e calls the spirit of beauty liberty, because despotism, and
perhaps, as 'the man of virtuous soul commands not nor obeys,' all
authority, pluck virtue from her path towards beauty, and because it leads
us by that love whose service is perfect freedom. It leads all things by
love, for he cries again and again that love is the perception of beauty
in thought and things, and it orders all things by love, for it is love
that impels the soul to its expressions in thought and in action, by
making us 'seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we
experience within ourselves.' 'We are born into the world, and there is
something within us which, from the instant that we live, more and more
thirsts after its likeness.' We have 'a soul within our soul that
describes a circle around its proper paradise which pain and sorrow and
evil dare not overleap,' and we labour to see this soul in many mirrors,
that we may possess it the more abundantly. He would hardly seek the
progress of the world by any less gentle labour, and would hardly have us
resist evil itself. He bids the reformers in _The Philosophical Review of
Reform_ receive 'the onset of the cavalry,' if it be sent to disperse
their meetings, 'with folded arms,' and 'not because active resistance is
not justifiable, but because temperance and courage would produce greater
advantages than the most decisive victory;' and he gives them like advice
in _The Masque of Anarchy_, for liberty, the poem cries, 'is love,' and
can make the rich man kiss its feet, and, like those who followed Christ,
give away his goods and follow it throughout the world.

He does not believe that the reformation of society can bring this beauty,
this divine order, among men without the regeneration of the hearts of
men. Even in _Queen Mab_, which was written before he had found his
deepest thought, or rather perhaps before he had found words to utter it,
for I do not think men change much in their deepest thought, he is less
anxious to change men's beliefs, as I think, than to cry out against that
serpent more subtle than any beast of the field, 'the cause and the effect
of tyranny.' He affirms again and again that the virtuous, those who have
'pure desire and universal love,' are happy in the midst of tyranny, and
he foresees a day when 'the spirit of nature,' the spirit of beauty of his
later poems, who has her 'throne of power unappealable in every human
heart,' shall have made men so v