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 from
human folly and ignorance.[144] By its protest against the conception
of the mechanical god who "pushes the universe from without," and by
the Spinozistic pantheism which it implicitly proclaims, the ode
dismayed the more timid spirits of the time.
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