If “Alastor” had expressed one side of Shelley’s nature, his devotion to Ideal Beauty, “Laon and Cythna” was in a far profounder sense representative of its author.  All his previous experiences and all his aspirations—­his passionate belief in friendship, his principle of the equality of women with men, his demand for bloodless revolution, his confidence in eloquence and reason to move nations, his doctrine of free love, his vegetarianism, his hatred of religious intolerance and tyranny—­are blent together and concentrated in the glowing cantos of this wonderful romance.  The hero, Laon, is himself idealized, the self which he imagined when he undertook his Irish campaign.  The heroine, Cythna, is the helpmate he had always dreamed, the woman exquisitely feminine, yet capable of being fired with male enthusiasms, and of grappling the real problems of our nature with a man’s firm grasp.  In the first edition of the poem he made Laon and Cythna brother and sister, not because he believed in the desirability of incest, but because he wished to throw a glove down to society, and to attack the intolerance of custom in its stronghold.  In the preface, he tells us that it was his purpose to kindle in the bosoms of his readers “a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor misrepresentation, nor prejudice, can ever wholly extinguish among mankind;” to illustrate “the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind;” and to celebrate Love “as the sole law which should govern the moral world.”  The wild romantic treatment of this didactic motive makes the poem highly characteristic of its author.  It is written in Spenserian stanzas, with a rapidity of movement and a dazzling brilliance that are Shelley’s own.  The story relates the kindling of a nation to freedom at the cry of a young poet-prophet, the temporary triumph of the good cause, the final victory of despotic force, and the martyrdom of the hero, together with whom the heroine falls a willing victim.  It is full of thrilling incidents and lovely pictures; yet the tale is the least part of the poem; and few readers have probably been able either to sympathize with its visionary characters, or to follow the narrative without weariness.  As in the case of other poems by Shelley—­especially those in which he attempted to tell a story, for which kind of art his genius was not well suited—­the central motive of “Laon and Cythna” is surrounded by so radiant a photosphere of imagery and eloquence that it is difficult to fix our gaze upon it, blinded as we are by the excess of splendour.  Yet no one now can read the terrible tenth canto, or the lovely fifth, without feeling that a young eagle of poetry had here tried the full strength of his pinions in their flight.  This truth was by no means recognized when “Laon and Cythna” first appeared before the public.  Hooted down, derided, stigmatized, and howled at, it only served to intensify the prejudice with which the author of “Queen Mab” had come to be regarded.