Excerpt from Red-Letter Day, and Other Poems N hour of toil and strife, and we are dead. Life is a lie, a bitter lie, I said, And death itself is only dust to dust. All men are mad indeed with venal lust, The toiling galley slaves of cent per cent There is no cure, alas! For all these ills. In such a mood I folded up my tent In sooth, and sought the freedom of the hills. And from the couch of pine boughs where I lie, As one by one the dark-winged shadows fly, I watch the birth of this auspicious day. There is a quickening in the womb of night, A fringe of dawn, and then a flush of light; Slowly the sable curtain rolls away Let there be light, as God himself ordains, A beacon lit by his divine decree. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.