ation upon something that moves us more than any prospect of
a heaven realised on earth by abolishing kings and priests. When the
chorus of captive Greek women, who provide the lyrical setting, sing
round the couch of the sleeping sultan, we are aware of an ineffable
hope at the heart of their strain of melancholy pity; and so again when
their burthen becomes the transience of all things human. The sultan,
too, feels that Islam is doomed, and, as messenger after messenger
announces the success of the rebels, his fatalism expresses itself as
the growing perception that all this blood and all these tears are but
phantoms that come and go, bubbles on the sea of eternity. This again is
the purport of the talk of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who evokes
for him a vision of Mahmud II capturing Constantinople. The sultan is
puzzled:

"What meanest thou? Thy words stream like a tempest
Of dazzling mist within my brain";

but 'we' know that the substance behind the mist is Shelley's
"immaterial philosophy," the doctrine that nothing is real except the
one eternal Mind. Ever louder and more confident sounds this note, until
it drowns even the cries of victory when the tide of battle turns in
favour of the Turks. The chorus, lamenting antiphonally the destruction
of liberty, are interrupted by repeated howls of savage triumph:
"Kill! crush! despoil! Let not a Greek escape'" But these discords are
gradually resolved, through exquisitely complicated cadences, into the
golden and equable flow of the concluding song:

"The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream."

Breezy confidence has given place to a poignant mood of disillusionment.

"Oh, cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past,
Oh, might it die or rest at last!"

Perhaps the perfect beauty of Greek civilisation shall never be
restored; but the wisdom of its thinkers and the creations of its
artists are immortal, while the fabric of the world

"Is but a vision;--all that it inherits
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams."

It is curious that for three of his more considerable works Shelley
should have chosen the form of drama, since the last thi