Long lasted our dispute, intense to tears.
We were all gathered, and we were alone.
Distressing thoughts and anguish and dark doubts
For days had vexed and wrung us, sparing none.

In our own circle here no monarch's power
Restrained free speech, and in those hours, too brief,
It poured forth freely and it sounded harsh,
And each of us, while speaking, felt relief.

Brothers whose aspirations were the same,
Life's fellow-travellers on the self-same path,
Oh, strange with what mistrust and bitterness
We on each other gazed, like foes in wrath!

Were we not all by one same feeling warmed,
The sacred love of our own country dear,
And on our lives, in stifling darkness wrapped,
Had not the self-same sun of hope shone clear?

You listened to us sadly; and sometimes
When I glanced at you, as we fiercely strove,
It seemed to me you suffered for our sake,
And longed to tell us something, filled with love.

The night was fleeting; through the whitening pane
The day appeared; star after star died slow;
The lamp's red, flickering light was melting now
Into the golden dawn's triumphant glow.

To the piano silently you stepped,
And touched the keys that dumbly glimmered there;
And an impassioned strain of love and grief
Beneath your hands gushed forth upon the air.

What was it in your song like a reproach,
That, full of sadness, o'er our circle came,
And hotly stirred the heart within my breast,
And filled it with pure love and burning shame?

I do not know. Was it the sleepless night?
Was it my sick nerves playing? Tears would rise.
My bosom heaved with them; a moment more,
And they burst forth with passion from mine eyes.

As if some friend of deeply truthful soul
Had come to us—all angry, wretched, ill—
And had begun to speak, our circle now,
Revived and filled with joy, grew hushed and still.

Groundless complaints and clamorous phrases loud,
And vanity, with its envenomed darts—
Whate'er of harm life, like a viewless plague,
Sows 'mid us all, e'en in the noblest hearts—

All these grew calm, and only one desire,
One impulse in us all blazed into fire—
To suffer and to strive with all our souls
To scatter the surrounding darkness dire.

O friend! your notes revealed to us that night
All that was false in us, unseen till then;
And we clasped hands more firmly when at dawn
We to our daily work returned again.