. A crown of grapes! but can that hide his ears[?]
Asph. His ears!—Oh, no! they stick upright between.
\forcelinebreak
When Midas saw him—
Zopyr. Whom then do you mean?
Did you not say—
Asph. I spoke of old Silenus;
\forcelinebreak
Who having missed his way in these wild woods,
\forcelinebreak
And lost his tipsey company—was found
\forcelinebreak
Sucking the juicy clusters of the vines
\forcelinebreak
That sprung where’er he trod:—and reeling on
\forcelinebreak
Some shepherds found him in yon ilex wood.
\forcelinebreak
They brought him to the king, who honouring him
\forcelinebreak
For Bacchus’ sake, has gladly welcomed him,
\forcelinebreak
And will conduct him with solemnity
\forcelinebreak
To the disconsolate Fauns from whom he’s strayed.
\forcelinebreak
But have you seen the new-fashioned diadem\footnote{Another halting line. Cf. again, p. [47], 1. 3; p. [55], 1. 11; p. [59], 1.1; p. [61], 1. 1; p. [64], 1. 14.]}
\forcelinebreak
That Midas wears?—
Zopyr. Ha! he has got it on!—
\forcelinebreak
Know you the secret cause why with such care
\forcelinebreak
He hides his royal head? you have not seen—
Asph. Seen what?
Zopyr. Ah! then, no matter:— (\emph{turns away agitated.})
\forcelinebreak
I dare not sneak or stay[;]
\forcelinebreak
If I remain I shall discover all.
Asp. I see the king has trusted to your care
\forcelinebreak
Some great state secret which you fain would hide.
\forcelinebreak
I am your friend, trust my fidelity,
If you’re in doubt I’ll be your counsellor.
Zopyr. (\emph{with great importance.})
\forcelinebreak
Secret, Asphalion! How came you to know?
\forcelinebreak
If my great master (which I do not say)
\forcelinebreak
Should think me a fit friend in whom to pour
\forcelinebreak
The weighty secrets of his royal heart,
\forcelinebreak
Shall I betray his trust? It is not so;—
\forcelinebreak
I am a poor despised slave.—No more!
\forcelinebreak
Join we the festal band which will conduct
\forcelinebreak
Silenus to his woods again?
Asph. My friend,
\forcelinebreak
Wherefore mistrust a faithful heart? Confide
\forcelinebreak
The whole to me;—I will be still as death.
Zopyr. As death! you know not what you say; farewell[!]
\forcelinebreak
A little will I commune with my soul,
\forcelinebreak
And then I’ll join you at the palace-gate.
Asph. Will you then tell me?—
Zopyr. Cease to vex, my friend,
\forcelinebreak
Your soul and mine with false suspicion, (\emph{aside}) Oh!
\forcelinebreak
I am choked! I’d give full ten years of my life
\forcelinebreak
To tell, to laugh—\& yet I dare not speak.
Asph. Zopyrion, remember that you hurt
\forcelinebreak
The trusting bosom of a faithful friend
\forcelinebreak
By your unjust concealment.
(Exit.)
Zopyr. Oh, he’s gone!
\forcelinebreak
To him I dare not speak, nor yet to Lacon;
\forcelinebreak
No human ears may hear what must be told.
\forcelinebreak
I cannot keep it in, assuredly;
\forcelinebreak
I shall some night discuss it in my sleep.
\forcelinebreak
It will not keep! Oh! greenest reeds that sway
\forcelinebreak
And nod your feathered heads beneath the sun,
\forcelinebreak
Be you depositaries of my soul,
\forcelinebreak
Be you my friends in this extremity[:]
\forcelinebreak
I shall not risk my head when I tell you
\forcelinebreak
The fatal truth, the heart oppressing fact,
(stooping down \& whispering)
(Enter Midas, Silenus \& others, who fall back during the scene; Midas is always anxious about his crown, \& Zopyrion gets behind him \& tries to smother his laughter.)
Silen. (\emph{very drunk}) Again I find you, Bacchus, runaway!
