virtue of necessity--and thus contentment wreathes
with silk and velvet the prisoner's chains. Once were we--long, long
ago--restless as a sunbeam on the restless wave--rapid as a river that
seems enraged with all impediments, but all the while in passionate love

"Doth make sweet music with th' enamell'd stones"--

strong as a steed let loose from Arab's tent in the oasis to slake his
thirst at the desert well--fierce in our harmless joy as a red-deer
belling on the hills--tameless as the eagle sporting in the storm--gay
as the "dolphin on a tropic sea"--"mad as young bulls"--and wild as a
whole wilderness of adolescent lions. But now--alas! and alack-a-day!
the sunbeam is but a patch of sober verdure--the river is changed into a
canal--the "desert-born" is foundered--the red-deer is slow as an old
ram--the eagle has forsook his cliff and his clouds, and hops among the
gooseberry bushes--the dolphin has degenerated into a land
tortoise--without danger now might a very child take the bull by the
horns--and though something of a lion still, our roar is, like that of
the nightingale, "most musical, most melancholy"--and, as we attempt to
shake our mane, your grandmother--fair peruser--cannot choose but weep.

It speaks folios in favour of our philanthropy, to know that, in our own
imprisonment, we love to see all life free as air. Would that by a word
of ours we could clothe all human shoulders with wings! Would that by a
word of ours we could plume all human spirits with thoughts strong as
the eagle's pinions, that they might winnow their way into the empyrean!
Tories! Yes! we are Tories. Our faith is in the Divine right of
kings--but easy, my boys, easy--all free men are kings, and they hold
their empire from heaven. That is our political--philosophical--moral--
religious creed. In its spirit we have lived--and in its spirit we hope
to die--not on the scaffold like Sidney--no--no--no--not by any manner
of means like Sidney on the scaffold--but like ourselves, on a
hair-mattress above a feather-bed, our head decently sunk in three
pillows and one bolster, and our frame stretched out unagitatedly
beneath a white counterpane. But meanwhile--though almost as
unlocomotive as the dead in body--there is perpetual motion in our
minds. Sleep is one thing, and stagnation is another--as is well known
to all eyes that have ever seen, by moonlight and midnight, the face of
Christopher North, or of Windermere.

Windermere! Why