This photograph takes its title from John Milton’s poem “L’Allegro,” a celebration of life’s pleasures:

Come, and trip it as you go

 On the light fantastic toe;

And in thy right hand lead with thee

The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty.

Sir John Herschel wrote to Cameron, “That head of the ‘Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty’ (a little farouche & égarée [timid and distraught] by the way, as if first let loose & half afraid that it was too good to last) is really a most astonishing piece of high relief—She is absolutely alive and thrusting out her head from the paper into the air.” Herschel seized upon the photograph’s most striking quality—its startling sense of presence and of psychological connection with the viewer.