\forcelinebreak
Welcome, my glorious boy! Another time
\forcelinebreak
Stray not; or leave your poor old foster-father
\forcelinebreak
In the wild mazes of a wood, in which
\forcelinebreak
I might have wandered many hundred years,
\forcelinebreak
Had not some merry fellows helped me out,
\forcelinebreak
And had not this king kindly welcomed me,
\forcelinebreak
I might have fared more ill than you erewhile
\forcelinebreak
In Pentheus’ prisons, that death fated rogue.
Bac. (\emph{to Midas.}) To you I owe great thanks \& will reward
\forcelinebreak
Your hospitality. Tell me your name
\forcelinebreak
And what this country is.
Midas. My name is Midas—
The Reeds (\emph{nodding their heads}).
Midas, the king, has the ears of an ass.
Midas. (\emph{turning round \& seizing Zopyrion}).
\forcelinebreak
Villain, you lie! he dies who shall repeat
\forcelinebreak
Those traitrous words. Seize on Zopyrion!
The Reeds. Midas, the king, has the ears of an ass.
Mid. Search through the crowd; it is a woman’s voice
\forcelinebreak
That dares belie her king, \& makes her life
\forcelinebreak
A forfeit to his fury.
Asph. There is no woman here.
Bac. Calm yourself, Midas; none believe the tale,
\forcelinebreak
Some impious man or gamesome faun dares feign
\forcelinebreak
In vile contempt of your most royal ears.
\forcelinebreak
Off with your crown, \& shew the world the lie!
Mid. (\emph{holding his crown tight})
\forcelinebreak
Never! What[!] shall a vile calumnious slave
\forcelinebreak
Dictate the actions of a crowned king?
\forcelinebreak
Zopyrion, this lie springs from you—you perish!
Zopy. I, say that Midas has got asses’ ears?
\forcelinebreak
May great Apollo strike me with his shaft
\forcelinebreak
If to a single soul I ever told
\forcelinebreak
So false, so foul a calumny!
Bac. Midas!
The Reeds. Midas, the king, has the ears of an ass.
Bac. Silence! or by my Godhead I strike dead
\forcelinebreak
Who shall again insult the noble king.
\forcelinebreak
Midas, you are my friend, for you have saved
\forcelinebreak
And hospitably welcomed my old faun;
\forcelinebreak
Choose your reward, for here I swear your wish,
\forcelinebreak
Whatever it may be, shall be fulfilled.
Zopyr. (\emph{aside}) Sure he will wish his asses’ ears in Styx.
Midas. What[!] may I choose from out the deep, rich mine
\forcelinebreak
Of human fancy, \& the wildest thoughts
\forcelinebreak
That passed till now unheeded through my brain,
\forcelinebreak
A wish, a hope, to be fulfilled by you?
\forcelinebreak
Nature shall bend her laws at my command,
\forcelinebreak
And I possess as my reward one thing
\forcelinebreak
That I have longed for with unceasing care.
Bac. Pause, noble king, ere you express this wish[.]
\forcelinebreak
Let not an error or rash folly spoil
\forcelinebreak
My benefaction; pause and then declare,
\forcelinebreak
For what you ask shall be, as I have sworn.
Mid. Let all I touch be gold, most glorious gold!
Let me be rich! and where I stretch my hands,
\forcelinebreak
(That like Orion I could touch the stars!)
\forcelinebreak
Be radiant gold! God Bacchus, you have sworn,
\forcelinebreak
I claim your word,—my ears are quite forgot!
The Reeds. Midas, the king, has the ears of an ass.
Mid. You lie, \& yet I care not—
Zopyr. (\emph{aside to Midas}) Yet might I
\forcelinebreak
But have advised your Majesty, I would
\forcelinebreak
Have made one God undo the other’s work—
Midas. (\emph{aside to Zopyr}).
\forcelinebreak
Advise yourself, my friend, or you may grow
\forcelinebreak
Shorter by a head ere night.—I am blessed,
\forcelinebreak
Happier than ever earthly man could boast.
\forcelinebreak
Do you fulfil your words?
Bac. Yes, thoughtless man!
\forcelinebreak
And much I fear if you have not the ears
\forcelinebreak
You have the judgement of an ass. Farewel!
