‘My brethren, we are free! the plains and mountains, The grey sea shore, the forests and the fountains, Are haunts of happiest dwellers;--man and woman, Their common bondage burst, may freely borrow From _lawless love_ a solace for their sorrow; For oft we still must weep, since we are human. A stormy night’s serenest morrow, Whose showers are pity’s gentle tears, Whose clouds are smiles of those that die Like infants without hopes or fears, And whose beams are joys that lie In blended hearts, now holds dominion; The dawn of mind, which upwards on a pinion Borne, swift as sun-rise, far illumines space, And clasps this barren world in its own bright embrace!’ Fearful that the words ‘lawless love’ may frighten simple readers, Mr. Buxton Forman (who thinks Shelley ‘might have been the Saviour of the World’), in his most useful edition of Shelley’s works, appends to the alarming words this note:--‘The words _lawless love_ seem to be used, not in a conventional sense, but merely to signify _unshackled love_.’ True, but ‘unshackled’ from what? Cythna meant that tyrant custom, or tyrant anybody else, having been overthrown and rendered powerless for the moment, her brethren and sisters were free to marry, and changing about to remarry, in perfect liberty of affection--in love liberated from _the shackles of human law_--in matrimony, no less easily entered than easily quitted--in marriage, alike free from legal impediments to ingress, and from legal impediments to egress--love, in fact, so perfectly free from the supervision and control of human law, that it might be rightly styled ‘lawless love.’ Later in the poem’s story, when Cythna has rescued Laon from the tyrant’s soldiers, and carried him off, on the ‘black Tartarian horse of giant frame,’ to a picturesque ruin, the brother and sister, after recognizing one another as whilom playmates in Argolis, pass through emotions, that are set forth in the following stanzas:-- ‘The autumnal winds, as if spell-bound, had made A natural couch of leaves in that recess, Which seasons none disturb, but in the shade Of flowering parasites, did Spring love to dress With their sweet blooms the wintry loneliness Of those dead leaves, shedding their stars, whene’er The wandering wind her nurslings might caress; Whose intertwining fingers ever there, Made music wild and soft that filled the listening air. We know not where we go, or what sweet dream May pilot us thro’ caverns strange and fair Of far and pathless passion, while the stream Of life, our bark doth on its whirlpools bear, Spreading swift wings as sails to the dim air; Nor should we seek to know, so the devotion Of love and gentle thoughts be heard still there Louder and louder from the utmost Ocean Of universal life, attuning its commotion.