He would fain have desired liberty, but all hope of it was gone.
I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth.
Late in the 15th century, in spite of the somewhat greater liberty of that age, we find Stephen Scrope writing nakedly to a familiar correspondent "for very need [of poverty], I was fain to sell a little daughter I have for much less than I should have done by possibility," i.e.
They would fain be at home with the Lord, and absent from the body, for which there is no place in heaven since flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor corruption inherit incorruption.
Lacking his intensity of passion and his admirable faculty for seizing the most evanescent shades of difference in feeling, they degenerated into colourless and lifeless insipidities made insupportable by the frigid repetition of tropes and conceits which we are fain to pardon in the master.