\forcelinebreak
I found you rich \& happy; \& I leave you,
\forcelinebreak
Though you know it not, miserably poor.
\forcelinebreak
Your boon is granted,—touch! make gold! Some here
\forcelinebreak
Help carry old Silenus off, who sleeps
\forcelinebreak
The divine sleep of heavy wine. Farewel!
Mid. Bacchus, divine, how shall I pay my thanks[?]
(Exeunt.)
END OF FIRST ACT.
\bigskip
\section{ACT II}
Scene; a splendid apartment in the Palace of Midas.
Enter Midas
\forcelinebreak
(with a golden rose in his hand).
Mid. Gold! glorious gold! I am made up of gold!
\forcelinebreak
I pluck a rose, a silly, fading rose,
\forcelinebreak
Its soft, pink petals change to yellow gold;
\forcelinebreak
Its stem, its leaves are gold—and what before
\forcelinebreak
Was fit for a poor peasant’s festal dress
\forcelinebreak
May now adorn a Queen. I lift a stone,
\forcelinebreak
A heavy, useless mass, a slave would spurn,
\forcelinebreak
What is more valueless? ’Tis solid gold!
\forcelinebreak
A king might war on me to win the same.
\forcelinebreak
And as I pass my hand thus through the air,
\forcelinebreak
A little shower of sightless dust falls down
\forcelinebreak
A shower of gold. O, now I am a king!
\forcelinebreak
I’ve spread my hands against my palace walls,
\forcelinebreak
I’ve set high ladders up, that I may touch
\forcelinebreak
Each crevice and each cornice with my hands,
\forcelinebreak
And it will all be gold:—a golden palace,
\forcelinebreak
Surrounded by a wood of golden trees,
\forcelinebreak
Which will bear golden fruits.—The very ground
\forcelinebreak
My naked foot treads on is yellow gold,
Invaluable gold! my dress is gold!
\forcelinebreak
Now I am great! Innumerable armies
\forcelinebreak
Wait till my gold collects them round my throne;
\forcelinebreak
I see my standard made of woven gold.
\forcelinebreak
Waving o’er Asia’s utmost Citadels,
\forcelinebreak
Guarded by myriads invincible.
\forcelinebreak
Or if the toil of war grows wearisome,
\forcelinebreak
I can buy Empires:—India shall be mine,
\forcelinebreak
Its blooming beauties, gold-encrusted baths,
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Its aromatic groves and palaces,
\forcelinebreak
All will be mine! Oh, Midas, ass-eared king!
\forcelinebreak
I love thee more than any words can tell,
\forcelinebreak
That thus thy touch, thou man akin to Gods,
\forcelinebreak
Can change all earth to heaven,—Olympian gold!
\forcelinebreak
For what makes heaven different from earth!
\forcelinebreak
Look how my courtiers come! Magnificent!
\forcelinebreak
None shall dare wait on me but those who bear
\forcelinebreak
An empire on their backs in sheets of gold.
\forcelinebreak
Oh, what a slave I was! my flocks \& kine,
\forcelinebreak
My vineyards \& my corn were all my wealth
\forcelinebreak
And men esteemed me rich; but now Great Jove
\forcelinebreak
Transcends me but by lightning, and who knows
\forcelinebreak
If my gold win not the Cyclopean Powers,
\forcelinebreak
And Vulcan, who must hate his father’s rule,
To forge me bolts?—and then—but hush! they come.
Enter Zopyrion, Asphalion, \& Lacon.
Lac. Pardon us, mighty king—
Mid. What would ye, slaves?
\forcelinebreak
Oh! I could buy you all with one slight touch
\forcelinebreak
Of my gold-making hand!
Asph. Royal Midas,
\forcelinebreak
We humbly would petition for relief.
Mid. Relief I Bring me your copper coin, your brass,
\forcelinebreak
Or what ye will—ye’ll speedily be rich.
Zopyr. ’Tis not for gold, but to be rid of gold,
\forcelinebreak
That we intrude upon your Majesty.
