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Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry - The Ladder of St Augustine
Identifier
010045
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – from The Poems of Longfellow [printed about 1875]
from The Ladder of St Augustine
The mighty pyramids of stone
That wedge-like cleave the desert airs
When nearer seen, and better known
Are but gigantic flights of stairs
The distant mountains that uprear
Their solid bastions to the skies
Are crossed by pathways, that appear,
As we to higher levels rise
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight
But they, while their companions slept
Were toiling upward in the night
Standing on what too long we bore
With shoulders bent and downcast eyes
We may discern – unseen before -
A path to higher destinies