Note 410 — NATIONAL LYRICS, AND SONGS FOR MUSIC. TO MRS LAWRENCE
Reading edition
“The Summer’s Call.”—This faculty for realising images of the distant and the beautiful, amidst outward circumstances of apparently the most adverse influence, is thus gracefully illustrated by Washington Irving in the “Royal Poet” of his Sketch-Book:—“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 cooped 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; and 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 irradiate the gloom of the dungeon. Such was the world of pomp and pageant that lived ’round Tasso in his dismal cell at Ferrara, when he conceived the splendid scenes of his Jerusalem; and we may consider The King’s Quair, composed by James of Scotland during his captivity at Windsor, as another of those beautiful breakings forth of the soul from the restraint and gloom of the prison-house.”