From this letter and Note of _Queen Mab_, it appears that when, by his own admission, he was living happily with the _beautiful_ girl, whom he had illuminated out of the Christian faith and instructed to regard the rite and obligations of marriage with levity, the chivalric Shelley held these views touching the intercourse of the sexes:-- (1) The wanderings of amatory passion are indisciplinable, and every attempt to stay those wanderings of desire is a futile effort ‘to subdue the involuntary affections of human nature.’ (2) ‘Love’ being ‘inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness,’ it is natural and necessary for a sensitive and rightly constituted man to regard with love every woman in whom he perceives a high degree of loveliness. (3) Love lying no less completely than religious belief beyond the domain of volition, it is no less absurd for a man ‘to promise for ever to love the same woman’ than for him ‘to promise to believe the same creed,’ as circumstances may at any moment put it beyond his power to keep the promise. (4) A man’s obligation to fulfil an engagement being necessarily dependent on his power to do so, it follows from the nature of things that on becoming unable to love any longer the woman he has promised to love steadily, a man ceases to be bound by the promise. (5) On ceasing to love her, every man should be at liberty to withdraw from the society of his wife and take a congenial mate. (6) It being immoral for a man to enter into engagements without a reasonable prospect of being able to fulfil them, more especially into engagements affecting in a high degree the happiness of the person or persons with whom he makes them; and the conditions of human nature precluding every human creature from a reasonable certainty of being able to love the same person for ever, it is immoral for a man and woman to promise to love one another for ever, _i.e._ till death, as influences lying wholly beyond their control may at any moment take from either of them the power of fulfilling his or her part of the contract. (7) The moral and reasonable man’s largest promise of enduring affection to the woman of his choice should be nothing more than a sincere declaration, that his passion is so strong as to justify him in declaring it a state of feeling likely to endure for a considerable period. (8) Love being a more or less transient state of the affections, marriage ought to be replaced by Free Love, _i.e._ by cohabitation so arranged that either party to the affectionate league is free to retire from the association at will.