The passing of one series of gods and the coming into power of another series of gods was a familiar idea in Greek mythology. It reflected at once the literal fact that ever higher and higher forces of nature had been deified by them, beginning with crude Nature gods and ending with symbols of the most ideal human attributes, and at the same time that their thought leaned in the direction of interpreting nature as an evolutionary process. Seizing upon this, Keats has presented in the words of the old Titan Oceanus a theory of the evolution of beauty quite as startling as a prophecy of psychological theories upon this subject as Browning's is of cosmic and social theories. Addressing Saturn, Oceanus says: "We fall by course of Nature's law, not force Of thunder, or of love.... ... As thou wast not the first of powers So art thou not the last; it cannot be: From chaos and parental darkness came Light, the first fruits of that intestine broil, That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came And with it light, and light, engendering Upon its own producer, forthwith touched, The whole enormous matter into life. Upon that very hour, our parentage The Heavens and the Earth were manifest; Then thou first-born, and we the giant-race, Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms * * * * * As Heaven and Earth are fairer far Than chaos and blank darkness, though once chiefs, And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth In form and shape compact and beautiful, In will, in action free, companionship And thousand other signs of purer life, So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old darkness: nor are we Thereby more conquered than by us the rule Of shapeless chaos. For 'tis the eternal law That first in beauty should be first in might. Yea, by that law, another race may drive Our conquerors to mourn as we do now." There is in the attitude of Oceanus a magnificent acceptance of this ruthless course of nature reminding one of that taken by such men as Huxley and Clifford in the face of their own scientific discoveries, but one is immediately struck by the absence of love in the idea. An Apollo, no matter what new beauty he may have, himself, to offer, who yet disregards the beauty of Hyperion and calmly accepts the throne of the sun in his stead, does not satisfy us. What unreason it is that so splendid a being as Hyperion should be deposed! As a matter of fact, he was not deposed. He is left standing forever in our memories in splendor like the morn, for Keats did not finish the poem and no picture of the enthroned Apollo is given. Perhaps Keats remembered his earlier utterance, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," and cared for his own Hyperion too much to banish him for the sake of Apollo.