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 A sweeter thing than liberty.” Apply, again, to the general subject the special fact, by way of illustration, that restrictions and shackles are essential to rhythmic writing, and voluntary thraldom the natural condition of poetry. The Chevalier de la Faye, in his “Apology” for the supposed difficulties of rhyme in our Cisalpine dialects (one Italian poet being “distinguishable among his fellow-captives by the light aërial nature of his fetters,”) suggests an ingenious parallel to the _jets d’eau_ that ornament the gardens of the Tuileries, Versailles, and St. Cloud, in a copy of verses which have been thus Englished by Father Prout:— “From the rhyme’s restrictive rigour Thought derives its impulse oft, Genius draws new strength and vigour, Fancy springs and shoots aloft. So, in leaden conduits pent, Mounts the liquid element, By pressure forced to climb: And he who feared the rule’s restraint Finds but a friendly ministrant In Reason’s helpmate, Rhyme.” Pithy and pertinent too are Mr. Coventry Patmore’s lines on those who “Live by law, not like the fool, But like the bard, who freely sings In strictest bonds of rhyme and rule, And finds in them, not bonds, but wings.” They who so live are in every sense the happier, without an “except these bonds,” but because of them. They find in them not bonds, but wings; and thenceforth have free course, and go on their way rejoicing. They, like the repentant rebels in Shakspeare’s “King John,” and by the same river metaphor,