e 1: The following is the version of the passage in Mrs.
Browning's later translation of the 'Prometheus' (II. 247-251 of the
original):

_Prom._ I did restrain besides
My mortals from premeditating death.

_Cho._ How didst thou medicine the plague-fear of death?

_Prom._ I set blind hopes to inhabit in their house.

_Cho._ By that gift thou didst help thy mortals well.]

_E.B.B. to R.B._

March 5, 1845.

But I did not mean to strike a 'tragic chord'; indeed I did not!
Sometimes one's melancholy will be uppermost and sometimes one's
mirth,--the world goes round, you know--and I suppose that in that
letter of mine the melancholy took the turn. As to 'escaping with my
life,' it was just a phrase--at least it did not signify more than
that the sense of mortality, and discomfort of it, is peculiarly
strong with me when east winds are blowing and waters freezing. For
the rest, I am _essentially better_, and have been for several
winters; and I feel as if it were intended for me to live and not die,
and I am reconciled to the feeling. Yes! I am satisfied to 'take up'
with the blind hopes again, and have them in the house with me, for
all that I sit by the window. By the way, did the chorus utter scorn
in the [Greek: meg' ophelema]. I think not. It is well to fly towards
the light, even where there may be some fluttering and bruising of
wings against the windowpanes, is it not?

There is an obscurer passage, on which I covet your thoughts, where
Prometheus, after the sublime declaration that, with a full knowledge
of the penalty reserved for him, he had sinned of free will and
choice--goes on to say--or to seem to say--that he had _not_, however,
foreseen the extent and detail of the torment, the skiey rocks, and
the friendless desolation. See v. 275. The intention of the poet
might have been to magnify to his audience the torment of the
martyrdom--but the heroism of the martyr diminishes in proportion--and
there appears to be a contradiction, and oversight. Or is my view
wrong? Tell me. And tell me too, if AEschylus not the divinest of all
the divine Greek souls? People say after Quintilian, that he is savage
and rude; a sort of poetic Orson, with his locks all wild. But I will
not hear it of my master! He is strong as Zeus is--and not as a
boxer--and tender as Power itself, which always is tenderest.

But to go back to the view of Life wit