In this sense may be applied in earnest what Butler writes in sport, of an independent spirit who
“Disdains control, and yet can be
Nowhere, but in a prison, free.”
So the sculptor in Hawthorne’s tale of “Transformation,” intent on winning winsome Hilda for his own, “would try if it were possible to take this shy, yet frank and innocently fearless creature captive, and imprison her in his heart, and make her sensible of a larger freedom there than in all the world besides.” “I have read somewhere,” says a simple maiden in one of Lord Lytton’s fictions, “that the slave is gay in his holiday from toil; if you free him, the gaiety vanishes, and he cares no more for the dance under the palm-tree.” Don Alphonse, in Madame de Rémusat’s “Lettres Espagnoles,” writes to his sister an account of the courtiers’ embarrassment on being released by the king from ceremonial attendance, and allowed to do each one as he liked. “L’improvisation en tout est chose assez difficile, et particulièrement celle de la liberté. Il faut que je confesse que nous n’avons su que faire de la nôtre.” The moral of the fable may be read in Landor’s lines, supposed to be indited by the caged nightingales so tenderly tended by Agapenthe, and brought to Athens for her from Thessaly, and who bid the reader think not
“That we would gladly fly again
To gloomy wood or windy plain.
Certain we are we ne’er should find
A care so provident, so kind....
O may you prove, as well as we,
That e’en in Athens there may be