August 4– Percy Shelley
Romantic atheist, pagan pamphleteer and poet.

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.

Read more from Shelley on Project Gutenberg.

August 4, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
*Norway: Peer Gynt Festival Days.

ALSO ON AUGUST 4 IN HISTORY…
1578 — King of Portugal and his court killed in failed crusade in Morocco.
1792 — Poet, anarchist Percy Shelley born, Sussex, England.
1875 — Storyteller Hans Christian Andersen

Excerpted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective