They were warmed and brightened every now and then as a form that I loved glided amongst them, but even that form dragged after it a chain of painful, fettering considerations, and the gleams of light that it threw round it were only like those weak, pallid flashes of sun that flit through the clouds of thunder and storm in a hurricane.
"To-morrow?"
Victoria Cross
He attributes the origin of metre to the fact that the mind makes a conscious effort to hold passion in check by fettering it with regular numbers.
"The Literature of Ecstasy"
Albert Mordell
On a question of language, Hebrew for instance, if we don't know it and somebody else does, we cannot of course dispute his translation, but where nobody questions the words, everybody has a right-it is indeed everybody's duty-to reflect upon their meaning and bearing and come to their own conclusions; listening to others wiser or not wiser than themselves, eagerly seeking help, but never, oh never fettering their minds by an unconditional and premeditated submission to anybody else's, or rather pretending so to fetter it, for a mind will make itself heard, and there's much false modesty in the disclaimer of all power or right to judge-that very disclaimer being in fact, as you say, an exercise of private judgment and a rebellion or protest against thousands of wise and good and learned men.
"Lady-John-Russell"
MacCarthy, Desmond