language, and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary.”  He therefore, approached the theme of liberation from a wholly different point of view.  Prometheus in his drama is the human vindicator of love, justice, and liberty, as opposed to Jove, the tyrannical oppressor, and creator of all evil by his selfish rule.  Prometheus is the mind of man idealized, the spirit of our race, as Shelley thought it made to be.  Jove is the incarnation of all that thwarts its free development.  Thus counterposed, the two chief actors represent the fundamental antitheses of good and evil, liberty and despotism, love and hate.  They give the form of personality to Shelley’s Ormuzd-Ahriman dualism already expressed in the first canto of “Laon and Cythna”; but, instead of being represented on the theatre of human life, the strife is now removed into the reign of abstractions, vivified by mythopoetry.  Prometheus resists Jove to the uttermost, endures all torments, physical and moral, that the tyrant plagues him with, secure in his own strength, and calmly expectant of an hour which shall hurl Jove from heaven, and leave the spirit of good triumphant.  That hour arrives; Jove disappears; the burdens of the world and men are suddenly removed; a new age of peace and freedom and illimitable energy begins; the whole universe partakes in the emancipation; the spirit of the earth no longer groans in pain, but sings alternate love-songs with his sister orb, the moon; Prometheus is re-united in indissoluble bonds to his old love, Asia.  Asia, withdrawn from sight during the first act, but spoken of as waiting in her exile for the fated hour, is the true mate of the human spirit.  She is the fairest daughter of Earth and Ocean.  Like Aphrodite, she rises in the Aegean near the land called by her name; and in the time of tribulation she dwells in a far Indian vale.  She is the Idea of Beauty incarnate, the shadow of the Light of Life which sustains the world and enkindles it with love, the reality of Alastor’s vision, the breathing image of the awful loveliness apostrophized in the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” the reflex of the splendour of which Adonais was a part.  At the moment of her triumph she grows so beautiful that Ione her sister cannot see her, only feels her influence.  The essential thought of Shelley’s creed was that the universe is penetrated, vitalized, made real by a spirit, which he sometimes called the spirit of Nature, but which is always conceived as more than Life, as that which gives its actuality to Life, and lastly as Love and Beauty.  To adore this spirit, to clasp it with affection, and to blend with it, is, he thought the true object of man.  Therefore the final union of Prometheus with Asia is the consummation of human destinies.  Love was the only law Shelley recognized.  Unterrified by the grim realities of pain and crime revealed in nature and society, he held fast to the belief that, if we could but pierce to the core of things, if we could but be what we might