_Prometheus_. The critics remark with good reason the propriety of the stout-hearted sufferer observing complete silence up to this point. It is natural for pain to find a vent in words, but a proud man will not complain in the presence of his adversary. Compare the similar silence of Cassandra in the Agamemnon; and for reasons equally wise, that of Faust in the Auerbach cellar scene. So true is it that a great poet, like a wise man, is often best known, not by what he says, but by what he does _not_ say--(και τῆς ἂγαν γάρ έστί που σιγῆς βάρος, as Sophocles has it). As to the subject of the beautiful invocation here made by the Titan sufferer, the reader will observe not merely its poetical beauty (to which there is something analogous in Manfred, act I. sc. 2-- "My mother Earth, And thou fresh-breaking day, and you, ye mountains, And thou the bright eye of the Universe,") but also its mythological propriety in the person of the speaker, as in the early times the original elementary theology common to the Greeks with all polytheists, had not been superseded by those often sadly disguised impersonations which are represented by the dynasty of Jove. OCEAN and HYPERION (ὑπερίων--he that walks aloft) are named in the Theogony, along with THEMIS and IAPETUS, as the first generation of gods, directly begotten from Heaven and Earth.--(Theog. 133-4.) In the natural progress of religious opinion, this original cosmical meaning of the Greek gods, though lost by anthropomorphism to the vulgar, was afterwards brought out by the natural philosophers, and by the philosophical poets; of which examples occur everywhere among the later classics. Indeed, the elemental worship seems never to have been altogether exploded, but continued to exist in strange confusion along with the congregation of fictitious persons to which it had given birth. So in Homer, Agamemnon prays-- "Father Jove from Ida swaying, god most glorious and great, And thou Sun, the all-perceiving and all-hearing power, and ye RIVERS and EARTH," etc.--Il. III. 277. Note 10 (p. 185). "The multitudinous laughter." ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα. I must offer an apology here for myself, Mr. Swayne, and Captain Medwyn, because I find we are in a minority. The Captain, indeed, has paraphrased it a little-- "With long loud laughs, exulting to be free," but he retains the laugh, which is the stumbling-block. Swayne has "Ye ocean waves That with incessant laughter bound and swell Countless," also a little paraphrased, but giving due prominence to the characteristic idea. E. P. Oxon. has "Ocean smiling with its countless waves," with a reference to Stanley's note, "Refertur ad levem sonum undarum ventis exagitatarum qui etiam aliquantulum _crispant_ maris dorsum quasi amabili quadam γελασιᾳ," in which words we see the origin of POT.'s--