Page:Shelley, a poem, with other writings (Thomson, Debell).djvu/76

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It is assuredly no very high work, thus extorting from a great poem an exact account of its employment of every hour, as if it were a prisoner at the bar whose defence rested on an alibi; but zealous and accurate students will not disdain it in its own lower sphere any more than such students disdain precise measurements of proportion in great works of painting and sculpture. And, not to speak of similar investigations concerning other dramas, men no less justly eminent than Jean Paul Richter and De Quincey have applied such criticism to the period of the action of "Paradise Lost."

III. Is there any possible conciliation of the two caves in Act III. sc. iii.? Prometheus is no sooner released than he describes elaborately to Asia and her fair sister nymphs a certain forest cave, with fountain and stalactites, "A simple dwelling, which shall be our own," and yet more elaborately the mode of life he and they