iness or pleasure. There follow three brief Scenes which are meant
to depict the dawnings of human consciousness and the conditions under
which life is to be lived. To one he shows how a hut to shelter him
may be constructed with the branches he has lopped with the aid of an
implement of stone. In a dispute between two men, one of whom wounds
the other and steals his goat, Prometheus pronounces the judgment that
the hand of the offender will be against every man, and every man's
hand against him. In the third and last Scene we have the most
remarkable passage in the poem. Pandora, Prometheus' favourite
creation, in dismay and bewilderment, describes the strange
experience she has witnessed in the case of a friend, another maiden,
and Prometheus tells her that what she had seen was death. What death
meant Prometheus explains in the following passage, charged with the
sensuous mysticism which was one of the elements of Goethe's own
experiences when he wrote it:--

Wenn aus dem innerst tiefsten Grunde
Du ganz erschuettert alles fuehlst,
Was Freud' und Schmerzen jemals dir ergossen,
[Transcriber's Note: corrected error "and" for "und"]
Im Sturm dein Herz erschwillt,
In Traenen sich erleichtern will
Und seine Glut vermehrt,
Und alles klingt an dir und bebt und zittert,
Und all die Sinne dir vergehn,
Und du dir zu vergehen scheinst
Und sinkst,
Und alles um dich her versinkt in Nacht,
Und du, in inner eigenstem Gefuehl,
Umfassest eine Welt;
Dann stirbt der Mensch.

When from thy inmost being's depths
Shattered to nought thou feelest all
Of joy and woe that e'er to thee hath flowed,
In storm thy heart hath swelled,
In tears doth find itself relief,
And doth its flow increase;
When all within thee thrills, and quakes, and quivers,
And all thy senses from thee part,
And from thyself thou seem'st to part,
And sink'st,
And all around thee sinketh deep in night,
And thou within thy inner very self
Encompassest a world;
Then dies the man.

To these two Acts Goethe subsequently added, as the opening of a third
Act, a soliloquy of Prometheus, written in the following year. In this
soliloquy Prometheus appears as the sheer Titan, the burden of his
defiance being that Zeus merits no worship from men to whose miseries
he is deaf, and that such worship as he receives proceeds only fr