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.
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