“I stood within the grave’s o’ershadowing vault;
Gloomy and damp it stretch’d its vast domain;
Shades were its boundary; for my strain’d eye sought
For other limit to its width in vain.
“Faint from the entrance came a daylight ray,
And distant sound of living men and things;
This, in th’ encountering darkness pass’d away,
That, took the tone in which a mourner sings.
“I lit a torch at a sepulchral lamp,
Which shot a thread of light amid the gloom;