\forcelinebreak
I fear that you will suffer by this gift,
\forcelinebreak
As we do now. Look at our backs bent down
\forcelinebreak
With the huge weight of the great cloaks of gold.
\forcelinebreak
Permit us to put on our shabby dress,
\forcelinebreak
Our poor despised garments of light wool:—
\forcelinebreak
We walk as porters underneath a load.
\forcelinebreak
Pity, great king, our human weaknesses,
\forcelinebreak
Nor force us to expire—
Mid. Begone, ye slaves!
\forcelinebreak
Go clothe your wretched limbs in ragged skins!
\forcelinebreak
Take an old carpet to wrap round your legs,
A broad leaf for your feet—ye shall not wear
\forcelinebreak
That dress—those golden sandals—monarch like.
Asph. If you would have us walk a mile a day
\forcelinebreak
We cannot thus—already we are tired
\forcelinebreak
With the huge weight of soles of solid gold.
Mid. Pitiful wretches! Earth-born, groveling dolts!
\forcelinebreak
Begone! nor dare reply to my just wrath!
\forcelinebreak
Never behold me more! or if you stay
\forcelinebreak
Let not a sigh, a shrug, a stoop betray
\forcelinebreak
What poor, weak, miserable men you are.
\forcelinebreak
Not as I—I am a God! Look, dunce!
\forcelinebreak
I tread or leap beneath this load of gold!
(Jumps \& stops suddenly.)
I’ve hurt my back:—this cloak is wondrous hard!
\forcelinebreak
No more of this! my appetite would say
\forcelinebreak
The hour is come for my noon-day repast.
Lac. It comes borne in by twenty lusty slaves,
\forcelinebreak
Who scarce can lift the mass of solid gold,
\forcelinebreak
That lately was a table of light wood.
\forcelinebreak
Here is the heavy golden ewer \& bowl,
\forcelinebreak
In which, before you eat, you wash your hands.
Mid. (\emph{lifting up the ewer})
\forcelinebreak
This is to be a king! to touch pure gold!
Would that by touching thee, Zopyrion,
\forcelinebreak
I could transmute thee to a golden man;
\forcelinebreak
A crowd of golden slaves to wait on me!
(Pours the water on his hands.)
But how is this? the water that I touch
\forcelinebreak
Falls down a stream of yellow liquid gold,
\forcelinebreak
And hardens as it falls. I cannot wash—
\forcelinebreak
Pray Bacchus, I may drink! and the soft towel
\forcelinebreak
With which I’d wipe my hands transmutes itself
\forcelinebreak
Into a sheet of heavy gold.—No more!
\forcelinebreak
I’ll sit and eat:—I have not tasted food
\forcelinebreak
For many hours, I have been so wrapt
\forcelinebreak
In golden dreams of all that I possess,
\forcelinebreak
I had not time to eat; now hunger calls
\forcelinebreak
And makes me feel, though not remote in power
\forcelinebreak
From the immortal Gods, that I need food,
\forcelinebreak
The only remnant of mortality!
(In vain attempts to eat of several dishes.)
Alas! my fate! ’tis gold! this peach is gold!
\forcelinebreak
This bread, these grapes \& all I touch! this meat
\forcelinebreak
Which by its scent quickened my appetite
\forcelinebreak
Has lost its scent, its taste,—’tis useless gold.
Zopyr. (\emph{aside}) He’d better now have followed my advice.
He starves by gold yet keeps his asses’ ears.
Mid. Asphalion, put that apple to my mouth;
\forcelinebreak
If my hands touch it not perhaps I eat.
\forcelinebreak
Alas! I cannot bite! as it approached
\forcelinebreak
I felt its fragrance, thought it would be mine,
\forcelinebreak
But by the touch of my life-killing lips
\forcelinebreak
’Tis changed from a sweet fruit to tasteless gold,
\forcelinebreak
Bacchus will not refresh me by his gifts,
\forcelinebreak
The liquid wine congeals and flies my taste.
\forcelinebreak
Go, miserable slaves! Oh, wretched king!
\forcelinebreak
Away with food! Its sight now makes me sick.
