disimprison

The quote is bogus even though “it sounds so right, with that awkward word-coinage ‘disimprison’ in it, surely just the kind of thing the poet would pull out of the air as he scratched along at speed in a notebook.”

He opens this collection with a brief introduction, explaining that he’d planned to use a quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge as his epigraph, something about imagination possessing “the power to disimprison the soul of fact.”

Disimprison, dis-im-priz′n, v.t. to free from prison or restraint.—n.

It is true that he does not interpret between the brain and music, but he is able to disimprison sound, as no one has ever done with mortal hands, and the piano, when he touches it, becomes a joyous, disembodied thing, a voice and nothing more, but a voice which is music itself.

And now, here has come his new Visit to Friedrich the Great;—which, with the issues it had, and the tempestuous cloud of tumid speculations and chaotic writings it involved him in, quite upset the poor Ritter Doctor; so that, hypochondrias deepening to the abysmal, his fine intellect sank altogether,—and only Death, which happily followed soon, could disimprison him.