will reflect upon
the part which those who presume to represent them will have played
in the great drama of the revival of liberty, with feelings which
it would become them to anticipate. This is the age of the war of
the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those
ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers,
called Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common
enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a
mightier fear. Of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth
are virtual members. But a new race has arisen throughout Europe,
nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and
she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that
destiny which tyrants foresee and dread.

It is nearly a hundred years since Shelley proclaimed this birth of a new
race throughout Europe. Would he have turned pessimist if he had lived to
see the world infected with Prussianism as it has been in our time? I do
not think he would. He would have been the singer of the new race to-day
as he was then. To him the resurrection of the old despotism, foreign and
domestic, would have seemed but a fresh assault by the Furies on the body
of Prometheus. He would have scattered the Furies with a song.

For Shelley has not failed. He is one of those who have brought down to
earth the creative spirit of freedom. And that spirit has never ceased to
brood, with however disappointing results, over the chaos of Europe until
our own time. His greatest service to freedom is, perhaps, that he made it
seem, not a policy, but a part of Nature. He made it desirable as the
spring, lovely as a cloud in a blue sky, gay as a lark, glad as a wave,
golden as a star, mighty as a wind. Other poets speak of freedom, and
invite the birds on to the platform. Shelley spoke of freedom and himself
became a bird in the air, a wave of the sea. He did not humiliate beauty
into a lesson. He scattered beauty among men not as a homily but as a
spirit--

Singing hymns unbidden, till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

His politics are implicit in _The Cloud_ and _The Skylark_ and _The West
Wind_, no less than in _The Mask of Anarchy_. His idea of the State as
well as his idea of sky and stream and forest was rooted in the exuberant
imagination of a lover. The whole body of his work, whether lyrical in t