The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.

William Hazlitt (1778–1830), a leading English essayist and critic of the Romantic period, wrote frequently about the inner life—how perception, feeling, and thought are shaped by circumstance. This line comes from his essay on travel, where he defends solitary wandering against the social obligations and conversational “duties” that can accompany journeys with companions. In the wake of late‑18th- and early‑19th-century travel writing and the Romantic celebration of individual sensibility, Hazlitt frames travel less as sightseeing than as a temporary emancipation from routine, roles, and expectations—an interval in which the mind can move freely, answerable only to itself.

Hazlitt defines the essence of travel not by destinations or accomplishments but by a particular mental condition: uncoerced self-direction. “Liberty” here is experiential and psychological—the freedom to let attention drift, to respond emotionally without having to justify oneself, and to act without negotiating with others’ plans. The sentence also implies a critique of travel as performance (collecting sights, reporting impressions) and of companionship as a subtle form of constraint. For Hazlitt, the best journey restores a kind of original autonomy: the traveler becomes most fully a self when released from social scripts, able to think and feel in an unedited, private way.