\forcelinebreak
Bring in my couch! I will sleep off my care,
\forcelinebreak
And when I wake I’ll coin some remedy.
\forcelinebreak
I dare not bathe this sultry day, for fear
\forcelinebreak
I be enclosed in gold. Begone!
\forcelinebreak
I will to rest:—oh, miserable king!
(Exeunt all but Midas. He lies down, turns restlessly for some time \& then rises.)
Oh! fool! to wish to change all things to gold!
\forcelinebreak
Blind Ideot that I was! This bed is gold;
\forcelinebreak
And this hard, weighty pillow, late so soft,
\forcelinebreak
That of itself invited me to rest,
\forcelinebreak
Is a hard lump, that if I sleep and turn
I may beat out my brains against its sides.
\forcelinebreak
Oh! what a wretched thing I am! how blind!
\forcelinebreak
I cannot eat, for all my food is gold;
\forcelinebreak
Drink flies my parched lips, and my hard couch
\forcelinebreak
Is worse than rock to my poor bruised sides.
\forcelinebreak
I cannot walk; the weight of my gold soles
\forcelinebreak
Pulls me to earth:—my back is broke beneath
\forcelinebreak
These gorgeous garments— (\emph{throws off his cloak})
\forcelinebreak
Lie there, golden cloak!
\forcelinebreak
There on thy kindred earth, lie there and rot!
\forcelinebreak
I dare not touch my forehead with my palm
\forcelinebreak
For fear my very flesh should turn to gold.
\forcelinebreak
Oh! let me curse thee, vilest, yellow dirt!
\forcelinebreak
Here, on my knees, thy martyr lifts his voice,
\forcelinebreak
A poor, starved wretch who can touch nought but thee[,]
\forcelinebreak
Wilt thou refresh me in the heat of noon?
\forcelinebreak
Canst thou be kindled for me when I’m cold?
\forcelinebreak
May all men, \& the immortal Gods,
\forcelinebreak
Hate \& spurn thee as wretched I do now.
(Kicks the couch, \& tries to throw down the pillow but cannot lift it.)
I’d dash, thee to the earth, but that thy weight
Preserves thee, abhorred, Tartarian Gold!
\forcelinebreak
Bacchus, O pity, pardon, and restore me!
\forcelinebreak
Who waits?
Enter Lacon.
Go bid the priests that they prepare
\forcelinebreak
Most solemn song and richest sacrifise;—
\forcelinebreak
Which I may not dare touch, lest it should turn
\forcelinebreak
To most unholy gold.
Lacon. Pardon me, oh King,
\forcelinebreak
But perhaps the God may give that you may eat,
\forcelinebreak
And yet your touch be magic.
Mid. No more, thou slave!
\forcelinebreak
Gold is my fear, my bane, my death! I hate
\forcelinebreak
Its yellow glare, its aspect hard and cold.
\forcelinebreak
I would be rid of all.—Go bid them haste.
(Exit Lacon.)
Oh, Bacchus I be propitious to their prayer!
\forcelinebreak
Make me a hind, clothe me in ragged skins—
\forcelinebreak
And let my food be bread, unsavoury roots,
\forcelinebreak
But take from me the frightful curse of gold.
\forcelinebreak
Am I not poor? Alas! how I am changed!
\forcelinebreak
Poorer than meanest slaves, my piles of wealth
\forcelinebreak
Cannot buy for me one poor, wretched dish:—
\forcelinebreak
In summer heat I cannot bathe, nor wear
\forcelinebreak
A linen dress; the heavy, dull, hard metal
\forcelinebreak
Clings to me till I pray for poverty.
Enter Zopyrion, Asphalion \& Lacon.
Zopyr. The sacrifice is made, \& the great God,
\forcelinebreak
Pitying your ills, oh King, accepted it,
\forcelinebreak
Whilst his great oracle gave forth these words.
\forcelinebreak
“Let poor king Midas bathe in the clear stream
\forcelinebreak
“Of swift Pactolus, \& to those waves tran[s]fer
\forcelinebreak
“The gold-transmuting power, which he repents.”
