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Updated: June 19, 2025
Freedom was so near at hand. The green woods, the sweet wild woods, his woods were all about him. The blue sky was above him. The fragrant wind blew fresh through his prison-bars. It could not be that he was helpless so near to freedom. Presently these strong bars would break and he would rush into the wilderness and flee far from the haunts of men. Then the slow and curious procession started.
Between the road leading to l'Etoile, the Bois de Boulogne, &c, and that which skirts the Seine, formerly called the Cours de la Reine, is a large piece of turf, where, in fine weather, and especially on Sundays, the Parisian youths amuse themselves at foot-ball, prison-bars, and long tennis.
Charley saw and heard all this during the whole of that long, exciting afternoon, and as he heard and saw it his heart swelled as if it would burst its prison-bars, his voice rang out wildly in the choruses, regardless alike of tune and time, and his spirit boiled within him as he quaffed the first sweet draught of a rover's life a life in the woods, the wild, free, enchanting woods, where all appeared in his eyes bright, and sunny, and green, and beautiful!
His own positive and earthly nature attained, for the first time, and as if for its own punishment, the comprehension of that loftier and more ethereal visitant from the heavens, who had once looked with a seraph's smile through the prison-bars of his iron life; that celestial refinement of affection, that exuberance of feeling which warms into such varieties of beautiful idea, under the breath of the earth-beautifier, Imagination, all from which, when it was all his own, he had turned half weary and impatient, and termed the exaggerations of a visionary romance, now that the world had lost them evermore, he interpreted aright as truths.
My heart recoiled from him so utterly, that I could conceive of no fate more bitter than to be compelled again to receive his profession of affection, his lover-like caresses; yet, in recoiling, it had been bruised against its prison-bars, bruised and crushed like a bird that seeks refuge in the farthest limits of its cage from an approaching foe, and suffers almost as severely as if given to its fangs.
If you ever dreamt this dream, do not apologise for it; it is one as old as the world. 'Oh that I had wings like a dove! cried the Prophet, nearly 3,000 years ago; and the dialogue of the swallow and the prisoner, so often sung by poets, has been repeated in prose behind all the prison-bars on the globe since prisons were first invented.
We cannot glean from these incidental expressions, whether it brought them any steady comfort, or sensibly affected their happiness. Thus, for four thousand years, the soul of man dashed its wings against the prison-bars of time, peering into the night through the cold, relentless gratings for some fugitive ray of the existence of which it had such strong and sleepless presentiment.
Isolation is a great aid to the thinker. Some of the best books the world has ever known were written behind prison-bars; exile has done much for literature, and a protracted sea-voyage has allowed many a good man to roam the universe in imagination. Some of Macaulay's best essays were written on board slow-going sailing-ships that were blown by vagrant winds from England to India.
He was pacing the streets, wondering whether it was worth while to be respectable and prosperous in a city where violence took the place of law when logic failed. To him, Garrison had won Garrison had not been answered: only beaten, bullied, abused and thrust behind prison-bars. Wendell Phillips' cheeks burned with shame. Garrison was held a prisoner for several days.
He thought it must be a vision born of the fever burning in his brain. Later, he heard a despairing cry. But was it surprising that one should hear such a sound in a prison, where twenty men condemned to death were suffering the agony of that terrible night which precedes the day of execution. At last, the gray light of early dawn came creeping in through the prison-bars.
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