Excerpt from The Vicissitudes of Shelley's Queen Mab: A Chapter in the History of Reform Once again in the English-speaking race has the victim of the reforming passion appeared. In the vastness of America a man with commensurate vastness of concep tion awoke from the dream of everyday life some thirty years ago, and preached a new gospel of reform. Walt Whitman, the poet of democracy and of the natural man, is the latest Avatar of the true passion for reform and he goes on to this day adding and adding to the heads of his propaganda. This passion for reforming the world, then, is generic. Other victims of it might be named; but these will suffice for the present purpose of illustrating the sense in which the passion is regarded as inspiring Shelley. Whence and how this passion was breathed into his nos trils when he became a living soul, is a problem for historians and psychologists. The whence indeed is not so hard a matter, for Shelley was born in 1792, when the spirit of revolt was in the air; and the French Revo lution was the central historic fact during the period in which his early years fell. But why the concentrated spirit of that movement, wafted across the Channel, should have entered into the scion of a long line of Sussex squires, is a question bootless to ask and impossible to answer. Stranger still, and greatly to the advantage of humanity, the essential spirit of the Revolution took shape in Shelley free from the accidentals of violence and bloodshed; and his almost universal tolerance never taught him to tolerate cruelty or savagery in any form, no matter what the end to be attained. Thus the passion for reforming the world was with Shelley not only a passion for attaining somehow to the supremacy of good and the abolition of evil, but also for reforming funda mentally the means of reform; and that, I take it, is almost as high an ideal as the mind can shape. The Nazarene reformer Confessed that he came not to bring peace but a sword: Shelley brought no sword, and would hear of none. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.