I hated slavery, always, and the desire for freedom only needed a favorable breeze, to fan it into a blaze, at any moment. The thought of only being a creature of the presentand the past troubled me, and I longed to have a future - a future with hope in it. To be shut up entirely to the past and present, is abhorrent to the human mind; it is to the soul - whose life and happiness is unceasing progress - what the prison is to the body; a blight and mildew, a hell of horrors. The dawning of this, another year, awakened me from my temporary slumber, and roused into life my latent, but long cherished aspirations for freedom. I was now not only ashamed to be contented in slavery, but ashamed to seem to be contented.