"Unto me, the foreknower, this mandate of power, He cries, to reveal it! And scarce strange is my fate, if I suffer from hate At the hour that I feel it! Let the rocks of the lightning, all bristling and whitening, Flash, coiling me round! While the ether goes surging 'neath thunder and scourging Of wild winds unbound! Let the blast of the firmament whirl from its place The earth rooted below-- And the brine of the ocean, in rapid emotion, Be it driven in the face Of the stars up in heaven, as they walk to and fro! Let him hurl me anon into Tartarus--on-- To the blackest degree, With necessity's vortices strangling me down! But he cannot join death to a fate meant for me!" --Trans. by ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. THE SUFFERINGS OF PROMETHEUS. We close this subject with a brief extract from the Prometheus Bound of the English poet SHELLEY, in which the sufferings of the defiant captive are vividly portrayed: "No change, no pause, no hope! yet I endure. I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt? I ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun, Has it not seen? The Sea, in storm or calm, Heaven's ever-changing shadow, spread below, Have its deaf waves not heard my agony? Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, forever! The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears Of their moon-freezing crystals; the bright chains Eat with their burning gold into my bones. Heaven's winged hound, polluting from thy lips His beak in poison not his own, tears up My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by-- The ghastly people of the realm of dream Mocking me; and the Earthquake fiends are charged To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds When the rocks split and close again behind; While from their loud abysses howling throng The genii of the storm." Returning now to the poet Ovid, we present the account which he gives of the Deluge, or the destruction of mankind by a flood, called by the Greeks, THE DELUGE OF DEUCALION. Deucalion is represented as the son of Prometheus, and is styled the father of the Greek nation of post-diluvian times. When Jupiter determined to destroy the human race on account of its impiety, it was his first design, OVID tells us, to accomplish it with fire. But his own safety demanded the employment of a less dangerous agency. Already had Jove tossed the flaming brand, And rolled the thunder in his spacious hand, Preparing to discharge on seas and land; But stopped, for fear, thus violently driven, The sparks should catch his axle-tree of heaven-- Remembering, in the Fates, a time when fire Should to the battlements of heaven aspire, And all his blazing worlds above should burn, And all the inferior globe to cinders turn. His dire artillery thus dismissed, he bent His thoughts to some securer punishment; Concludes to pour a watery deluge down, And what he durst not burn resolves to drown.