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Ingelow, Jean, 1820-1897

"Fated to Be Free"

He felt strangely weak that afternoon,
but he was happy. The lightness of heart that comes of giving up some
wrong or undesirable course of action (one that he thought wrong) might
long have been his, but he had not hitherto been able to get away from
the scene of it.
To-morrow he was to depart. Oh, glad to-morrow!
He laid himself back in his seat, and looked at the blue hills, and
listened to the sweet remote voices of the children, let apple-blossoms
drop all over him, peered through great brown boughs at the empty sky,
and lost himself in a sea of thought which seemed almost as new to him
and as fathomless as that was.
Not often does a man pass his whole life before him and deliberately
criticize himself, his actions and his way.
If he does, it is seldom when he would appear to an outsider to have
most reasonable occasion; rather during some pause when body and mind
both are still.
The soul does not always recognise itself as a guest seated within this
frame; sometimes it appears to escape and look at the human life it has
led, as if from without.


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