Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/222

Rh bitterness, this passionate, poignant regret for all he might have been, had not Position warped, and cramped, and proscribed, and starved him, can come unto no man.

And there is no evil worse than this; for by it the man casts back on accident (and often with a terrible justice) all the errors, the failures, the sins, and the disgraces of his life. "I never had a fair field!"—it may be sometimes a coward's apology; but it is many a time the epitome of a great, cramped, tortured, wasted life, which strove like a caged eagle to get free, and never could beat down the bars of the den that circumstances and prejudice had forged. The world sees the few do do reach freedom, and, watching their bold upward flight, says rashly, "will can work all things." But they who perish by the thousand, the fettered eagles who never see the sun; who pant in darkness, and wear their breasts bare beating on the iron that will never yield; who know their strength, yet cannot break their prison; who feel their wings, yet never can soar up to meet the sweet wild western winds of liberty; who lie at last beaten, and hopeless, and blind, with only strength enough to long for death to come and quench all sense and thought in its annihilation,—who thinks of them—who counts them?