I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
Gone from the path direct; and e’en to tell,
It were no easy task, how savage wild
That forest, how robust and rough its growth,
Which to remember only, my dismay
Renews, in bitterness not far from death.
Yet to discourse of what there good befell,
All else will I relate discovered there.
How first I entered it I scarce can say,
Such sleepy dullness in that instant weighed
My senses down, when the true path I left;
But when a mountain’s fool I reached, where closed
The valley that had pierced my heart with dread,
I looked aloft, and saw his shoulders broad
Already vested with that planets beam,
Who leads all wanderers safe through every way?

by Robert Lewis Stevenson