Mid. Oh joy! Oh Bacchus, thanks for this to thee
\forcelinebreak
Will I each year offer three sucking lambs—
\forcelinebreak
Games will I institute—nor Pan himself
\forcelinebreak
Shall have more honour than thy deity.
\forcelinebreak
Haste to the stream,—I long to feel the cool
\forcelinebreak
And liquid touch of its divinest waves.
(Exeunt all except Zopyrion and Asphalion.)
Asph. Off with our golden sandals and our cloaks!
\forcelinebreak
Oh, I shall ever hate the sight of gold!
\forcelinebreak
Poor, wealthy Midas runs as if from death
\forcelinebreak
To rid him quick of this meta[l]lic curse.
Zopyr. (\emph{aside}) I wonder if his asses[’] ears are gold;
\forcelinebreak
What would I give to let the secret out?
\forcelinebreak
Gold! that is trash, we have too much of it,—
\forcelinebreak
But I would give ten new born lambs to tell
\forcelinebreak
This most portentous truth—but I must choke.
Asph. Now we shall tend our flocks and reap our corn
\forcelinebreak
As we were wont, and not be killed by gold.
Golden fleeces threatened our poor sheep,
\forcelinebreak
The very showers as they fell from heaven
\forcelinebreak
Could not refresh the earth; the wind blew gold,
\forcelinebreak
And as we walked\footnote{MS. \emph{as he walked.}} the thick sharp-pointed atoms
\forcelinebreak
Wounded our faces—the navies would have sunk—
Zopyr. All strangers would have fled our gold-cursed shore,
\forcelinebreak
Till we had bound our wealthy king, that he
\forcelinebreak
Might leave the green and fertile earth unchanged;—
\forcelinebreak
Then in deep misery he would have shook
\forcelinebreak
His golden chains \& starved.
Enter Lacon.
Lacon. Sluggards, how now I
\forcelinebreak
Have you not been to gaze upon the sight?
\forcelinebreak
To see the noble king cast off the gift
\forcelinebreak
Which he erewhile so earnestly did crave[?]
Asph. I am so tired with the weight of gold
\forcelinebreak
I bore to-day I could not budge a foot
\forcelinebreak
To see the finest sight Jove could display.
\forcelinebreak
But tell us, Lacon, what he did and said.
Lac. Although he’d fain have run[,] his golden dress
\forcelinebreak
And heavy sandals made the poor king limp
\forcelinebreak
As leaning upon mine and the high priest’s arm,
\forcelinebreak
He hastened to Pactolus. When he saw
\forcelinebreak
The stream—“Thanks to the Gods!” he cried aloud
\forcelinebreak
In joy; then having cast aside his robes
\forcelinebreak
He leaped into the waves, and with his palm
Throwing the waters high—“This is not gold,”
\forcelinebreak
He cried, “I’m free, I have got rid of gold.”
\forcelinebreak
And then he drank, and seizing with delight
\forcelinebreak
A little leaf that floated down the stream,
\forcelinebreak
“Thou art not gold,” he said—
Zopyr. But all this time—
\forcelinebreak
Did you behold?—Did he take off his crown?—
Lacon. No:—It was strange to see him as he plunged
\forcelinebreak
Hold tight his crown with his left hand the while.
Zopyr. (\emph{aside}) Alas, my fate! I thought they had been seen.
Lac. He ordered garments to the river side
\forcelinebreak
Of coarsest texture;—those that erst he wore
\forcelinebreak
He would not touch, for they were trimmed with gold.
Zopyr. And yet he did not throw away his crown?
Lac. He ever held it tight as if he thought
\forcelinebreak
Some charm attached to its remaining there.
\forcelinebreak
Perhaps he is right;—know you, Zopyrion,
\forcelinebreak
If that strange voice this morning spoke the truth?
Zopyr. Nay guess;—think of what passed \& you can judge.
\forcelinebreak
I dare not—I know nothing of his ears.
Lac. I am resolved some night when he sleeps sound
\forcelinebreak
To get a peep.—No more,’tis he that comes.
\forcelinebreak
He has now lost the boon that Bacchus gave,
\forcelinebreak
Having bestowed it on the limpid waves.
