Note book of the Shelley Society

the address :?The passion for reforming the world is as exalted a form of enthusiasm as can be named. In its integrity it is but seldom manifested. Demagogues are common enough, but the true avatar of the reforming passion appears at long intervals, perhaps even then to be sacrificed to the animosity of those classes against which his zeal is directed. In modern England the archetypal victim of this passion was Shelley. He was born in 1792, when the spirit of revolt was in the air ; but why the concentrated spirit of the revolutionary movement should have entered into the scion of a long line of Sussex squires is a question bootless for us to ask and hard to answer. In Shelley it was unaccompanied by the spirit of violence and bloodshed. His almost universal tolerance never taught him to tolerate cruelty or savagery in any form. With him there was no " via media " between right and wrong, and his reforming zeal was not simply a strong desire to attain the good and abolish the evil; it was also a passion for fundamentally reforming the means of reform?almost as high an ideal as the mind can shape. It is undoubtedly a passion which is inconvenient to society, and, by reaction, to its possessor; for, in the first place, the passion consumes him, and, in the second, arouses the selfish passions of those around him. Even in free England we dare not speak our convictions unless they are those of the ruling faction, while the boasted freedom of America is a still hol...