In the spirit of poetic errantry he determines
to comply with this intimation; he therefore takes pen in hand,
makes with it a sign of the cross to implore a benediction, and
sallies forth into the fairy-land of poetry. There is something
extremely fanciful in all this, and it is interesting as
furnishing a striking and beautiful instance of the simple manner
in which whole trains of poetical thought are sometimes awakened
and literary enterprises suggested to the mind.
In the course of his poem, he more than once bewails the peculiar
hardness of his fate, thus doomed to lonely and inactive life,
and shut up from the freedom and pleasure of the world in which
the meanest animal indulges unrestrained. There is a sweetness,
however, in his very complaints; they are the lamentations of an
amiable and social spirit at being denied the indulgence of its
kind and generous propensities; there is nothing in them harsh
nor exaggerated; they flow with a natural and touching pathos,
and are perhaps rendered more touching by their simple brevity.
They contrast finely with those elaborate and iterated repinings
which we sometimes meet with in poetry, the effusions of morbid
minds sickening under miseries of their own creating, and venting
their bitterness upon an unoffending world.
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