I am in the world feeling my way to light ‘amid the encircling gloom.’
Gloom
The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, mouldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts.
Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom – all, which makes death a hideous show.
A lost but happy dream may shed its light upon our waking hours, and the whole day may be infected with the gloom of a dreary or sorrowful one; yet of neither may we be able to recover a trace.