It might be months, or years, or days-- I kept no count, I took no note-- I had no hope my eyes to raise, And clear them of their dreary mote; At last men came to set me free; 370 I asked not why, and recked not where; It was at length the same to me, Fettered or fetterless to be, I learned to love despair. And thus when they appeared at last, And all my bonds aside were cast, These heavy walls to me had grown A hermitage--and all my own![34] And half I felt as they were come To tear me from a second home: 380 With spiders I had friendship made, And watched them in their sullen trade, Had seen the mice by moonlight play, And why should I feel less than they? We were all inmates of one place, And I, the monarch of each race, Had power to kill--yet, strange to tell! In quiet we had learned to dwell;[h] My very chains and I grew friends, So much a long communion tends 390 To make us what we are:--even I Regained my freedom with a sigh. FOOTNOTES: [1] {7}[In the first draft, the sonnet opens thus-- "Belovéd Goddess of the chainless mind! Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art, Thy palace is within the Freeman's heart, Whose soul the love of thee alone can bind; And when thy sons to fetters are consign'd-- To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom, Thy joy is with them still, and unconfined, Their country conquers with their martyrdom." Ed. 1832.] [2] [Compare-- "I appeal from her [sc. Florence] to Thee." _Proph. of Dante_, Canto I. line 125.] [a] {8} _When the foregoing.... Some account of his life will be found in a note appended to the Sonnet on Chillon, with which I have been furnished, etc.--[Notes, The Prisoner of Chillon, etc._, 1816, p. 59.] [3] {13} Ludovico Sforza, and others.--The same is asserted of Marie Antoinette's, the wife of Louis the Sixteenth, though not in quite so short a period. Grief is said to have the same effect; to such, and not to fear, this change in _hers_ was to be attributed. [It has been said that the Queen's hair turned grey during the return from Varennes to Paris; but Carlyle (_French Revolution_, 1839, i. 182) notes that as early as May 4, 1789, on the occasion of the assembly of the States-General, "Her hair is already grey with many cares and crosses." Compare "Thy father's beard is turned white with the news" (Shakespeare, I _Henry IV_., act ii. sc. 4, line 345); and-- "For deadly fear can time outgo, And blanch at once the hair." _Marmion_, Canto I. stanza xxviii. lines 19, 20.] [b] _But with the inward waste of grief_.--[MS.]