Today, as on many days that I’ve squandered travelling this lonely road, I am gripped unshakably by the prospect that I might never again feel happiness, that not the most fleeting of smiles will I don, and that the world will be lost of joy until I can but lay eyes upon her angelic face, that radiant visage! Whose only mask is one of glass, a window through her corporeal form, an ocularis to her soul! She, who is my inspiration, my muse, my only Joy! How so then, that she is the selfsame devilish imp whose mere thought of means a wellspring of this boiling, writhing, toxic venom that fills and tortures my heart and my soul when more than seeing does separate us? Such is the nature of the ailment of my soul, and the aching of my heart on this day. In the depths of my despair I send heavenward a prayer, that god might shepherd me with haste into her arms. I hold out no hope that my words are heard. Surely my voice was lost in that oppressive, dark cloud which O’erhangs my head. Yet my quiet cries of despair must have found their way to the ear of the lord for he has sent me a vision of majesty and grace which could only have been meant to rival her own! Viewed from the bridge of Francis Scott Key, the Baltimore skyline rises in the west. Behind it, the most majestic sunset this earth has yet seen! I say majestic, (for surely it is, and crafted too by divine hands purely for the alleviation of my sorrows), but I cannot speak with truth to its beauty. For all its splendorous hues of fire and passion, may well be pitch painted on slate! I steal a final glance at this image of dark irony, a mirror held to the stagnant tarn that is my soul. I shed a solitary tear, and I hasten my journey home to her, that I might know Joy again.