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is to be effected not by violent revolution but by passive endurance and the mighty power of Love.
From these conceptions it will readily appear that the moral problem can not be identical for the two poets. Aeschylus labors to effect a reconciliation between the two antagonistic forces by the submission of the finite will to the supreme Law upon terms which sustain the majesty of the latter while preserving the dignity of the former. This, we may believe, he succeeded in doing, in his lost drama, "Prometheus Unbound." Shelly, on the contrary, proposes to overcome the antagonism by vaporizing one of the antagonists. Humanity is to be undeceived and made to see that it has been its own tormentor—that the enthroned tyrant of custom and law is but a fiction and that the only law of the world is Love. Shelley believed that all evil is the creation of the human will and that the creating power can also disannul. The means and process by which the human mind accomplishes its own deliverance form the content of "Prometheus Unbound." A discussion of the poem does not seem to be within the scope of this paper, inasmuch as no comparison can be instituted between it and the drama of Aeschylus.
Let a few remarks now be submitted upon the plots of the two dramas. In Aeschylus the story is very simple. The action is slight and proceeds right onward without halting to the culmination, where the drama abruptly closes. In "Prometheus Unbound," owing to the greater number of actors, the plot is more complicated. There is abundant action and some suspense. We find ourselves wondering how it will turn out. After the climax has been reached, Jupiter dethroned and Promethus loosed, the drama declines rather tediously. The sinking of the Sun is not nearly so glorious as its rising. However meritorious the latter part of the drama may be in itself, as lyrical poetry it seems to me to disfigure the production as a whole. The "living happily ever afterward" conclusion, greatly detracts from the grandeur
and sublimity of the first three acts. O, that Robert Browning might have written the latter part of "Prometheus Unbound!"
"Strive and Thrive"-cry "Speed, fight on, fare ever. There as here." C. M. SHARPE.
A Dream by the Sea.
The little waves are sobbing
In their little chapel-caverns in the cliff.
Father Tide brings them in
From their dances on the shore,
To the little chapel-caverns in the cliff.
Never failing, twice a day,
Leave the little waves their play
Hide and seek and leap frog gay;
Leave them all and to the little chapel-caverns
Come to pray.
Come to pray for the good ship
Striving with the wind,
And to weep for the lost souls
Groping in the sea;
Come the little waves sobbing
To their little chapel-caverns in the cliff.
A One-sided Quarrell and its Outcome.
The old lady sat by the west window of her tiny kitchen, the afternoon sun streaming in on her wrinkled face and reflecting in the big bowed spectacles before her keen small eyes. She held a half knit stocking in her clumsy worn hands, and the needles clicked as she at last secured the stitch which she had lost while watching to see what the grocery boy left at Mrs. Wiggins.
"There was coal-oil and starch"—she remarked to her daughter Jane, who was sprinkling the clothes. "Starch," why she got starch week before last, then those flat irons! flat irons! and her husband only makes forty dollars a month. They will die in the poor house, all of them I never owned but one flat-iron in my life. It is simply ridiculous I shall just tell her what I think of her. I wonder what she will be getting next."
The needles clicked for a few moments, then she spoke again, "Jane you just run over and borrow those two irons and we'll smooth out these clothes before dark."
LUCY VAN HOESEN.