A voice in the air thus sings the hymn of Asia at the moment of her apotheosis:-- Life of Life! thy lips enkindle With their love the breath between them; And thy smiles before they dwindle Make the cold air fire; then screen them In those looks where whoso gazes Faints, entangled in their mazes.
Child of Light! thy limbs are burning Through the vest which seems to hide them, As the radiant lines of morning Through the clouds, ere they divide them; And this atmosphere divinest Shrouds thee whereso'er thou shinest.
Fair are others; none beholds thee.
But thy voice sounds low and tender, Like the fairest, for it folds thee From the sight, that liquid splendour, And all feel, yet see thee never, As I feel now, lost for ever! Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, And the souls of whom thou lovest Walk upon the winds with lightness, Till they fail, as I am failing, Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing! It has been said that Shelley, as a landscape painter, is decidedly Turneresque; and there is much in "Prometheus Unbound" to justify this opinion.

The scale of colour is light and aerial, and the darker shadows are omitted.

An excess of luminousness seems to be continually radiated from the objects at which he looks; and in this radiation of many-coloured lights, the outline itself is apt to be a little misty.
Shelley, moreover, pierced through things to their spiritual essence.
The actual world was less for him than that which lies within it and beyond it.

"I seek," he says himself, "in what I see, the manifestation of something beyond the present and tangible object." For him, as for the poet described by one of the spirit voices in "Prometheus", the bees in the ivy-bloom are scarcely heeded; they become in his mind,-- Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality.
And yet who could have brought the bees, the lake, the sun, the bloom, more perfectly before us than that picture does?
(Forman, volume 2 page 181.) What vignette is more exquisitely coloured and finished than the little study of a pair of halcyons in the third act?
(Forman, volume 2 page 231.) Blake is perhaps the only artist who could have illustrated this drama.

He might have shadowed forth the choirs of spirits, the trailing voices and their thrilling songs, phantasmal Demorgorgon, and the charioted Hour.