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!"

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
occas