Salt considered Shelley and Whitman as the "two most signal embodiments of the revolutionary spirit during the past century ...”

This week I became the proud owner of Songs of Freedom. Selected and Edited, with an Introduction, by Henry S. Salt (London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd.; 1893). Salt wrote Animals’ Rights. Considered in Relation to Social Progress in 1894. He was also the founder of the Humanitarian League. In the Introduction to Songs of Freedom, Salt writes

Finally, it must be repeated that liberty is, as yet, an ideal rather than a reality — a fair but intangible vision which has long eluded the eager grasp of its worshippers. Again and again have the soldiers of freedom appeared to be on the point of capturing the central stronghold of the enemy; again and again has the tyranny rearisen in some new and unexpected quarter, and the battle has been bequeathed anew from one age to another, with the accompanying legacy of suffering, self-sacrifice, and privation. Our Songs of Freedom must therefore of necessity be in great part songs of slavery, for it is the evils of the present that, by very contrast, enhance and emphasize the brighter visions of the future. […] Link by link the chains of serfdom are broken: step by step man advances towards that perfect freedom which can only be attained by the temporary failure — in other words, the eventual success — of innumerable earlier efforts.