Tell this poor spirit pent in dying flesh,
This fighting, working, praying, prisoned soul,
Why it is trapped and strangled in the mesh
Of foolish Life and Time? Its wild young voice
Calls for release, unanswered and unstilled,—
It sought not out this world,—it had no choice
Of other worlds where glory is fulfilled.
“How hard to live at all, if living be
The thing it seems to us!—the few brief years
Made up of toil and sorrow, where we see