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 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 the strictest sense or propagandist, is in the nature of a Book of Revelation.