ction,
to the magnetic leading of chosen and consecrated spirits. He saw the
process of change not as a slow evolution (as moderns do), nor yet as
the deliberate discarding of error at the bidding of rational argument
(as Godwin did), but rather as a sudden emotional conversion. The
missionary is always the light-bringer. "Some eminent in virtue shall
start up," he prophesies in _Queen Mab_. The _Revolt of Islam_, so
puzzling to the uninitiated reader by the wilful inversions of its
mythology, and its history which seems to belong to no conceivable race
of men, becomes, when one grasps its underlying ideas, a luminous epic
of revolutionary faith, precious if only because it is told in that
elaborately musical Spenserian stanza which no poet before or after
Shelley has handled with such easy mastery. Their mission to free their
countrymen comes to Laon and Cythna while they are still children,
brooding over the slavery of modern Greece amid the ruins of a free
past. They dream neither of teaching nor of fighting. They are the
winged children of Justice and Truth, whose mere words can scatter the
thrones of the oppressor, and trample the last altar in the dust. It is
enough to speak the name of Liberty in a ship at sea, and all the coasts
around it will thrill with the rumour of her name. In one moving,
eloquent harangue, Cythna converts the sailors of the ship, laden with
slaves and the gains of commerce, into the pioneers of her army. She
paints to them the misery of their own lot, and then appeals to the
central article of revolutionary faith:

This need not be; ye might arise and will
That gold should lose its power and thrones their glory.
That love which none may bind be free to fill
The world like light; and evil faith, grown hoary
With crime, be quenched and die.

"Ye might arise and will"--it was the inevitable corollary of the facile
analysis which traced all the woes of mankind not to "nature," but to
kings, priests, and institutions. Shelley's missionaries of liberty
preach to a nation of slaves, as the apostles of the Salvation Army
preach in the slums to creatures reared in degradation, the same
mesmeric appeal. Conversion is a psychological possibility, and the
history of revolutions teaches its limitations and its power as
instructively as the history of religion. It breaks down not because men
are incapable of the sudden effort that can "arise and will," but
rather because to render its eff