When the soul, as in Shelley’s case, is all goodness, and when the world seems all illegitimacy and obstruction, we need not wonder that freedom should be regarded as a panacea.  Even if freedom had not been the idol of Shelley’s times, he would have made an idol of it for himself.  “I never could discern in him,” says his friend Hogg, “any more than two principles.  The first was a strong, irrepressible love of liberty....  The second was an equally ardent love of toleration ... and ... an intense abhorrence of persecution.”  We all fancy nowadays that we believe in liberty and abhor persecution; but the liberty we approve of is usually only a variation in social compulsions, to make them less galling to our latest sentiments than the old compulsions would be if we retained them.  Liberty of the press and liberty to vote do not greatly help us in living after our own mind, which is, I suppose, the only positive sort of liberty.  From the point of view of a poet, there can be little essential freedom so long as he is forbidden to live with the people he likes, and compelled to live with the people he does not like.  This, to Shelley, seemed the most galling of tyrannies; and free love was, to his feeling, the essence and test of freedom.  Love must be spontaneous to be a spiritual bond in the beginning and it must remain spontaneous if it is to remain spiritual.  To be bound by one’s past is as great a tyranny to pure spirit as to be bound by the sin of Adam, or by the laws of Artaxerxes; and those of us who do not believe in the possibility of free love ought to declare frankly that we do not, at bottom, believe in the possibility of freedom.

    “I never was attached to that great sect
     Whose doctrine is that each one should select,
     Out of the crowd, a mistress or a friend
     And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
     To cold oblivion; though it is the code
     Of modern morals, and the beaten road
     Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread
     Who travel to their home among the dead
     By the broad highway of the world, and so
     With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
     The dreariest and the longest journey go. 
     True love in this differs from gold and clay,
     That to divide is not to take away. 
     Love is like understanding that grows bright
     Gazing on many truths....  Narrow
     The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
     The life that wears, the spirit that creates
     One object and one form, and builds thereby
     A sepulchre for its eternity!”