I would educate myself; I would read--what would I not read? These
three years should be a time of sacred retirement and contemplation, as of
Thebaid Anchorite, or Mahomet in his Arabian cave. I would write pamphlets
that should thunder through the land, and make tyrants tremble on their
thrones! All England--at least all crushed and suffering hearts--should
break forth at my fiery words into one roar of indignant sympathy. No--I
would write a poem; I would concentrate all my experience, my aspirations,
all the hopes, and wrongs, and sorrows of the poor, into one garland of
thorns--one immortal epic of suffering. What should I call it? And I set to
work deliberately--such a thing is man--to think of a title.
I looked up, and my eye caught the close bars of the little window;
and then came over me, for the first time, the full meaning of that
word--Prison; that word which the rich use so lightly, knowing well that
there is no chance, in these days, of there ever finding themselves in one;
for the higher classes never break the laws--seeing that they have made
them to fit themselves.
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