Brilliant.

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 coop'd 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—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 brilliant visions, to make solitude populous, and irradiate the gloom of the dungeon. 

Washington Irving, from "The Royal Poet"

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