The difficulties in reducing this charming theory of love to practice are well exemplified in Shelley’s own life.  He ran away with his first wife not because she inspired any uncontrollable passion, but because she declared she was a victim of domestic oppression and threw herself upon him for protection.  Nevertheless, when he discovered that his best friend was making love to her, in spite of his free-love principles, he was very seriously annoyed.  When he presently abandoned her, feeling a spiritual affinity in another direction, she drowned herself in the Serpentine:  and his second wife needed all her natural sweetness and all her inherited philosophy to reconcile her to the waves of Platonic enthusiasm for other ladies which periodically swept the too sensitive heart of her husband.  Free love would not, then, secure freedom from complications; it would not remove the present occasion for jealousy, reproaches, tragedies, and the dragging of a lengthening chain.  Freedom of spirit cannot be translated into freedom of action; you may amend laws, and customs, and social entanglements, but you will still have them; for this world is a lumbering mechanism and not, like love, a plastic dream.  Wisdom is very old and therefore often ironical, and it has long taught that it is well for those who would live in the spirit to keep as clear as possible of the world:  and that marriage, especially a free-love marriage, is a snare for poets.  Let them endure to love freely, hopelessly, and infinitely, after the manner of Plato and Dante, and even of Goethe, when Goethe really loved:  that exquisite sacrifice will improve their verse, and it will not kill them.  Let them follow in the traces of Shelley when he wrote in his youth:  “I have been most of the night pacing a church-yard.  I must now engage in scenes of strong interest....  I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in poetry....  I slept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night, but did not die,” Happy man if he had been able to add, “And did not marry!”

Last among the elements of Shelley’s thought I may perhaps mention his atheism.  Shelley called himself an atheist in his youth; his biographers and critics usually say that he was, or that he became, a pantheist.  He was an atheist in the sense that he denied the orthodox conception of a deity who is a voluntary creator, a legislator, and a judge; but his aversion to Christianity was not founded on any sympathetic or imaginative knowledge of it; and a man who preferred the Paradiso of Dante to almost any other poem, and preferred it to the popular Inferno itself, could evidently be attracted by Christian ideas and sentiment the moment they were presented to him as expressions of moral truth rather than as gratuitous dogmas.  A pantheist he was in the sense that he felt how fluid and vital this whole world is; but he seems to have had no tendency to conceive any conscious plan or logical necessity connecting