Love as the remedy for all evils and the solvent of all social
difficulties.

The differences between Prometheus Unbound and The Ring are as
interesting as the likenesses. Shelley, caught in the pugnacity
of his youth and the first impetuosity of his prodigious artistic
power by the first fierce attack of the New Reformation, gave no
quarter to the antagonist of his hero. His Wotan, whom he calls
Jupiter, is the almighty fiend into whom the Englishman's God had
degenerated during two centuries of ignorant Bible worship and
shameless commercialism. He is Alberic, Fafnir Loki and the
ambitious side of Wotan all rolled into one melodramatic demon
who is finally torn from his throne and hurled shrieking into the
abyss by a spirit representing that conception of Eternal Law
which has been replaced since by the conception of Evolution.
Wagner, an older, more experienced man than the Shelley of 1819,
understood Wotan and pardoned him, separating him tenderly from
all the compromising alliances to which Shelley fiercely held
him; making the truth and heroism which overthrow him the
children of his inmost heart; and representing him as finally
acquiescing in and working for his own supersession and
annihilation. Shelley, in his later works, is seen progressing
towards the same tolerance, justice, and humility of spirit, as
he advanced towards the middle age he never reached. But there is
no progress from Shelley to Wagner as regards the panacea, except
that in Wagner there is a certain shadow of night and death come
on it: nay, even a clear opinion that the supreme good of love is
that it so completely satisfies the desire for life, that after
it the Will to Live ceases to trouble us, and we are at last
content to achieve the highest happiness of death.