And in the poem to William Shelley, his little son by Mary, he writes: "They have taken thy brother and sister dear, They have made them unfit for thee; They have withered the smile and dried the tear Which should have been sacred to me. To a blighting faith and a cause of crime They have bound them slaves in youthly time; And they will curse my name and thee Because we are fearless and free. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fear not the tyrants will rule for ever, Or the priests of the evil faith; They stand on the brink of that raging river Whose waves they have tainted with death. It is fed from the depths of a thousand dells, Around them it foams and rages and swells; And their swords and their sceptres I floating see Like wrecks, on the surge of eternity." Fearing that this son of his second marriage might also be taken from him, Shelley left his native country, never to return. At the time when the Lord Chancellor was branding him as less fit for the most rudimentary duties of social life than any other man in England, he was preparing to prove that he was one of the few men then in existence who were predestined to immortality. He left England, stamped as a criminal, and most of the Englishmen whom he met abroad feared and hated him as capable of any crime. He appears to have been actually once or twice subjected to personal molestation. As already mentioned, Shelley in 1817 published a pamphlet on the subject of Parliamentary Reform. As a proof of the moderation and practicability of the views elaborated in its pages, it need only be mentioned that the Tories in 1867 passed almost the very scheme of Reform which the "atheist and republican" had planned fifty years before. He "disavowed any wish to establish universal suffrage at once, or to do away with monarchy and aristocracy." And on many other occasions he declared himself to be against precipitate changes. His Radicalism consisted simply in his being fifty years ahead of his day. Attacked and persecuted by the narrow-minded society of the period, Shelley now hurled his poems of liberty at England. His political poems are written with his blood. The employment of such similes for Castlereagh and Sidmouth as "two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle" and "two vipers tangled into one," was allowable in his case. It must not be forgotten that to him Castlereagh, Sidmouth, and Eldon, were not men, but personifications of a principle--of the great, fateful principle of reaction to which his career and his happiness had been sacrificed. He writes in _The Masque of Anarchy_: