"As the night advanced, a fierce wind arose from the woods, and quickly dispersed the clouds that had loitered in the heavens: the blast tore along like a mighty avelanche, and produced a kind of insanity in my spirits, that burst all bounds of reason and reflection. I lighted the dry branch of a tree, and danced with fury around the devoted cottage, my eyes still fixed on the western horizon, the edge of which the moon nearly touched. A part of its orb was at length hid, and I waved my brand; it sunk, and, with a loud scream, I fired the straw, and heath, and bushes, which I had collected. The wind fanned the fire, and the cottage was quickly enveloped by the flames, which clung to it, and licked it with their forked and destroying tongues." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The mutated hybrid of Enlightenment optimism and Gothic cynicism - of humanism and environmentalism - Frankenstein offers a chilling postmortem of humanity's confident drive to master and operate the cosmos' generative and degenerative functions. The disastrous fable of man's bastardization of nature is as much a tragedy of the neglected offspring of human ingenuity and cosmic nature as it is an elegy of the hopes for mankind's progress in the gory wake of the French Revolution.