The same instinct of modernness both in the spirituality of the torment and in the minuteness of its description displays itself a little farther on in the curse of Prometheus. Prometheus tells us in this same opening speech that long ago he uttered a certain awful curse against Jove which he now desires to recall; but it would seem that in order to recall it he wishes to hear the exact words of it. "What was that curse?"--he exclaims at the end of the speech; "for ye all heard me speak." To this question we have page after page of replies from five voices--namely, the Voice of the Mountains, of the Springs, of the Air, of the Whirlwinds and of the Earth--embodying such a mass of falsetto sublimity that Shelley himself would surely have drawn his pen through the whole, if he had lived into the term of manhood. Finally the whole awkward device for getting the curse of Prometheus before the reader is consummated by raising up the phantasm of Jupiter which repeats the curse, word for word. In truth, Shelley appears always to have labored under an essential immaturity: it is very possible that if he had lived a hundred years he would never have become a man: he was penetrated with modern ideas, but penetrated as a boy would be, crudely, overmuch, and with a constant tendency to the extravagant and illogical: so that I call him the modern boy. These considerations quite cover the remaining three acts of his _Prometheus Unbound_ and render it unnecessary for me to quote from them in support of the passages already cited. The first act contains, indeed, nearly the substance of the whole drama. Act II contains no important motive except the visit of Asia and Panthea to Demogorgon under the earth. In the third act we have a view of Jove surrounded by his ministers; but in the midst of a short speech to them he is suddenly swept into hell for everlasting punishment. Here, of course, Shelley makes a complete departure from the old story of the compromise between Jove and Prometheus; Shelley makes Prometheus scornfully reject such a compromise and allow Jove to go down to his doom. Hercules then unbinds Prometheus who repairs to a certain exquisite interlunar cave and there dwells in tranquillity with his beloved Asia.