Library of the best American literature / Containing the lives of our authors in story form, their portraits, their homes, and their personal traits, how they worked and what they wrote; choice selections from eminent writers, embracing great American poets and novelists, foremost women in American letters, distinguished critics and essayists, our national humorists, noted journalists and magazine contributors, popular writers for young people, great orators and public lecturers

by Unknown

Did shroud unutterable things:

One, a fair angel, in the skies

Of whose serene, unshadowed eyes

Were seen the lights of Paradise.

To these, in turn, he gave the whole

Vast empire of his brooding soul;

Now, filled with strains of heavenly swell,

Now thrilled with awful tones of hell:

Wide were his being’s strange extremes,

’Twixt nether glooms, and Eden gleams