Faith & Spirit Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt doesn’t sell travel as scenery; he sells it as sovereignty. “The soul of a journey” isn’t a postcard, it’s permission: to exit the social script and reclaim the self as its own lawgiver. The phrase “perfect liberty” lands with deliberate extravagance, the kind of absolutism that reveals its target. Hazlitt is taking aim at obligation-by-default: companions who steer conversation, itineraries that become negotiations, even the small performances of politeness that turn movement into another kind of work. He makes travel sound like a political right because, for him, it is one - a temporary republic of one.

The rhythm matters. “To think, feel, do” moves from interior freedom to outward action, insisting that liberty isn’t just having opinions; it’s having time and space for moods, idleness, appetite, contradiction. The kicker, “just as one pleases,” is both ecstatic and slightly bratty, a knowing wink at how rarely adulthood allows that kind of unaccountable pleasure. As a critic shaped by Romantic individualism and a Britain tightening around class etiquette and industrial pace, Hazlitt treats solitude as resistance: a way to stop being processed by other people’s expectations.

The subtext is sharper: the modern self is crowded. A journey, properly undertaken, becomes a moral experiment in deprogramming. Hazlitt’s “liberty” is less about distance traveled than about shedding the constant negotiation of being legible, agreeable, and useful.