Now over golden sands Pactolus runs,
\forcelinebreak
And as it flows creates a mine of wealth.
Enter Midas, (with grapes in his hand).
Mid. I see again the trees and smell the flowers
\forcelinebreak
With colours lovelier than the rainbow’s self;
\forcelinebreak
I see the gifts of rich-haired Ceres piled
\forcelinebreak
And eat. (\emph{holding up the grapes})
\forcelinebreak
This is not yellow, dirty gold,
\forcelinebreak
But blooms with precious tints, purple and green.
\forcelinebreak
I hate this palace and its golden floor,
\forcelinebreak
Its cornices and rafters all of gold:—
\forcelinebreak
I’ll build a little bower of freshest green,
\forcelinebreak
Canopied o’er with leaves \& floored with moss:—
\forcelinebreak
I’ll dress in skins;—I’ll drink from wooden cups
\forcelinebreak
And eat on wooden platters—sleep on flock;
\forcelinebreak
None but poor men shall dare attend on me.
\forcelinebreak
All that is gold I’ll banish from my court,
\forcelinebreak
Gilding shall be high treason to my state,
\forcelinebreak
The very name of gold shall be crime capital[.]
Zopyr. May we not keep our coin?
Mid. No, Zopyrion,
\forcelinebreak
None but the meanest peasants shall have gold.
\forcelinebreak
It is a sordid, base and dirty thing:—
\forcelinebreak
Look at the grass, the sky, the trees, the flowers,
These are Joves treasures \& they are not gold:—
\forcelinebreak
Now they are mine, I am no longer cursed.—
\forcelinebreak
The hapless river hates its golden sands,
\forcelinebreak
As it rolls over them, having my gift;—
\forcelinebreak
Poor harmless shores! they now are dirty gold.
\forcelinebreak
How I detest it! Do not the Gods hate gold?
\forcelinebreak
Nature displays the treasures that she loves,
\forcelinebreak
She hides gold deep in the earth \& piles above
\forcelinebreak
Mountains \& rocks to keep the monster down.
Asph. They say Apollo’s sunny car is gold.
Mid. Aye, so it is for Gold belongs to him:—
\forcelinebreak
But Phoebus is my bitterest enemy,
\forcelinebreak
And what pertains to him he makes my bane.
Zopyr. What [!] will your Majesty tell the world?—
Mid. Peace, vile gossip! Asphalion, come you here.
\forcelinebreak
Look at those golden columns; those inlaid walls;
\forcelinebreak
The ground, the trees, the flowers \& precious food
\forcelinebreak
That in my madness I did turn to gold:—
\forcelinebreak
Pull it all down, I hate its sight and touch;
\forcelinebreak
Heap up my cars \& waggons with the load
\forcelinebreak
And yoke my kine to drag it to the sea:
\forcelinebreak
Then crowned with flowers, ivy \& Bacchic vine,
\forcelinebreak
And singing hymns to the immortal Gods,
We will ascend ships freighted with the gold,
\forcelinebreak
And where no plummet’s line can sound the depth
\forcelinebreak
Of greedy Ocean, we will throw it in,
\forcelinebreak
All, all this frightful heap of yellow dirt.
\forcelinebreak
Down through the dark, blue waters it will sink,
\forcelinebreak
Frightening the green-haired Nereids from their sport
\forcelinebreak
And the strange Tritons—the waves will close above
\forcelinebreak
And I, thank Bacchus, ne’er shall see it more!
\forcelinebreak
And we will make all echoing heaven ring
\forcelinebreak
With our loud hymns of thanks, \& joyous pour
\forcelinebreak
Libations in the deep, and reach the land,
\forcelinebreak
Rich, happy, free \& great, that we have lost
\forcelinebreak
Man’s curse, heart-bartering, soul-enchaining gold.
FINIS.
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The Anarchist Library (Mirror)
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Mary Shelley
Proserpine and Midas
Two unpublished Mythological Dramas
1820
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https:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.gutenberg.org\Slash{}ebooks\Slash{}6447
* Edited with Introduction by A. KOSZUL
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\textbf{usa.anarchistlibraries.net}
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