Falkner by Mary Shelley

In the best room that could be allotted to him consistently with safe imprisonment, and with such comforts around as money might obtain, Falkner passed the lingering days. What so forlorn as the comforts of a prison! the wigwam of the Indian is more pleasing to the imagination -- that is in close contiguity with Nature, and partakes her charm -- no barrier exists between it and freedom -- and Nature and freedom are the stanch friends of unsophisticated man. But a jail's best room sickens the heart in its very show of accommodation. The strongly-barred windows, looking out on the narrow court, surrounded by high frowning walls; the appalling sounds that reach the ear, in such close neighbourhood to crime and wo; the squalid appearance given to each inhabitant by the confined air -- the surly, authoritative manners of the attendants -- not dependant on the prisoner, but on the state -- the knowledge that all may come in, while he cannot get out -- and the conviction that the very unshackled state of his limbs depends upon his tame submission and apparent apathy; there is no one circumstance that does not wound the free spirit of man, and make him envy the meanest animal that breathes the free air, and is at liberty.

Falkner, by that strange law of our nature which makes us conceive the future, without being aware of our foreknowledge, had acquainted his imagination with these things -- and while writing his history amid the far-stretched mountains of Greece, had shrunk and trembled before such an aspect of slavery; and yet now that it had fallen on him, he felt in the first instance more satisfied, more truly free, than for many a long day before.