With this combination of manly and delicate accomplishments,
fitting him to shine both in active and elegant life, and
calculated to give him an intense relish for joyous existence, it
must have been a severe trial, in an age of bustle and chivalry,
to pass the spring-time of his years in monotonous captivity. It
was the good fortune of James, however, to be gifted with a
powerful poetic fancy, and to be visited in his prison by the
choicest inspirations of the muse. Some minds corrode, and grow
inactive, under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid
and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender
and imaginative in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets
upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird,
pours forth his soul in melody.
Have you not seen the nightingale,
A pilgrim coop'd into a cage,
How doth she chant her wonted tale,
In that her lonely hermitage!
Even there her charming melody doth prove
That all her boughs are trees, her cage a grove.+
+ Roger L'Estrange.
Indeed, it is the divine attribute of the imagination, that it is
irrepressible, unconfinable--that when the real world is shut
out, it can create a world for itself, and, with a necromantic
power, can conjure up glorious shapes and forms and brilliant
visions, to make solitude populous, and irradiate the gloom of
the dungeon.
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