Came stealing upon me with all the distress
Of loss and of yearning and powerlessness:
Till the hopes and the doubts and the sleepless unrest
That, swallow-like, built in the home of my breast,
Now hither, now thither, now heavenward flew,
Wild-winged as the winds are: now suddenly drew
My soul to abysses of nothingness where
All light was a shadow, all hope, a despair:
Where truth, that religion had set upon high,
The darkness distorted and changed to a lie:
And dreams of the beauty ambition had fed
Like leaves of the autumn fell blighted and dead.
And I rose with my burden of anguish and doom,
And cried, "O my God, had I died in the womb!
"Than born into night, with no hope of the morn,
An heir unto shadows, to live so forlorn!
"All effort is vain; and the planet called Faith
Sinks down; and no power is real but death.
"Oh, light me a torch in the deepening dark
So my sick soul may follow, my sad heart may mark!"--
And then in the darkness the answer!--It came
From Earth not from Heaven--a glimmering flame,
Behold, at my feet! In the shadow it shone
Mysteriously lovely and dimly alone:
An ember; a sparkle of dew and of glower;
Like the lamp that a spirit hangs under a flower:
As goldenly green as the phosphorus star
A fairy may wear in her diadem's bar:
An element essence of moonlight and dawn
That, trodden and trampled, burns on and burns on.
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