mere improvise," the boiling over of his sympathy with the
Greeks, who were in revolt against the Turks. He wove into it,
with all possible heightening of poetic imagery, the chief
events of the period of revolution through which southern
Europe was then passing, so that it differs from the Prometheus
in having historical facts as ostensible subject. Through it
reverberates the dissolution of kingdoms in feats of arms by
land and sea from Persia to Morocco, and these cataclysms,
though suggestive of something that transcends any human
warfare, are yet not completely pinnacled in "the intense
inane." But this is not the only merit of "Hellas;' its poetry
is purer than that of the earlier work, because Shelley no
longer takes sides so violently. He has lost the cruder
optimism of the 'Prometheus', and is thrown back for
consolation upon something that moves us more than any prospect
of a heaven realised on earth by abolishing kings and priests.
When the chorus of captive Greek women, who provide the lyrical
setting, sing round the couch of the sleeping sultan, we are
aware of an ineffable hope at the heart of their strain of
melancholy pity; and so again when their burthen becomes the
transience of all things human. The sultan, too, feels that
Islam is doomed, and, as messenger after messenger announces
the success of the rebels, his fatalism expresses itself as the
growing perception that all this blood and all these tears are
but phantoms that come and go, bubbles on the sea of eternity.
This again is the purport of the talk of Ahasuerus, the
Wandering Jew, who evokes for him a vision of Mahmud II
capturing Constantinople. The sultan is puzzled:

"What meanest thou? Thy words stream like a tempest