Maternal Earth, the mighty parent, is superseded by the Spirit
of the Earth, the guide of our planet through the realms of
sky; while his fair and weaker companion and attendant, the
Spirit of the Moon, receives bliss from the annihilation of
evil in the superior sphere." We are in a strange metaphysical
region, an interstellar space of incredibly rarefied fire and
light, the true home of Shelley's spirit, where the circling
spheres sing to one another in wave upon wave of lyrical
rapture, as inexpressible in prose as music, and culminating in
the cry:

"To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory."

On the whole, Prometheus has been over-praised, perhaps because
the beauty of the interspersed songs has dazzled the critics.
Not only are the personages too transparently allegorical, but
the allegory is insipid; especially tactless is the treatment
of the marriage between Prometheus, the Spirit of Humanity, and
Asia, the Spirit of Nature, as a romantic love affair. When,
in the last of his more important poems, Shelley returned to
the struggle between the good and evil principles, it was in a
different Spirit. The short drama of 'Hellas' (1821) was "a