There is something extremely fanciful in all this, and it is
interesting as furnishing a striking and beautiful instance of the
simple manner in which whole trains of poetical thought are
sometimes awakened, and literary enterprises suggested to the mind.
In the course of his poem he more than once bewails the peculiar
hardness of his fate; thus doomed to lonely and inactive life, and
shut up from the freedom and pleasure of the world, in which the
meanest animal indulges unrestrained. There is a sweetness, however,
in his very complaints; they are the lamentations of an amiable and
social spirit at being denied the indulgence of its kind and
generous propensities; there is nothing in them harsh nor exaggerated;
they flow with a natural and touching pathos, and are perhaps rendered
more touching by their simple brevity. They contrast finely with those
elaborate and iterated repinings, which we sometimes meet with in
poetry;- the effusions of morbid minds sickening under miseries of
their own creating, and venting their bitterness upon an unoffending
world. James speaks of his privations with acute sensibility, but
having mentioned them passes on, as if his manly mind disdained to
brood over unavoidable calamities.
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