Expect no thunderbolt, dear maiden; none will come: nor shall I regain the
immortality of which I feel myself bereaved since yesterday."

"Is this no sorrow to thee?" asked Elenko.

"Has not my immortality been one of pain?" answered Prometheus. "Now I feel
no pain, and dread one only."

"And that is?"

"The pain of missing a certain fellow-mortal," answered Prometheus, with a
look so expressive that the hitherto unawed maiden cast her eyes to the
ground. Hastening away from the conversation to which, nevertheless, she
inly purposed to return.

"Is Man, then, the maker of Deity?" she asked.

"Can the source of his being originate in himself?" asked Prometheus. "To
assert this were self-contradiction, and pride inflated to madness. But of
the more exalted beings who have like him emanated from the common
principle of all existence, Man, since his advent on the earth, though not
the creator, is the preserver or the destroyer. He looks up to them, and
they are; he out-grows them, and they are not. For the barbarian and
Triballian gods there is no return; but the Olympians, if dead as deities,
survive as impersonations of Man's highest conceptions of the beautiful.
Languid and spectral indeed must be their existence in this barbarian age;
but better days are in store for them."

"And for thee, Prometheus?"