The soul of man can never be enslaved Save by its own infirmities, nor freed Save by its very strength and own resolve And constant vision and supreme endeavor! You will be free? Then, courage, O my brother! O let the soul stand in the open door Of life and death and knowledge and desire And see the peaks of thought kindle with sunrise! Then shall the soul return to rest no more, Nor harvest dreams in the dark field of sleep-- Rather the soul shall go with great resolve To dwell at last upon the shining mountains In liberal converse with the eternal stars.[11] And he kills the vulture; and sets Jove's victim free. By his demeanor Prometheus has become the ensample of magnanimous endurance, and of resistance to oppression. Titan! to whose immortal eyes The sufferings of mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise, What was thy pity's recompense? A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh Until its voice is echoless.... Thy godlike crime was to be kind, To render with thy precepts less The sum of human wretchedness, And strengthen man with his own mind. But, baffled as thou wert from high, Still, in thy patient energy, In the endurance and repulse Of thine impenetrable spirit, Which earth and heaven could not convulse, A mighty lesson we inherit[12].... =16. Longfellow's Prometheus.= A happy application of the story of Prometheus is made by Longfellow in the following verses:[13] Of Prometheus, how undaunted On Olympus' shining bastions His audacious foot he planted, Myths are told, and songs are chanted, Full of promptings and suggestions. Beautiful is the tradition Of that flight through heavenly portals, The old classic superstition Of the theft and the transmission Of the fire of the Immortals! First the deed of noble daring, Born of heavenward aspiration, Then the fire with mortals sharing, Then the vulture,--the despairing Cry of pain on crags Caucasian. All is but a symbol painted Of the Poet, Prophet, Seer; Only those are crowned and sainted Who with grief have been acquainted, Making nations nobler, freer. In their feverish exultations, In their triumph and their yearning, In their passionate pulsations, In their words among the nations, The Promethean fire is burning. Shall it, then, be unavailing, All this toil for human culture? Through the cloud-rack, dark and trailing, Must they see above them sailing O'er life's barren crags the vulture?