asure. In _Hellas_ he puts into the mouth of Christ a reproof of
Mahomet which is a reproof to all the Carsons and those who are haters of
a finer future to-day.

Obdurate spirit!
Thou seest but the Past in the To-come.
Pride is thy error and thy punishment.
Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds
Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops
Before the Power that wields and kindles them.
True greatness asks not space.

There are some critics who would like to separate Shelley's politics from
his poetry. But Shelley's politics are part of his poetry. They are the
politics of hope as his poetry is the poetry of hope. Europe did not adopt
his politics in the generation that followed the Napoleonic Wars, and the
result is we have had an infinitely more terrible war a hundred years
later. Every generation rejects Shelley; it prefers incredulity to hope,
fear to joy, obedience to common sense, and is surprised when the logic of
its common sense turns out to be a tragedy such as even the wildest orgy
of idealism could not have produced. Shelley must, no doubt, still seem a
shocking poet to an age in which the limitation of the veto of the House
of Lords was described as a revolutionary step. To Shelley even the new
earth for which the Bolsheviks are calling would not have seemed an
extravagant demand. He was almost the only English poet up to his own time
who believed that the world had a future. One can think of no other poet
to whom to turn for the prophetic music of a real League of Nations.
Tennyson may have spoken of the federation of the world, but his passion
was not for that but for the British Empire. He had the craven fear of
being great on any but the old Imperialist lines. His work did nothing to
make his country more generous than it was before. Shelley, on the other
hand, creates for us a new atmosphere of generosity. His patriotism was
love of the people of England, not love of the Government of England.
Hence, when the Government of England allied itself with the oppressors of
mankind, he saw nothing unpatriotic in arraigning it as he would have
arraigned a German or a Russian Government in the same circumstances.

He arraigned it, indeed, in the preface to _Hellas_ in a paragraph which
the publisher nervously suppressed, and which was only restored in 1892 by
Mr. Buxton Forman. The seditious paragraph ran:

Should the English people ever become free, they