Florence, the pine-woods near Pisa, the lawns above San Guiliano, and
the summits of the Euganean Hills, witnessed the creation of his
loveliest lyrics; and his last great poem, the "Triumph of Life", was
transferred to paper in his boat upon the Bay of Spezia.

If "Alastor" had expressed one side of Shelley's nature, his devotion to
Ideal Beauty, "Laon and Cythna" was in a far profounder sense
representative of its author. All his previous experiences and all his
aspirations--his passionate belief in friendship, his principle of the
equality of women with men, his demand for bloodless revolution, his
confidence in eloquence and reason to move nations, his doctrine of free
love, his vegetarianism, his hatred of religious intolerance and
tyranny--are blent together and concentrated in the glowing cantos of
this wonderful romance. The hero, Laon, is himself idealized, the self
which he imagined when he undertook his Irish campaign. The heroine,
Cythna, is the helpmate he had always dreamed, the woman exquisitely
feminine, yet capable of being fired with male enthusiasms, and of
grappling the real problems of our nature with a man's firm grasp. In
the first edition of the poem he made Laon and Cythna brother and
sister, not because he believed in the desirability of incest, but
because he wished to throw a glove down to society, and to attack the
intolerance of custom in its stronghold. In the preface, he tells us
that it was his purpose to kindle in the bosoms of his readers "a
virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that
faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor
misrepresentation, nor prejudice, can ever wholly extinguish among
mankind;" to illustrate "the growth and progress of individual mind
aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind;" and to
celebrate Love "as the sole law which should govern the moral world."
The wild romantic treatment of this didactic motive makes the poem